"It is an historical fact, well known to every man who has read the debates of the convention which framed the Constitution, that the Southern States refused to become parties to the Constitution unless there was an express provision in the Constitution prohibiting Congress to levy an export duty on any product of the country. No sooner have these cotton States seceded than an export duty is levied, and if they will levy it on their own cotton do you not think they will levy it on our pork and our beef and our corn and our wheat and our manufactured articles, and all we have to sell? Then what is the proposition? It is to enable the tier of States bordering on the Atlantic and the Pacific and on the Gulf, surrounding us on all sides, to withdraw from our Union, form alliances among themselves, and then levy taxes on us without our consent, and collect revenues without giving us any just proportion or any portion of the amount collected. Can we submit to taxation without representation? Can we permit nations foreign to us to collect revenues off our products, the fruits of our industry? I ask the citizens of Illinois—I ask every citizen in the great basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valley of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri to tell me whether he is willing to sanction a line of policy that may isolate us from the markets of the world and make us dependent provinces upon powers that thus choose to surround and hem us in?
"I warn you, my countrymen, whenever you permit this to be done in the Southern States, New York will very soon follow their example. New York—that great port where two-thirds of all our revenue is collected, and whence two-thirds of our products are exported, will not long be able to resist the temptation of taxing fifteen millions of people in the great West, when she can monopolize the resources and release her own people thereby from any taxation whatsoever. Hence I say to you, my countrymen, from the best consideration I have been able to give to this subject, after the most mature reflection and thorough investigation, I have arrived at the conclusion that, come what may,—war if it must be, although I deplore it as a great calamity,—yet, come what may, the people of the Mississippi Valley can never consent to be excluded from free access to the ports of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico.
"Hence, I repeat, that while I am not prepared to take up arms or to sanction war upon the rights of the Southern States, upon their domestic institutions, upon their rights of person or property, but, on the contrary, would rush to their defence and protect them from assault, I will never cease to urge my countrymen to take up arms and to fight to the death in defence of our indefeasible rights.
"Hence, if a war does come, it will be a war of self-defence on our part. It will be a war in defence of our own just rights; in defence of the Government which we have inherited as a priceless legacy from our patriotic fathers; in defence of those great rights of the freedom of trade, commerce, transit, and intercourse from the centre to the circumference of our great continent. These are rights we can never surrender.
"I have struggled almost against hope to avert the calamities of war and to effect a reunion and reconciliation with our brethren of the South. I yet hope it may be done, but I am not able to point out to you how it may be effected. Nothing short of Providence can reveal to us the issue of this great struggle. Bloody—calamitous —I fear it will be. May we so conduct it if a collision must come, that we will stand justified in the eyes of Him who knows our hearts and who will judge our every act. We must not yield to resentments, nor to the spirit of vengeance, much less to the desire for conquest or ambition.
"I see no path of ambition open in a bloody struggle for triumph over my own countrymen. There is no path for ambition open for me in a divided country, after having so long served a united and glorious country. Hence, whatever we may do must be the result of conviction, of patriotic duty—the duty that we owe to ourselves, to our posterity, and to the friends of constitutional liberty and self-government throughout the world.
"My friends, I can say no more. To discuss these topics is the most painful duty of my life. It is with a sad heart—with a grief that I have never before experienced, that I have to contemplate this fearful struggle; but I believe in my conscience that it is a duty we owe ourselves and our children and our God, to protect this Government and that flag from every assailant, be he who he may."
Of all the members of that joint assembly who listened to the eloquence of Senator Douglas that evening, forty-nine years ago, aside from Dr. William Jayne of Springfield, and myself, I do not know of a single one now living.
After he concluded his address, the joint session of the Legislature dissolved. He and I remained together in conversation, and I accompanied him to his hotel. During that talk he expressed to me the great anxiety which he felt for the safety of the country and the preservation of the Union. I am satisfied that it was his ambition to enter the army and possibly lead it in suppressing the Rebellion. What would have been the result in that case, no one can tell; but I am inclined to think that he would have made a very great general.
Senator Douglas's Springfield speech had a tremendous effect on public opinion. It brought his followers, and they were legion in all parts of the country, to the support of the Government and the North.