Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis, 1858 | Page 5

can no
longer emulate their virtues? Have the purposes for which our Union
was formed, lost their value? Has patriotism ceased to be a virtue, and
is narrow sectionalism no longer to be counted a crime? Shall the North
not rejoice that the progress of agriculture in the South has given to her
great staple the controlling influence of the commerce of the world, and
put manufacturing nations under bond to keep the peace with the
United States? Shall the South not exult in the fact, that the industry
and persevering intelligence of the North, has placed her mechanical
skill in the front ranks of the civilized world--that our mother country,
whose haughty minister some eighty odd years ago declared that not a
hob-nail should be made in the colonies, which are now the United
States, was brought some four years ago to recognize our pre-eminence
by sending a commission to examine our work shops, and our
machinery, to perfect their own manufacture of the arms requisite for
their defence? Do not our whole people, interior and seaboard, North,
South, East, and West, alike feel proud of the hardihood, the enterprise,
the skill, and the courage of the Yankee sailor, who has borne our flag
far as the ocean bears its foam, and caused the name and the character

of the United States to be known and respected wherever there is
wealth enough to woo commerce, and intelligence enough to honor
merit? So long as we preserve, and appreciate the achievements of
Jefferson and Adams, of Franklin and Madison, of Hamilton, of
Hancock, and of Rutledge, men who labored for the whole country, and
lived for mankind, we cannot sink to the petty strife which would sap
the foundations, and destroy the political fabric our fathers erected, and
bequeathed as an inheritance to our posterity forever.
Since the formation of the Constitution, a vast extension of territory,
and the varied relations arising there from, have presented problems
which could not have been foreseen. It is just cause for
admiration--even wonder, that the provisions of the fundamental law
should have been found so fully adequate to all the wants of
government, new in its organization, and new in many of the principles
on which it was founded. Whatever fears may have once existed as to
the consequences of territorial expansion, must give way before the
evidence which the past affords. The general government, strictly
confined to its delegated functions, and the States left in the
undisturbed exercise of all else, we have a theory and practice which
fits our government for immeasurable domain, and might, under a
millennium of nations, embrace mankind.
From the slope of the Atlantic our population with ceaseless tide has
poured into the wide and fertile valley of the Mississippi, with eddying
whirl has passed to the coast of the Pacific, from the West and the East
the tides are rushing towards each other--and the mind is carried to the
day when all the cultivable and will be inhabited, and the American
people will sign for more wildernesses to conquer. But there is here a
physico-political problem presented for our solution. Were it was
purely physical--your past triumphs would leave but little doubt of your
capacity to solve it.
A community, which, when less than twenty thousand, conceived the
grand project of crossing the White Mountains, and, unaided, save by
the stimulus which jeers and prophecies of failure gave, successfully
executed the herculean work, might well be impatient, if it were
suggested that a physical problem was before us, too difficult for their
mastery. The history of man teaches that high mountains and wide
deserts have resisted the permanent extension of empire, and have

formed the immutable boundaries of States. From time to time, under
some able leader, have the hordes of the upper plains of Asia swept
over the adjacent country, and rolled their conquering columns over
Southern Europe. Yet, after the lapse of a few generations, the physical
law to which I have referred, has asserted its supremacy, and the
boundaries of those States differ little now from those which obtained
three thousand years ago. Rome flew her conquering eagles over the
then known world, and has now subsided into the little territory on
which her great city was originally built. The Alps and the Pyrenees
have been unable to restrain imperial France; but her expansion was a
leverish action; her advance and her retreat were tracked with blood,
and those mountain ridges are the re-established limits of her empire.
Shall the Rocky Mountains prove a dividing barrier to us? Were ours a
central consolidated government, instead of a Union of sovereign States,
our fate might be learned from the history of other nations. Thanks to
the wisdom and independent spirit of our forefathers, this is not