Diversity there is of occupation, of habits, of education, of character. But it is not of that extreme kind which proves incompatibility, or even incongruity; for your Massachusetts man, when he comes to Mississippi, adopts our opinions and our institutions, and frequently becomes the most extreme southern man among us. [Great applause.] As our country has extended—as new products have been introduced into it, the free trade which blesses our Union, has been of increasing value.
And it is not an unfortunate circumstance that this diversity of pursuit and character has survived the condition which produced it. Originally it sprang in no small degree from natural causes. Massachusetts became a manufacturing and a commercial State because of the connection between her fine harbor and water power, resulting from the fact that the streams make their last leap into the sea, so that the ship of commerce brought the staple to the manufacturing power. This made you a commercial and manufacturing people. In the Southern States great plains interpose between the last leaps of the streams and the sea. Those plains most proximate to navigation, were the first cultivated, and the sea bore their products to the most approachable water power, there to be manufactured. This was the first cause of the difference. Then your longer and more severe winters—your soil not as favorable for agriculture, also contributed to make you a manufacturing and commercial people.
After the controlling cause had passed away—after railroads had been built—after the steam engine had become a motive power for a large part of machinery, the characteristics originally stamped by natural causes continued the diversity of pursuit. Is it fortunate or otherwise? I say it is fortunate. Your interest is to remain a manufacturing and ours to remain an agricultural people.
Your prosperity is to receive our staple and to manufacture it, and ours to sell it to you and buy the manufactured goods. [Applause.] This is an interweaving of interests, which makes us all the richer and all the happier.
But this accursed agitation, this offensive, injurious intermeddling with the affairs of other people, and this alone it is that will promote a desire in the mind of any one to separate these great and growing States. [Applause.]
The seeds of dissension may be sown by invidious reflections. Men may be goaded by the constant attempt to infringe upon rights and to traduce community character, and in the resentment which follows it is not possible to tell how far the case may be driven. I therefore plead to you now to arrest a fanaticism which has been evil in the beginning, and must be evil to the end. You may not have the numerical power requisite; and those at a distance may not understand how many of you there are desirous to put a stop to the course of this agitation. But let your language and your acts teach them to appreciate a faithful self-denying minority. I have learned since I have been in New England the vast mass of true State Rights Democrats to be found within its limits—though not represented in the halls of Congress.
And if it comes to the worst; if, availing themselves of a majority in the two Houses of Congress, our opponents should attempt to trample upon the Constitution; to violate the rights of the States; to infringe upon our equality in the Union, I believe that even in Massachusetts, though it has not had a representative in Congress for many a day, the State Rights Democracy, in whose breasts beats the spirit of the revolution, can and will whip the Black Republicans. [Great applause.] I trust we shall never be thus purified, as it were, by fire; but that the peaceful progressive revolution of the ballot box will answer all the glorious purposes of the Constitutional Union. [Applause.]
I marked that the distinguished orator and statesman who preceded me in addressing you used the words national and constitutional in such relations to each other as to show that in his mind the one was a synonym of the other. And does he not do so with reason? We became a nation by the constitution; whatever is national springs from the constitution; and national and constitutional are convertible terms. [Applause.]
Your candidate for the high office of governor—whom I have been once or twice on the point of calling your governor, and whom I hope I may be able soon to call so, [applause]—in his remarks to you has presented the same idea in another form. And well may Massachusetts orators, without even perceiving what they are saying, utter sentiments which lie at the foundation of your colonial as well as your revolutionary history, which existed in Massachusetts before the revolution, and have existed since, whenever the true spirit which comes down from the revolutionary sires has been aroused into utterance within her limits. [Applause.]
It has been not only, my friends, in this increasing and mutual dependence of interest that we have formed new bonds. Those bonds are both material and mental. Every improvement in the navigation of a river, every construction of a railroad, has added another link to the chain which encircles us, another facility for interchange and new achievements, whether it has been in arts or in science, in war or in manufactures, in commerce or agriculture, success, unexampled success has constituted for us a common and proud memory, and has offered to us new sentiments of nationality.