"For me, I have no such word as a Senator, to utter. For me"—and here his eyes flashed again while his martial voice rang like a clarion-call to battle—"amid temporary defeat, disaster, disgrace, it seems that my duty calls me to utter another word, and that word is, bold, sudden, forward, determined, WAR, according to the laws of War, by Armies, by Military Commanders clothed with full power, advancing with all the past glories of the Republic urging them on to conquest!
* * * * * *
"I tell the Senator," continued the inspired Patriot, "that his predictions, sometimes for the South, sometimes for the Middle States, sometimes for the North-East, and then wandering away in airy visions out to the Far Pacific, about the dread of our people, as for loss of blood and treasure, provoking them to Disloyalty, are false in sentiment, false in fact, and false in Loyalty. The Senator from Kentucky is mistaken in them all.
"Five hundred million dollars! What then? Great Britain gave more than two thousand million in the great Battle for Constitutional Liberty which she led at one time almost single-handed against the World. Five hundred thousand men! What then? We have them; they are ours; they are the children of the Country; they belong to the whole Country; they are our sons; our kinsmen; and there are many of us who will give them all up before we will abate one word of our just demand, or will retreat one inch from the line which divides right from wrong.
"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: