Henry Winter Davis

“ Why, men of the United States, what is the rebellion? The Democratic party in arms in the South and in sympathy in the North. What Democrat does not sympathize with his "Southern brethren?" What Seymour does not speak of them as his "friends?" They restore the Union by pacific means! That means that they will stop the war. We need no one to tell us that. They opposed it in its beginning; they have maligned it to the present day; they have embarrassed its progress; they have vilified those that conduct it; they have struggled against every measure essential to its conduct. ”

“ Who ever heard of a free negro running away from where he was free? Who ever heard of a negro running at all, if he could help it? They don't run from Maryland to Pennsylvania—why from South Carolina to Louisiana? "But they are lazy and idle." Those who want to keep them as slaves say so; nobody else. We in Maryland have more experience on that subject than any body else. We have about 200,000 negroes; one half of them are free, the other half are slaves. We find that the slaves are lazier than the free negroes. ”

“ We merely restore to power those that have rebelled, to subjugate the North by the old coalition to abide their time till undying hate, still fostered and kept alive by the perpetuation of political power, shall awake amid some great national collision from abroad; to leave our ranks in the day of battle, to lift the banner of rebellion in the midst of national disaster, with combined armies tear in pieces the republic that they are now vainly struggling to overthrow. ”

“ They thought that, as a general thing, and in the long run, the great mass and body of the people were wise, and liberal, and honest, and would conduct their affairs well; but they knew that bad men could get into power; that great masses of men could be inflamed by passion; that injustice might be perpetrated by mobs as well as by a tyrant; that a republican government could be overthrown and a despotic government erected; that a minority, with superior arms or superior intelligence, could trample down a majority disarmed and out of possession of the government. ”

“ The President has proclaimed emancipation. A proclamation is a breath, or printer's ink. It dies of itself unless there be something living behind it. In point of law, no court will hold it a valid title to freedom; that is my judgment as a lawyer. I may be wrong, but it is my judgment . If the negroes of the South are to render us any material aid in the suppression of the rebellion, they must have a title to freedom that they will understand to be effectual, and they know that the proclamation is not effectual without something following it—a law of Congress and arms. ”

“ The current of events is daily sweeping away the only mark of disunion between Pennsylvania and Maryland—their internal recognition of slavery, or their refusal to recognize slavery. We stand together, and ought to stand together as one man in maintaining the integrity of the government, which more entirely crushes us than any other portion of the Confederacy if it fall in ruin about our ears. ”

“ We are informed "slaves can not be soldiers!" There is mighty little of the slave left in the man who has a musket upon his shoulder. "Slaves can not be soldiers." They who have taken leave of absence are likely to keep it. "Slaves can not be soldiers." Then make them free by law of Congress, and let us stop the argument. "You can not take private property for public use without compensation." No; but every man in the United States owes military service to the United States paramount to all laws of the States; and if the negro owes the service, the master has no right to claim pay for it. ”

“ They begin to understand that they were barriers thrown up to protect the institution of slavery. They begin to understand that they were the deliberately prepared bulwarks for a premeditated rebellion. They now begin to see that James Buchanan was only repeating the lesson he had heard from Jefferson Davis when he said there was no power to invade a State, no power to make war against a State, no power to coerce a State; the States must be left to their good pleasure, to do ill if they so pleased. ”

“ And when I speak of the Constitution as it is, I mean as it came from the hands of George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, not the wretched, crippled humpback that has been presented before our eyes, the result of a cross between the Northern and the Southern Democrat, an ill-begotten and shapeless monster that they have contrived for their purposes. Born without arms to use or legs to move with, and with a head that could only contrive mischief, and for every thing else was impotent ”

“ And I say that, with the kindliest regard, with the utmost respect, with the greatest deference for the honest members of that party, who, whatever may have been their judgments before the rebellion broke out, saw by the flames of civil war the dangerous path they trod, and joined their lifelong political opponents in the right path. They who now arrogate to themselves the reputation and the name of the Democratic party are the mere refuse that remained behind when the patriotic elements withdrew for the defense of the nation. ”

“ They war with the rope around their necks. Their victory can be decorated by no laurel in history. Where she speaks of their deeds of valor, it will always be with a melancholy tear over the cause in which it was exhibited. It will always be accompanied with the bar sinister, to mark that the cause was illegitimate, the purpose iniquitous, the object unjust. You sanctify them when you call them alien enemies. ”

“ If the sword drop from our wearied hands, they will say, "Go, ye nation of shop-keepers and weavers; work, navigate, be ingenious, build houses, weave fabrics; make arms for the rest of the world, leave other men to bear and wield them; you are not the legitimate descendants of the men who wrested their independence from the power of Great Britain." Maintain your power intact, scout down and stamp down any man who speaks of any terms of peace at all. ”

“ Every officer of theirs is aiding to promote the war. They are a band of traitors, usurping rights over citizens of the United States. The armies of the United States move to strike that power from their hands, and restore it to loyal men; and in doing that, the only arbiter of what government shall be recognized, the only arbiter of who shall be treated as a governor, or a legislator, or a judge of a rebel State, is the United States in Congress assembled. Till they shall recognize another government, there is no government. ”

“ Those that they tore down were republican governments in the sense of the Constitution. Those that they have established are a mob in the form of the government, and the rebellion organized to execute its purpose, entitled to recognition by nobody. To participate in their government is, by the laws of the United States, the crime of high treason. Their governor, by merely accepting his position, renders himself liable to trial, conviction, and hanging. ”

“ They are opposed to every measure for conducting the war. Ah! they are opposed to the Conscription Act; yet they do not volunteer. How can we get soldiers? They are opposed to the $300 clause in it; yet they have generally paid the $300. They are opposed to negro soldiers; yet negro soldiers are the poor man's substitute, who can not pay the $300. They are opposed to confiscation; yet confiscation alone can break the power of the leaders of Southern politics. They are opposed to emancipation; yet emancipation alone can break the oligarchy that has brought on the war. ”

“ I say that now, when our armies have advanced to the very heart of the Confederacy, let us press it home and rest nowhere. Our armies now gird all the rebellion; the leaders of the rebellion begin to feel the inward tortures of conscious guilt, and they begin to feel the searching throes of the fire that we are heaping around them. Press forward only a little more, and they will be consumed in the conflagration that they themselves have created. ”

“ We have to learn, and our Southern brethren have to learn more bitterly than we, that sometimes people have to do what they can do, and not what they prefer to do. When the Southern master is taught that the question is not whether be will have the negro free or slave, but whether he will have him free or no cotton, he will take the negro free. ”

“ The attempt is to begin a new civil war. When you order back West Virginia, she will turn to you the points of her bayonets that are now on your side—and justly. When you recognize the butchers of East Tennessee for its republican government, the very ghosts of the murdered dead will lead the living men to battle against you. When you talk of recognizing Kentucky and Missouri as States of the rebellion, you will be overwhelmed by ridicule that no man can stand up against . ”

“ Every body talks against them who wants to keep them down below the level of the slave. It is the interest of the people who own the slave property with which they come in competition to do it; but when there was an attempt made a few years ago to expel them from Maryland, the leading landholders and negroholders protested against it, and stopped it because it would destroy the agricultural industry of the State. If we in Maryland did not want to lose one half of our agricultural population, how will they of South Carolina live if they lose it all? ”

“ You can not destroy property. It is difficult to change the form of a political organization. Here the foundation is a social institution—the right by law, contrary to the law of nature, for one man to hold another in servitude. You cut up the roots of the rebellion by striking the shackles from the slave. ”

“ What great leading man, calling himself a Democrat and not now supporting the administration, avows himself in favor of prosecuting the war to the bitter end, till the banners of rebellion trail in the dust? ”

“ Who will cultivate the deserted regions that they leave? Who will indemnify King Cotton for the loss of his subjects? What will the cotton-planter do—represented to you as a gentleman who, like Apollyon in the Pilgrim's Progress, eats and spouts nothing but fire; but you will find a little common sense at the bottom of it all. Let him understand that the negro is free, and that he has to deal with him as a free laborer, or let cotton go uncultivated, and he will hasten to pay him wages, and the negro will be glad to receive them. ”

“ If they attempt to reduce them to slavery, the law calls the men of the North to vindicate the right they have conferred, not to meet in arms the men they had previously armed against the Southern rebellion. That is the legal way that that problem will be accomplished. Then, if we hear the wretched cry, coming from the lowest of the populace, chiefly that which floods us from abroad, about negro equality and the intrusion of negro labor upon white labor, mention to them one or two things which may even meet their intellect. ”

“ But, gentlemen, rest assured that they who are ready to make peace first will not dictate the terms of it; rest assured that they who are determined to see no end of the war, excepting under the crown of victory, will wear that crown. It is tenacity, it is endurance, it is patience, it is the resolution never to stop fighting until your enemy yields, that constitute the great qualities .of nations born to rule. ”

“ Organize one hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand, or three hundred thousand, and plant them as a beacon-light and a tower of strength in the middle of the Southern country, and that, with an act of Congress, makes freedoms not only law, but fact; and till that is done, the President's proclamation is not worth the paper on which it is written. Your declaration that you are going to set the slaves free is a mere delusion; their rushing to join the army is merely preparing their necks for the halter ”

“ I think the Constitution a provision made for the great necessities of national life by men who had just come out of a war of seven years, and anarchy of twelve years—wise men who knew the necessities of public life, and were not careful to bind the arms of the nation when its being is at stake; and they provided that in the event of invasion or rebellion, or public danger, the writ of habeas corpus might be suspended. ”

“ From the days of the Revolution to the days of the War of 1812, prejudice was silent before reason—national necessity and national interest. It was only when the cotton aristocracy arose that common sense was driven from the minds of men. What do they fear half so much as a negro army marching through the cotton-field?
Gentlemen, without a negro army an attempt at emancipation is idle. ”

“ If Judge Woodward and his like mean that in the face of these terms they are ready to stop the war, then eternal will be the disgrace of Pennsylvania if, knowing that, she elect him for her chief magistrate. If he do not mean to accept these, the only terms that have ever been uttered, then the people of Pennsylvania deserve to be placed in their own hospitals if they accept a man to regulate and govern their Commonwealth who says he is for peace and an armistice when these are the only terms that are possible. ”