tract of Mexican territory. Pride or vanity, wounded by the settlement of the Oregon boundary at forty-nine, ambition, disappointed of office, the nomination of Generals Cass and Taylor in 1848, and the manifestly approaching dissolution of the Whig party, all contributed to throw a large portion of that party in the North, and not a few from the Democratic host, into the ranks of the Abolitionists; who, swelled now by such great accessions, threw off wholly the odious name of Abolition, and, organizing into one body, under a new title, at Buffalo, announced Martin Van Buren as their candidate for the Presidency. In the midst of all this chaos in the political elements, arose that pernicious bubble, the "Wilmot Proviso," which, convulsing the country for more than four years, in its various forms, had well nigh precipitated us headlong into the bottomless gulf of disunion.

Assuming now the specious name of "Free Soil," and disguising its odious principles and its true purposes, under the false pretence of No Extension of Slavery, the Abolition party addressed itself to minds full now of hate toward the South and her institutions, and ready alike to forget the true mission of a political party, and the limitations of the Constitution. But the united patriotism, talent, and worth of the North and South rallied to the rescue of this the last grand experi ment of free government, from the thick darkness of failure and of ruin by the parricidal hands of its own children. The Compromise of 1850 followed: intended and believed to be a final adjustment of this appalling controversy. It was designed to be a covenant of peace forever-sealed and attested by the self-sacrifice of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, the most illustrious triumvirate of great men and patriots, in any age or any country. But to no purpose: the yawning gulf did not close over them. The origin of the evil lay deeper, and it was not reached. No great question of a like nature and magnitude was ever adjusted by a legislative compromise, in a popular government. The evil lay in that great and most pernicious error which pervaded and penetrated so large a portion of the Northern mind, that the men of the North, if not under the Constitution, yet, by some 'higher law" of conscience, had a right, and, as they would escape that fire which is not quenched, were bound to intermeddle, and, in some way, to legislate for the abolition of the "accursed system." No act of Congress, no number of acts, could heal a malady like this, rooted in presumptuous self-righteousness, and aggravated by the corroding poison of sectional jealousy and hate. For such, sir, there is no sweet oblivious antidote in legislation. Set on fire by these passions, applied now to that case which, coming nighest home, appealed most plausibly and most strongly to their impulses and their prejudices, a large part of the North resolved to render nugatory the chief slavery compromise of the Constitution, by trampling under foot and resisting or obstructing the execution of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. And three years later, re-enforced now by many recruits from the Democratic ranks, and by almost the entire Whig force of the North, disbanded finally by the overthrow of 1852, but re-organized in part under the banner of Know-Nothingism, the Abolition handful of

1835, swelled now to a mighty host, rallied in defense of the Missouri Restriction, and shook the whole land with a rocking tempest of popular commotion, more dangerous than even the storm of 1850,

Here, then, gentlemen, let me pause to survey the true nature and full extent of the perils which thus encompass us, and to inquire: What remains to be done, that they may be averted?

In January, 1838, Mr. Calhoun spoke, with alarm-then derided as visionary-of the danger which, to him, seemed already as certain as it would be disastrous, from the continued, persevering, uncounteracted efforts of the Abolitionists, imbuing the rising generation at the North with the belief that the institutions of the South were sinful and immoral, and that it would be doing God service to abolish them, even should it involve the destruction of half her inhabitants, as murderers and pirates at best. Sir, what was then prophecy, is now history. More than half the present generation in the North have ceased to look upon Southern men as brethren. Taught to hate, first, the institutions of the South, they have, very many of them, by easy gradations, transferred that hatred to her citizens. Learning to abhor what they are told is murder, they have found no principle either in nature or in morals, which impels them to love the murderer with fraternal affection. Organized bands exist in every northern State, with branches in Canada, which make slave-stealing a business and a boast and that outrage which, if any foreign state, or any State of this Union even, in any thing else, were to encourage or permit in any of her citizens, would, by the whole country, with one voice, be regarded as a just cause of instant war or reprisals, is every day consummated without rebuke, or by connivance, or the direct sanction of many of the members of this Confederacy; by school-books, and in school-houses; in the academies, colleges, and universities; in the schools of divinity, medicine, and law-these same sad lessons of hate and jealousy are every day inculcated. Even the name and the fame of a slaveholding Washington have ceased to cause a throb in many a Northern heart. The entire press of the North, in journals, newspapers, periodicals, prints, and books, with not many manly and patriotic exceptions, has either been silent or lent countenance and support, knowingly or carelessly, to the systematic and treasonable efforts of those who are resolved to pull down the fabric of this Union. Literature and the arts are put under conscription, for the same wicked purpose. Not a Northern poet, from Longfellow and Bryant, down to Lowell, but has sought inspiration from the black Helicon of Abolition and the poison from a hundred thousand copies of false and canting libels, in the form of works of fiction, is licked up from every hearthstone, while the "Tribune" of Greeley-one among ten thousand "sold to do evil," at once the tool and the compeer of Seward in his traitorous purpose to make himself a name in history -the antithesis of Washington-by the subversion of this Republicgathering up, with persevering and most devilish diligence, every murder, every crime, every outrage, every act of cruelty, rapine, or lust, upon white or upon black, real or forged, throughout the South, sends it forth winged with venom and malice, as a faithful witness of

the true and general state of Southern society, and the legitimate fruit of slaveholding. In the public lecture, and anniversary address; at the concert hall, and upon the boards of the theater; nay, even at the festivals of our ancient charitable orders, this same dark spirit of mischief is ever present, dropping pestilence from his wings. Even history is corrupted, and figures marshalled into a huge lie, to compass the same treacherous end.

Here, again, too, the clergy, and the Church, gentlemen, mindful less than ever of their true province and vocation, have, one by one, joined in the crusade, till nineteen-twentieths of Northern pulpits resound every Sabbath, in sermon or prayer, with imprecation upon slaveholders. Already has disunion and consequent strife ensued in all the chief religious sects, three only excepted. Outside of these -and sometimes within them, too-the religion of the Bible is but too often superseded by the gospel of Abolition, and the way of salvation taught to lie through sympathy with that distant portion of the African race which is held in bondage south of Mason and Dixon's line. Thus the spirit of persecution is superadded to the jealousies of sectional position, and the furnace of hate heated seven times hotter than is wont.

They who would not turn a deaf ear to the express requirements of the Constitution, are beguiled and drawn astray by the hollow pretense of Opposition to the Extension of Slavery-a pretense alike false and unmanly, and opposed to the spirit of the Constitutional compact, and the principle which forbids to intermeddle with slavery in the States.

Others, sir, who may care nothing for the sinfulness or immorality of slaveholding, are wrought to jealousy by the false and impudent outcry against the "aggressions of the slave-power," "the grasping spirit of the South," "Southern bluster and bravado ;" and many an arrant coward hires himself to be written down a hero, for his wondrous courage in lending the eye a terrible aspect on his own hustings, at the mention of a "fire-eater" from the Carolinas, or repelling, indignantly, six weeks after the offense, on the floor of Congress, the insolence of some "slave-dealing" member from Virginia, who is, perhaps, at the moment, a hundred miles from the capitol. Thus the claim of the South to participation in the common territory purchased by the common blood and treasure of the Union -nay, even her demand that the solemn compact of the Constitution be fulfilled and her fugitives restored to her, are denounced alike as arrogant "slave-driving" assaults and aggressions upon the rights of the North.

Others, again, are persuaded that the South is weak, is unwilling, and dare not resist is afraid of insurrection, and dependent for safety and bread and existence upon the proverbial fertility and magnanimity of New England. As if no Henry, no Lee, no Jefferson, no Pinckney, no Sumpter, no Hayne, no Laurens, no Carroll, no George Washington had ever lived-as if the spirit of Marion's men lingered not yet upon the banks of Santee, and the fierce courage of the Butler who rose pale and corpse-like from the bed of death, to lead the

Palmetto regiment to battle at Cherubusco, foremost in the ranks and nearest the flashing of the guns,' was already become extinct. The political parties, also, at the North, gentlemen, have faltered, and some of them fallen, before Abolition. The Whig party, bargaining with, courting, and seeking to absorb it into its own ranks, has, itself, at last, been swallowed up and lost. Political Temperance and Know-Nothingism are rapidly drifting into the same vortex. The spirit of Anti-Masonry transmigrated, some years ago, into the opaque body of Abolitionism. Fourierism, Anti-Rentism, the party devoted to Women's Rights, and all the other isms of the day, born of the same generating principle, are already fully assimilated to their common parent: for all these isms, sir, like the nerves of sense, run in pairs. Even the Democratic party, never losing its identity, never ceasing to be national, and even now the sole hope of the country, if it will but return to its ancient mission and discipline-the only organized body round which all true conservatives and friends of the Constitution and Union may rally-has, nevertheless, in whole or in part, at some period or another, in every State, cowered before or tampered with this dark specter.

Just such, too, as public feeling in the North is, so is its legislation. Vermont has passed a law repealing, in effect, within her limits, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and abrogating so much of the Constitution as requires the rendition of fugitives from service. Connecticut, enacting a similar statute, has gone a step farther, and outraged every dictate of justice, in the effort to make it effectual. Massachusetts, the "model Commonwealth" of the times, improving yet upon the work of her sister States, provides, also, that whatsoever member of her bar shall dare appear in behalf of the claimant of a fugitive slave, shall ignominiously be stricken from her court rolls, and forbidden to practice within her limits. Legislation of a kindred character exists, sir, in other States also; and New England will, doubtless, yet find humble imitators even in the West. Already, indeed, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin has deliberately released from her penitentiary, upon habeas corpus, a prisoner convicted, on indictment before a United States court, of resisting the laws and officers of the United States in a slave case. Judges, elsewhere, have held that no citizen of the United States living South may dare set his foot, with a slave, upon the north-west shore of the Ohio, at low-water mark even, without by that act, though but for a moment, and from necessity, working instant emancipation of the slave. Not many months ago, a mingled mob of negroes, white and black, at Salem, in Ohio, entered a railroad train, and by violence tore from the family of a slaveholder, passing through the State from necessity, and at forty miles an hour, the nurse of his infant child. A Massachusetts legislature has demanded of her Executive the removal of an able, meritorious, and upright judge, for the conscientious discharge, within her limits, of the duties of an office which he held under authority of the United States; and a Massachusetts ecclesiastical conclave, three hundred in number, rose as one man on the announcement of the outrage, and shouted till the house rang

again with their plaudits. And a Massachusetts university rejected, also, the same judge, for the same cause, when proposed for a professorship in the institution.

Thus, sir, within little more than two years from the death of her noblest son-whose whole life, and whose dying labors were exhausted in defending the Union and holding the Commonwealth of his adoption up to the full measure of her Revolutionary patriotism and greatness-has the star of Massachusetts been seen to fall from heaven and begin to plunge into the utter blackness of disunion. In vain now, sir, from the grave of the Statesman of Marshfield there comes up the warning cry, "Let her shrink back; let her hold others back, if she can; at any rate, let her keep herself back from this gulf, full at once of fire and blackness-full, as far as human foresight can scan, or human imagination fathom, of the fire and the blood of civil war, and of the thick darkness of general political disgrace, ignominy, and ruin." No; she is fallen. Sumner has supplanted Winthrop; and a Wilson crawled up into the seat which Webster once adorned.

And add, now, to all this, gentlemen, that, already, that portentous and most perilous evil, against which the Father of his Country so solemnly and earnestly warned his countrymen, a party bounded by geographical lines-a Northern party, standing upon a Northern platform, doing battle for Northern issues, and relying solely for success upon appeals to Northern prejudices and Northern jealousies, is now, for the first time in our history, fully organized and consolidated in our midst. Add farther, that, to the Thirty-Fourth Congress, fourteen Senators and a majority of Representatives have been chosen who, in name or in fact, are Abolitionists; Ohio contributing to this dark host her entire delegation in House and Senate, one only excepted; and thus, for the first time, also, since the organization of our Government, has the House of Representatives been converted into a vast Abolition conventicle, full of men picked out for their hatred of the South, and who can not be true to the Constitution and the Union without treachery to the expectations and the purposes of those who elected them. And then reflect yet further, that this vast and terrible magazine of explosive elements is gathered together just upon the eve of a Presidential election, with all its multiplied and convulsing interests; and that soon Kansas will knock for admission into the Union, thus surely precipitating the crisis; and who, tell me, I pray you, may foresee what shall be the history of this Republic at the end of two years from to-day? All this, gentlemen, the spirit of Abolition has accomplished in twenty years of continued and exhausting labors of every sort. But, in all that time, not one convert has it made in the South; not one slave emancipated, except by larceny and in fraud of the solemn compacts of the Constitution. Meantime, public opinion has wholly, radically changed in the South. The South has ceased to denounce, ceased to condemn slavery-ceased even to palliate-and begun now, almost as one man, to defend it as a great moral, social, and political blessing. The bitter and proscriptive warfare of twenty years has