Fifty Years of Public Service / Personal Recollections of Shelby M. Cullom, Senior United States Senator from Illinois

by Shelby M. Cullom

"The first duty of an American citizen, or of a citizen of any constitutional Government, is obedience to the Constitution and laws of his country. I have no apprehension that any man in Illinois, or beyond the limits of our own beloved State, will misconstrue or misunderstand my motive. So far as any of the partisan questions are concerned, I stand in equal, irreconcilable, and undying opposition both to the Republicans and the secessionists. You all know that I am a very good partisan fighter in partisan times, and I trust you will find me equally as good a patriot when the country is in danger.

"Now permit me to say to the assembled Representatives and Senators of our beloved States, composed of men of both political parties, in my opinion it is your duty to lay aside, for the time being, your party creeds and party platforms; to dispense with your party organizations and partisan appeals; to forget that you were ever divided, until you have rescued the Government and the country from their assailants. When this paramount duty shall have been performed, it will be proper for each of us to resume our respective political positions according to our convictions of public duty. Give me a country first, that my children may live in peace; then we will have a theatre for our party organizations to operate upon.

"Are we to be called upon to fold our arms, allow the national capital to be seized by a military force under a foreign revolutionary flag; to see the archives of the Government in the hands of a people who affect to despise the flag and Government of the United States? I am not willing to be expelled by military force, nor to fly from the Federal capitol. It has been my daily avocation six months in the year, for eighteen years, to walk into that marble building, and from its portico to survey a prosperous, happy, and united country on both sides of the Potomac. I believe I may with confidence appeal to the people of every section of the country to bear testimony that I have been as thoroughly national in my political opinions and actions as any man that has lived in my day. And I believe if I should make an appeal to the people of the State of Illinois, or of the Northern States, for their impartial verdict, they would say that whatever errors I have committed have been in leaning too far to the Southern section of the Union against my own. I think I can appeal to friend and foe—I use the term in a political sense, and I trust I use the word foe in a past sense —I can appeal to them with confidence, that I have never pandered to the prejudice or passion of my section against the minority section of this Union; and I will say to you now, with all frankness and in all sincerity, that I will never sanction nor acquiesce in any warfare whatever upon the constitutional rights or domestic institutions of the people of the Southern States. On the contrary, if there was an attempt to invade these rights—to stir up servile insurrection among their people—I would rush to their rescue, and interpose with whatever of strength I might possess to defend them from such a calamity. While I will never invade them—while I will never fail to defend and protect their rights to the full extent that a fair and liberal construction of the Constitution can give them—they must distinctly understand that I will never acquiesce in their invasion of our constitutional rights.

"It is a crime against the inalienable and indefeasible rights of every American citizen to attempt to destroy the Government under which we were born. It is a crime against constitutional freedom and the hopes of the friends of freedom throughout the wide world to attempt to blot out the United States from the map of Christendom. Yet this attempt is now being made. The Government of our fathers is to be overthrown and destroyed. The capital that bears the name of the Father of his Country is to be bombarded and levelled with the earth among the rubbish and the dust of things that are past. The records of your Government are to be scattered to the four winds of heaven. The constituted authorities, placed there by the same high authority that placed Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Jackson in the chair, are to be captured and carried off, to become a byword and a scorn to the nations of the world.

"You may think that I am drawing a picture that is overwrought. No man who has spent the last week in the city of Washington will believe that I have done justice to it. You have all the elements of the French Revolution surrounding the capital now, and threatening it with its terrors. Not only is our constitutional Government to be stricken down; not only is our flag to be blotted out; but the very foundations of social order are to be undermined and destroyed; the demon of destruction is to be let loose over the face of the land, a reign of terror and mob law is to prevail in each section of the Union, and the man who dares to plead for the cause of justice and moderation in either section is to be marked down as a traitor to his section. If this state of things is allowed to go on, how long before you will have the guillotine in active operation?

"I appeal to you, my countrymen—men of all parties—not to allow your passions to get the better of your judgment. Do not allow your vengeance upon the authors of this great iniquity to lead you into rash, and cruel, and desperate acts upon loyal citizens who may differ with you in opinion. Let the spirit of moderation and of justice prevail. You cannot expect, within so few weeks after an excited political canvass, that every man can rise to the high and patriotic level of forgetting his partisan prejudices and sacrifice everything upon the altar of his country; but allow me to say to you, whom I have opposed and warred against with an energy you will respect—allow me to say to you, you will not be true to your country if you ever attempt to manufacture partisan capital out of the misfortunes of your country. When calling upon Democrats to rally to the tented field, leaving wife, child, father, and mother behind them to rush to the rescue of the President that you elected, do not make war upon them and try to manufacture partisan capital at their expense out of a struggle in which they are engaged from the holiest and purest of motives.

"Then I appeal to you, my own Democratic friends—those men that have never failed to rally under the glorious banner of the country whenever an enemy at home or abroad has dared to assail it—to you with whom it has always been my pride to act—do not allow the mortification, growing out of a defeat in a partisan struggle, and the elevation of a party to power that we firmly believe to be dangerous to the country—do not let that convert you from patriots into traitors to your native land. Whenever our Government is assailed, when hostile armies are marching under new and odious banners against the Government of our country, the shortest way to peace is the most stupendous and unanimous preparations for war. The greater unanimity, the less blood will be shed. The more prompt and energetic the movement, and the more imposing in numbers, the shorter will be the struggle.

"Every friend of freedom—every champion and advocate of constitutional liberty throughout the land—must feel that this cause is his own. There is and should be nothing disagreeable or humiliating to men who have differed in times of peace on every question that could divide fellow men, to rally in concert in defence of the country and against all assailants. While all the States of this Union, and every citizen of every State has a priceless legacy dependent upon the success of our efforts to maintain this Government, we in the great valley of the Mississippi have peculiar interests and inducements to the struggle. What is the attempt now being made? Seven States of the Union chose to declare that they will no longer obey the Constitution of the United States; that they will withdraw from the Government established by our fathers; that they will dissolve without our consent the bonds that have united us together. But, not content with that, they proceed to invade and obstruct our dearest and most inalienable rights, secured by the Constitution. One of their first acts is to establish a battery of cannon upon the banks of the Mississippi, on the dividing line between the States of Mississippi and Tennessee, and require every steamer that passes down the river to come to under their guns to receive a custom-house officer on board, to prescribe where the boat may land and upon what terms it may put out a barrel of flour or a cask of bacon.

"We are called upon to sanction this policy. Before consenting to their right to commit such acts, I implore you to consider that the same principle which will allow the cotton States to exclude us from the ports of the gulf, would authorize the New England States and New York and Pennsylvania to exclude us from the Atlantic, and the Pacific States to exclude us from the ports of that ocean. Whenever you sanction this doctrine of secession, you authorize the States bordering upon the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to withdraw from us, form alliance among themselves, and exclude us from the markets of the world and from communication with all the rest of Christendom. Not only this, but there follows a tariff on imports, levying taxes upon every pound of tea and coffee and sugar and every yard of cloth that we may import for our consumption; the levying too of an export duty upon every bushel of corn and every pound of meat we may choose to send to the markets of the world to pay for our imports.

"Bear in mind that these very cotton States, who in former times have been so boisterous in their demands for free trade, have, among their first acts, established an export duty on cotton for the first time in American history.