"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.
"You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You can have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend' it.
"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.
"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living hearth and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Words which, if human hearts do not harden into stone, through the long ages yet to come,
"Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking off."
The appeal was spurned; and, in the face of its almost godlike gentleness, they who already gloried in their anticipated saturnalia of blood inhumanly and falsely stigmatized it as a declaration of war. The long-patient North, slow to anger, in its agony still cried, "My brother; oh, my brother!" It remained for that final, ineradicable infamy of Sumter to arouse the nation to arms! At last, to murder at one blow the hopes we had nursed so tenderly, they impiously dragged in the dust the glorious symbol of our national life and majesty, heaping dishonor upon it, and, like the sneering devil at the crucifixion, crying out, "Come and deliver thyself!" and then no man, with the heart of a man, who loved his country and feared his God, dared longer delay to prepare for that great struggle which was destined to rock the earth.
Poor Maryland! cursed with slavery, doubly cursed with traitors! Mr. Davis had said that Maryland was loyal to the United States, and had pledged himself to maintain that position before the people. The time soon came for him to redeem his pledge. On the morning of the 15th of April the President issued his proclamation calling a special session of Congress, which made an extra election necessary in Maryland. Before the sun of that day had gone down, this card was promulgated:
To the voters of the fourth congressional district of Maryland:
I hereby announce myself as a candidate for the House of Representatives of the 37th Congress of the United States of America, upon the basis of the unconditional maintenance of the Union.