These matters being adjusted, he immediately took the field for Congress on his platform against Mr. Henry May, conservative Union, and in the face of an opposition which few men have dared to encounter, he carried on, unremittingly from that time until the election on the 13th of June, the most brilliant campaign against open traitors, doubters, and dodgers, that unrivalled eloquence, courage, and activity could achieve. Everywhere, day and night, in sunshine and storm, in the market-houses, at the street corners, and in the public halls, his voice rang out clear, loud, and defiant for the "unconditional maintenance" of the Union. He was defeated, but he sanctified the name of unconditional union in the vocabulary of every true Marylander. He gathered but 6,000 votes out of 14,000, yet the result was a triumph which gave him the real fruits of victory; and he exclaimed to a friend, with laudable pride, "With six thousand of the workingmen of Baltimore on my side, won in such a contest, I defy them to take the State out of the Union." Though not elected, he never ceased his efforts. With us it was a struggle for homes, hearths, and lives. He said at Brooklyn:
"You see the conflagration from a distance; it blisters me at my side. You can survive the integrity of the nation; we in Maryland would live on the side of a gulf, perpetually tending to plunge into its depths. It is for us life and liberty; it is for you greatness, strength, and prosperity."
Nothing appalled him; nothing deterred him. He said, at Baltimore, in 1861:
"The War Department has been taught by the misfortune at Bull Run, which has broken no power nor any spirit, which bowed no State nor made any heart falter, which was felt as a humiliation that has brought forth wisdom."
He also said, speaking of the rebels, and foretelling his own fate, if they succeeded in Maryland:
"They have inaugurated an era of confiscations, proscriptions, and exiles. Read their acts of greedy confiscation, their law of proscriptions by the thousands. Behold the flying exiles from the unfriendly soil of Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri."
And so he worked on, never abating one jot of his uncompromising devotion to the Union, like a second Peter the Hermit, preaching a cause, as he believed, truly represented by insignia as sacred as the Cross, and for which no sacrifice, not even death, was too great.
But his crowning glory was his leadership of the emancipation movement. The rebels, notwithstanding "My Maryland's" bloody welcome at South Mountain and Antietam, claimed that she must belong to their confederacy because of the homogeneousness of her institutions. They contended that the fetters of slavery formed a chain that stretched across the Potomac, and held in bondage not only 87,000 slaves, but 600,000 white people also. Their constant theme was "the deliverance" of Maryland. We resolved to break that last tie, and to take position unalterably on the side of the Union and freedom, and thus to deal the final blow to the cause and support of rebellion. We organized our little band, almost ridiculous from its want of numbers, early in 1863. A Sibley tent would have held our whole army. Our enemies laughed us to scorn, and the politicians would not accept our help on any terms, but denied us as earnestly as Peter denied his Lord. Mr. Davis was our acknowledged leader, and it was in the heat and fury of the contest which followed that our hearts were welded into permanent friendship. He was the platform maker, and he announced it in a few lines:
"A hearty support of the entire policy of the national administration, including immediate emancipation by constitutional means."
It was very short, but it covered all the ground. The campaign opened by the publication of an address, written by Mr. Davis, to the people of Maryland, which, I venture to say, is unsurpassed by any state paper published in this age of able state papers for the warmth and vigor of its diction, and the lucidity and conclusiveness of its argumentation. It is a pamphlet of twenty pages, glowing throughout with the unmistakable marks of his genius and patriotism, and closing with these words of stirring cheer: