Thus, fellow citizens, have I attempted to show to you to-day what they fight for who fight for the Union—what those forces are that nerve the arms and inspire the souls of the people: 1st, the sentiment of nationality—a love of country, not bounded by State lines, but including the whole country, with its historic names and memories; 2nd, a belief that no permanent peace could follow a dissolution of the Union, and that the wars it would produce would prove vastly more desolating and unending than the one now waging; and, 3d, the probability, the almost certainty, that such dissolution would finally result in the entire abandonment of the democratic principle in government.
I am aware that, in enlarging upon these points, I have told you nothing new. I have, perhaps, told you little from which you would dissent. Times like these make all men thinkers, and on all cardinal points all patriots think alike. We are crowding years into days. Instinctively we recognize our duties. We learn not now our lessons of highest wisdom from one another. Events, God’s teachers and inspirers, are bringing to the surface all our nobler qualities. The objects we had set before us as being worthy the struggle of a life, have all sunk to a lower level, and higher objects have arisen, demanding self-abandonment, self-sacrifice, and absorbing the whole soul in love of country, in care for its honour, in sorrow for its misfortunes, in joy for its triumphs, in devotion to its service even unto death. The prosecution of this war is not with us a matter of choice; we do not regard it as a matter about which we have any right to hesitate or consult our own wishes or interests; it comes to us in the sphere of our highest duties; it prompts us to ask, not so much what we owe ourselves, as what we owe posterity; and we know we shall deserve the just condemnation of history, and the eternal execration of our children, if we do not sacrifice every selfish aim, every social comfort, every domestic tie, every interest of property or life, rather than have this Union divided. Beside this question of union, the question of slavery, deemed so important by many, sinks out of sight. Not but that the latter has important bearings on the war, both in the relation of cause and cure, but the great issue before us is not one of the good or ill of four millions of blacks, but of thirty millions of whites. The majestic duty of the hour is to save this Union, for ourselves, for our children and the children of those who would destroy it, for the unborn millions of the North and South, the East and the West. Let us, then, honour the dead who die in this cause, and the living mothers who bore them; let us honour the heroes who survive the conflict; let their children be taught to prize the names they inherit, and let it be the joy of the living and the solace of those who mourn the dead, that the men whose names are enrolled on the side of the Government, in the battles of ’61 and ’62, will live forever in the hearts of their countrymen, side by side with the soldiers of our great Washington. And, moreover, if this war be as righteous as we believe it, it becomes us to counteract, by word and deed, those influences, so widespread, so noxious, and withal so active in diffusing a contrary belief. For there are some men in all sections of the North, some even in the halls of Congress, some men and some women in every community, who stigmatise this war on our behalf as wicked and inhuman; and it would be a shame upon our civilization, a reproach upon our courage, our intelligence and our patriotism, and the moral tone of our communities, if we did not meet these calumnies with fitting rebuke, and if we did not our utmost to prevent a shade of doubt or suspicion as to the righteous nature of this war from polluting our northern air, and from invading those northern homes made desolate by the news of battle and of loved ones dying amid its terrors. This is no time for half-way measures or half-way men. This is no time for the deepest convictions of the heart to falter upon the lips, from motives of mere worldly prudence. Things must be called by their right names. Deeds must be approved or emphatically condemned. Men must be what they seem. For or against the Government they must take their stand. Justice, and judgment, and mercy, demand that there be no trifling, no concealment, no equivocation now. Wars have been, may be again, about which we can differ, but this is not one of them.
The President of the United States is exerting all his powers, as it is his duty to do, to save the government from destruction. Greater responsibility never rested upon a ruler, and he has done his duty eminently well. He has a right to the sympathy and active aid of every citizen. In some respects he may have overstepped his constitutional powers. Men, if true and loyal, may differ from him as to his policy and prerogatives, and their opinions be entitled to respect, but they should praise vastly more than blame. But men, who condemn him yet condemn not the rebellion he is trying to crush are not entitled to respect. The President, his advisers and agents may err; they are but human, but their object is to save the Constitution and Union; the object of the South is the destruction of both, and wherever and whenever you find men who denounce the former fiercely and the latter faintly, whose eyes are so microscopic that they can discover, in the records of Congress and the departments, flaws in legislation and frauds in contracts, and yet cannot see the tremendous fraud and crime of this rebellion; whenever you find men who cry peace, peace, and who mean by peace, and can’t mean otherwise, the independence of the South, the submission of the North, the dissolution of the Union and the death of republican liberty, then you have found the deadliest foes your country has in these dark and trying hours.
We shall succeed in crushing this Rebellion. True, tidings of disaster float upon the air. God pity the dying soldier, and the desolate homes throughout the land. If we have lost a great battle the war is just begun. We may lose one battle, we may lose fifty, but we will gain more than we lose, and will conquer in the end. We have two men to their one; we have ten times their wealth; we hold the sea, we have infinite resources in reserve upon land; we have a cause that will keep us ever hopeful and defiant, and in the end we must conquer. But we have lessons of wisdom yet to learn, and we must learn some from our enemies. Every dollar of property among them, owned by us, they confiscate and use against us in war. Every dollar of debt owed by their citizens to ours they claim as the property of their government. They tolerate no enemies among them. Men who do not heartily support them they drive out of their country, or into the ranks of their armies. We have not dared to attack them with their own weapons. They never can be conquered till we do; and it may be true that we can only learn wisdom in the severe school of defeat and disaster. But learn it we must and will, and we will teach them, and teach the world, at whatever sacrifice of means and life, that republican liberty in America was not born to die. We know, and we must teach them, that our life-long enthusiasm for popular government, our life-long hope for its spread throughout the world, that all the memories that cluster around this sacred day, hallowing our past and brightening our future, are all involved in, are impossible without, the perpetuity of this Union. We know that our lives are worth nothing, that all our aims and achievements are valueless, that we can claim no high standard for conduct or character, that we can find no link to bind us to the immortal men who signed that Declaration,[{1}] if we are to leave behind us, as a heritage for our children, a Union “divided, discordant, belligerent,” instead of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
[{1}] The Declaration of Independence which had just been read by John Rodgers, Esq.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.