NUMBER THREE.

HOW SHALL THE UNION BE PRESERVED?

SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, FEBRUARY 20, 1861.

THIS is that famous speech in which MR. VALLANDIGHAM is said to have proposed to divide the Union into "four distinct nationalities." Such is the assertion repeatedly and persistently made by the Abolition press. The whole speech is here given: also, the proposed amendments to the Constitution. It is not easy to imagine a greater perversion of the plain and obvious meaning of language than has been exhibited in this case. A cause that requires the use of such means must be a bad one. The attention of the public has been repeatedly called to those misrepresentations; but thus far it has been found impossible to obtain a correction in the Abolition journals. So far from this, the leading papers of that class have continued to repeat the false statement, thus compelling the belief, that in making and circulating this declaration, those papers have been manufacturing and using a deliberate and intentional falsehood.

But the people are pretty generally learning that the reports furnished by Abolition papers, pretending to give the sentiments of leading Democratic statesmen, are, almost invariably, caricatures or gross misrepresentations. They will not, therefore, be surprised to find that this speech, made in the hour of most imminent peril, when the greatest calamity any nation has ever endured was impending, so far from being, as has been so often and so falsely asserted, a proposition to divide the Union into "four distinct nationalities," was, in fact, a most wise and prudent suggestion, evincing the deepest political sagacity and foresight. If adopted, the country would have been saved that great waste and slaughter which have already wearied and sickened the heart of humanity, and of which the end is not yet. Even now, it may not be too late to make good use of some features of the plan here proposed.

The special order-namely, the Report of the Committee of Thirty-Three-being under consideration- MR. VALLANDIGHAM addressed the House as follows:

MR. SPEAKER: It was my purpose, some three months ago, to speak solely upon the question of peace and war between the two great sections of the Union, and to defend, at length, the position which, in the very beginning of this crisis, and almost alone, I assumed against the employment of military force by the Federal Government to execute its laws and restore its authority within the States which might secede. Subsequent events have rendered this unnecessary. Within the three months, or more, since the Presidential election, so rapid has been the progress of events, and such the magnitude which the movement in the South has attained, that the country has been forced-as this House and the incoming Administration will at last be forced, in spite of their warlike purposes now-to regard it as no longer a mere casual and temporary rebellion of discontented individuals, but a great and terrible REVOLUTION, which threatens now to result in permanent dissolution of the Union, and division into two or more rival, if not hostile, confederacies. Before this dread reality, the atrocious and fruitless policy of a war of coercion to preserve or to restore the Union has, outside, at least, of these walls and of this capital, rapidly dissolved. The people have taken the subject up, and have reflected upon it, till, to-day, in the South, almost as one man, and by a very large majority, as I believe, in the North, and especially in the West, they are resolved, that, whatever else of calamity may befall us, that horrible scourge of CIVIL WAR shall be averted. Sir, I rejoice that the hard AngloSaxon sense and pious and humane impulses of the American people have rejected the specious disguise of words without wisdom, which appealed to them to enforce the laws, collect the revenue, maintain the Union, and restore the Federal authority by the perilous edge of battle, and that thus early in the revolution they are resolved to compel us, their Representatives, belligerent as you of the Republican party here may now be, to the choice of peaceable disunion upon the one hand, or Union through adjustment and conciliation upon the other. Born, sir, upon the soil of the United Statesattached to my country from earliest boyhood, loving and revering her with some part, at least, of the spirit of Greek and Roman patriotism-between these two alternatives, with all my mind, with all my heart, with all my strength of body and of soul, living or dying, at home or in exile, I am for the Union which made it what it is; and, therefore, I am also for such terms of peace and adjustment as will maintain that Union now and forever. This, then, is the question which to-day I propose to discuss:

How SHALL THE UNION OF THESE STATES BE RESTORED AND PRESERVED?

Sir, it is with becoming modesty, and with something of awe, that I approach the discussion of a question which the ablest statesmen of the country have failed to solve. But the country expects even

the humblest of her children to serve her in this, the hour of her sore trial. This is my apology.

Devoted as I am to the Union, I have yet no eulogies to pronounce upon it to-day. It needs none. Its highest eulogy is the history of this country for the last seventy years. The triumphs of war, and the arts of peace-science, civilization, wealth, population, commerce, trade, manufactures, literature, education, justice, tranquillity, security to life, to person, to property-material happiness, common defense, national renown, all that is implied in the "blessings of liberty"-these, and more, have been its fruits from the beginning to this hour. These have enshrined it in the hearts of the people; and, before God, I believe they will restore and preserve it. And, to-day, they demand of us, their embassadors and Representatives, to tell them how this great work is to be accomplished.

Sir, it has well been said that it is not to be done by eulogies. Eulogy is for times of peace. Neither is it to be done by lamentations over its decline and fall. These are for the poet and the historian, or for the exiled statesman who may chance to sit amid the ruins of desolated cities. Ours is a practical work, and it is the business of the wise and practical statesman to inquire first what the causes are of the evils for which he is required to devise a remedy.

Sir, the subjects of mere partisan controversy which have been chiefly discussed here and in the country, so far, are not the causes, but only the symptoms or developments of the malady which is to be healed. These causes are to be found in the nature of man, and in the peculiar nature of our system of governments. Thirst for power and place, or preeminence-in a word, ambition-is one of the strongest and earliest developed passions of man. It is as discernible in the school-boy as in the statesman. It belongs alike to the individual and to the masses of men, and is exhibited in every gradation of society, from the family up to the highest development of the State. In all voluntary associations of any kind, and in every ecclesiastical organization, also, it is equally manifested. It is the sin by which the angels fell. No form of government is exempt from it; for even the absolute monarch is obliged to execute his power through the instrumentality of agents; and ambition here courts one master instead of many masters. As between foreign States, it manifests itself in schemes of conquest and territorial aggrandizement. In despotisms it is shown in intrigues, assassinations, and revolts. constitutional monarchies, and in aristocracies, it exhibits itself in contests among the different orders of society, and the several interests of agriculture, trade, commerce, and the professions. In democracies it is seen everywhere, and in its highest development; for here all the avenues to political place and preferment, and emolument, too, are open to every citizen; and all movements, and all interests of society, and every great question-moral, social, religious, scientific, no matter what-assumes, at some time or other, a political complexion, and forms a part of the election issues and legislation of the day. Here, when combined with interest, and where the

action of the Government may be made a source of wealth, then honor, virtue, patriotism, religion, all perish before it. No restraints and no compacts can bind it.

In a federal republic all these evils are found in their amplest proportions, and take the form also of rivalries between the States; or more commonly, or finally, at least, especially where geographical and climatic divisions exist, or where several contiguous States are in the same interest, and sometimes where they are similar in institutions or modes of thought, or in habits and customs, of sectional jealousies and controversies, which end always, sooner or later, in either a dissolution of the union between them, or the destruction of the federal character of the government. But, however exhibited— whether in federative or in consolidated governments, or whatever the development may be the great primary cause is always the same: the feeling that might makes right; that the strong ought to govern the weak; that the will of the mere and absolute majority of numbers ought always to control; that fifty men may do what they please with forty-nine; and that minorities have no rights, or at least that they shall have no means of enforcing their rights, and no remedy for the violation of them. And thus it is that the strong man oppresses the weak, and strong communities, states, and sections aggress upon the rights of weaker states, communities, and sections. This is the principle; but I propose to speak of it, to-day, only in its development in the political, and not in the personal or domestic relations.

Sir, it is to repress this principle that governments, with their complex machinery, are instituted among men; though in their abuse, indeed, governments may themselves become the worst engines of oppression. For this purpose treaties are entered into, and the law of nations acknowledged between foreign States. Constitutions and municipal laws and compacts are ordained, or enacted, or concluded to secure the same great end. No men understood this, the philosophy and aim of all just government, better than the framers of our Federal Constitution. No men tried more faithfully to secure the Government which they were instituting from this mischief; and, had the country over which it was established been circumscribed by nature to the limits which it then had, their work would have, perhaps, been perfect, enduring for ages. But the wisest among them did not foresee-who, indeed, that was less than omniscient, could have foreseen?—the amazing rapidity with which new settlements and new States have sprung up, as if by enchantment, in the wilderness; or that political necessity, or lust for territorial aggrandizement would, in sixty years, have given us new territories and States equal in extent to the entire area of the country for which they were then framing a Government? They were not priests or prophets to that God of MANIFEST DESTINY whom we now worship, and will continue to worship, whether united into one Confederacy still, or divided into many. And yet it is this very acquisition of territory which has given strength, though not birth, to that sectionalism which already has broken in pieces this, the noblest Government ever

devised by the wit of man. Not foreseeing the evil, or the necessity, they did not guard against its results. Believing that the great danger to the system which they were about to inaugurate lay rather in the jealousy of the State Governments toward the power and authority delegated to the Federal Government, they defended diligently against that danger. Apprehending that the larger States might aggress upon the rights of the smaller States, they provided. that no State should, without its consent, be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. Lest the legislative department might encroach upon the executive, they gave to the President the self-protecting power of a qualified veto; and, in turn, made the President impeachable by the two Houses of Congress. Satisfied that the several State Governments were strong enough to protect themselves from Federal aggressions, if, indeed, not too strong for the efficiency of the General Government, they thus devised a system of internal checks and balances looking chiefly to the security of the several departments from aggression upon each other, and to prevent the system from being used to the oppression of individuals. I think, sir, that the debates in the Federal Convention, and in the conventions of the several States called to ratify the Constitution, as well as the cotemporaneous letters and publications of the time, will support me in the statement that the friends of the Constitution wholly under-estimated the power and influence of the Government which they were establishing. Certainly, sir, many of the ablest statesmen of that day earnestly desired a stronger Government; and it was the policy of Mr. Hamilton, and of the Federal party, which he created, to strengthen the General Government; and hence the funding and protective systems, the national bank, and other similar schemes of finance, along with the "general-welfare doctrine," and a liberal construction of the Constitution.

Sir, the framers of the Constitution-and I speak it reverently, but with the freedom of history-failed to foresee the strength and centralizing tendencies of the Federal Government. They mistook wholly the real danger to the system. They looked for it in the aggressions of the large States upon the small States, without regard to geographical position, and accordingly guarded jealously in that direction, giving, for this purpose, as I have said, the power of a selfprotecting veto in the Senate to the small States, by means of their equal suffrage in that Chamber, and forbidding even amendment of the Constitution, in this particular, without the consent of every State. But, they seem wholly to have overlooked the danger of SECTIONAL COMBINATIONS as against other sections, and to the injury and oppression of other sections, to secure possession of the several departments of the Federal Government, and of the vast powers and influence which belong to them. In like manner, too, they seem to have utterly under-estimated SLAVERY as a disturbing element in the system, possibly because it existed still in almost every State, but chiefly because the growth and manufacture of cotton had scarce yet been commenced in the United States-because cotton was not yet crowned king. The vast extent of the patronage of the Executive,