"Sir, it is not a question of men or of money in that sense. All the money, all the men, are, in our judgment, well bestowed in such a cause. When we give them, we know their value. Knowing their value well, we give them with the more pride and the, more joy. Sir, how can we retreat? Sir, how can we make Peace? Who shall treat? What Commissioners? Who would go? Upon what terms? Where is to be your boundary line? Where the end of the principles we shall have to give up? What will become of Constitutional Government? What will become of public Liberty? What of past glories? What of future hopes?
"Shall we sink into the insignificance of the grave—a degraded, defeated, emasculated People, frightened by the results of one battle, and scared at the visions raised by the imagination of the Senator from Kentucky on this floor? No, Sir! a thousand times, no, Sir! We will rally—if, indeed, our words be necessary—we will rally the People, the Loyal People, of the whole Country. They will pour forth their treasure, their money, their men, without stint, without measure. The most peaceable man in this body may stamp his foot upon this Senate Chamber floor, as of old a warrior and a Senator did, and from that single tramp there will spring forth armed Legions.
"Shall one battle determine the fate of empire, or a dozen?—the loss of one thousand men, or twenty thousand? or one hundred million or five hundred million dollars? In a year's Peace—in ten years, at most, of peaceful progress—we can restore them all. There will be some graves reeking with blood, watered by the tears of affection. There will be some privation; there will be some loss of luxury; there will be somewhat more need for labor to procure the necessaries of life. When that is said, all is said. If we have the Country, the whole Country, the Union, the Constitution, Free Government—with these there will return all the blessings of well-ordered civilization; the path of the Country will be a career of greatness and of glory such as, in the olden time, our Fathers saw in the dim visions of years yet to come, and such as would have been ours now, to-day, if it had not been for the Treason for which the Senator too often seeks to apologize."
This remarkable speech was the last utterance of that glorious and courageous soul, in the National Senate. Within three months, his lifeless body, riddled by Rebel rifle balls, was borne away from the fatal field of Ball's Bluff—away, amid the lamentations of a Nation—away, across land and ocean—to lie beside his brave friend Broderick, on that Lone Mountain whose solemn front looks out upon the calm Pacific.
He had not lived in vain. In his great speech at the American Theatre in San Francisco, after his election by Oregon (1860) to represent her in the United States Senate, he had aroused the people to a sense of shame, that, as he said: "Here, in a land of written Constitutional Liberty it is reserved for us to teach the World that, under the American Stars and Stripes, Slavery marches in solemn procession; that, under the American flag, Slavery is protected to the utmost verge of acquired territory; that under the American banner, the name of Freedom is to be faintly heard, the songs of Freedom faintly sung; that, while Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, every great and good man in the World, strives, struggles, fights, prays, suffers and dies, sometimes on the scaffold, sometimes in the dungeon, often on the field of battle, rendered immortal by his blood and his valor; that, while this triumphal procession marches on through the arches of Freedom—we, in this land, of all the World, shrink back trembling when Freedom is but mentioned!"
And never was a shamed people more suddenly lifted up from that shame into a grand frenzy of patriotic devotion than were his auditors, when, with the inspiration of his matchless genius, he continued:
"As for me, I dare not, will not, be false to Freedom. Where the feet of my youth were planted, there, by Freedom, my feet shall ever stand. I will walk beneath her banner. I will glory in her strength. I have watched her in history struck down on an hundred chosen fields of battle. I have seen her friends fly from her; her foes gather around her. I have seen her bound to the stake; I have seen them give her ashes to the winds. But when they turned to exult, I have seen her again meet them face to face, resplendent in complete steel, brandishing in her strong right hand a flaming sword, red with Insufferable light! I take courage. The People gather around her. The genius of America will, at last, lead her sons to Freedom."
Never were grander utterances delivered by man in all the ages; never was there exhibited a more sublime faith; never a truer spirit of prophecy; never a more heroic spirit.
He was then on his way to Washington; on his way to perform the last acts in the drama of his own career—on his way to death. He knew the time had come, of which, ten years before, he had prophetically spoken in the House of Representatives, when he said: "I have only to say that, if the time should come when Disunion rules the hour, and discord is to reign supreme, I shall again be ready to give the best blood in my veins to my Country's Cause. I shall be prepared to meet all antagonists with lance in rest, to do battle in every land, in defense of the Constitution of the Country which I have sworn to support, to the last extremity, against Disunionists, and all its Enemies, whether of the South or North; to meet them everywhere, at all times, with speech or hand, with word or blow, until thought and being shall be no longer mine." And right nobly did he fulfil in all respects his promise; so that at the end—as was afterward well said of him by Mr. Colfax—he had mounted so high, that, "doubly crowned, as statesman, and as warrior—
'From the top of Fame's ladder he stepped to the Sky!'"