Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis | Page 8

only a small part of the people of his State was on that day prepared. Seduced by the wish, they still believed that the Union could be preserved by fair and mutual concessions. They were on their knees praying for peace, ignorant that bloody war had already girded on his sword. His language was then deemed too harsh and unconciliatory, and hundreds, I among the number, denounced him in unmeasured terms. Before the expiration of three months events had demonstrated his wisdom and our folly, and other paragraphs from that same speech became the fighting creed of the Union men of Maryland. He further said, on that occasion:
"But, sir, there is one State I can speak for, and that is the State of Maryland. Confident in the strength of this great government to protect every interest, grateful for almost a century of unalloyed blessings, she has fomented no agitation; she has done no act to disturb the public peace; she has rested in the consciousness that if there be wrong the Congress of the United States will remedy it; and that none exists which revolution would not aggravate.
"Mr. Speaker, I am here this day to speak, and I say that I do speak, for the people of Maryland, who are loyal to the United States; and that when my judgment is contested, I appeal to the people for its accuracy, and I am ready to maintain it before them.
"In Maryland we are dull, and cannot comprehend the right of secession. We do not recognize the right to make a revolution by a vote. We do not recognize the right of Maryland to repeal the Constitution of the United States, and if any convention there, called by whatever authority, under whatever auspices, undertake to inaugurate revolution in Maryland, their authority will be resisted and defied in arms on the soil of Maryland, in the name and by the authority of the Constitution of the United States."
In January, 1861, the ensign of the Republic, while covering a mission of mercy, was fired on by traitors. In February Jefferson Davis said, at Stevenson, Alabama, "We will carry war where it is easy to advance, where food for the sword and torch await our armies in the densely populated cities." In March the thirty-sixth Congress, after vainly passing conciliatory resolutions by the score, among other things recommending the repeal of all personal liberty bills, declaring that there was no authority outside of the States where slavery was recognized to interfere with slaves or slavery therein, and proposing by two-thirds votes of both houses an amendment of the Constitution prohibiting any future amendment giving Congress power over slavery in the States, adjourned amid general terror and distress.
Abraham Lincoln, having passed through the midst of his enemies, appeared at Washington in due time and delivered his inaugural, closing with these memorable words:
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.
"You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You can have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend' it.
"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.
"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living hearth and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
Words which, if human hearts do not harden into stone, through the long ages yet to come,
"Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking off."
The appeal was spurned; and, in the face of its almost godlike gentleness, they who already gloried in their anticipated saturnalia of blood inhumanly and falsely stigmatized it as a declaration of war. The long-patient North, slow to anger, in its agony still cried, "My brother; oh, my brother!" It remained for that final, ineradicable infamy of Sumter to arouse the nation to arms! At last, to murder at one blow the hopes we had nursed so tenderly, they impiously dragged in the dust the glorious symbol of our national life and majesty, heaping dishonor upon it, and, like the sneering devil at the crucifixion, crying out, "Come and deliver thyself!" and then no man, with the heart of a man, who loved his country and feared his God, dared longer delay to prepare for that great struggle which was destined to rock the earth.
Poor Maryland! cursed with slavery, doubly cursed with traitors! Mr. DAVIS had said that Maryland was loyal to the United States,