Mr. Douglas incessantly remembers to inform us in every speech he has made for a year past that, when the Constitution was formed, all the thirteen S… - George William Curtis

For what do we now see in the country? We see a man who, as Senator of the United States, voted to tamper with the public mails for the benefit of slavery, sitting in the President's chair. Two days after he is seated we see a judge rising in the place of John Jay — who said, 'Slaves, though held by the laws of men, are free by the laws of God' — to declare that a seventh of the population not only have no original rights as men, but no legal rights as citizens. We see every great office of State held by ministers of slavery ; our foreign ambassadors not the representatives of our distinctive principle, but the eager advocates of the bitter anomaly in our system, so that the world sneers as it listens and laughs at liberty. We see the majority of every important committee of each house of Congress carefully devoted to slavery. We see throughout the vast ramification of the Federal system every little postmaster in every little town professing loyalty to slavery or sadly holding his tongue as the price of his salary, which is taxed to propagate the faith. We see every small Custom-House officer expected to carry primary meetings in his pocket and to insult at Fourth-of-July dinners men who quote the Declaration of Independence. We see the slave-trade in fact, though not yet in law, reopened — the slave-law of Virginia contesting the freedom of the soil of New York We see slave-holders in South Carolina and Louisiana enacting laws to imprison and sell the free citizens of other States. Yes, and on the way to these results, at once symptoms and causes, we have seen the public mails robbed — the right of petition denied — the appeal to the public conscience made by the abolitionists in 1833 and onward derided and denounced, and their very name become a byword and a hissing. We have seen free speech in public and in private suppressed, and a Senator of the United States struck down in his place for defending liberty. We have heard Mr. Edward Everett, succeeding brave John Hancock and grand old Samuel Adams as governor of the freest State in history, say in his inaugural address in 1836 that all discussion of the subject which tends to excite insurrection among the slaves, as if all discussion of it would not be so construed, 'has been held by highly respectable legal authorities an offence against the peace of the commonwealth, which may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law'. We have heard Daniel Webster, who had once declared that the future of the slave was 'a widespread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death', now declaring it to be 'an affair of high morals' to drive back into that doom any innocent victim appealing to God and man, and flying for life and liberty. We have heard clergymen in their pulpits preaching implicit obedience to the powers that be, whether they are of God or the Devil — insisting that God's tribute should be paid to Caesar, and, by sneering at the scruples of the private conscience, denouncing every mother of Judea who saved her child from the sword of Herod's soldiers.

In January 1865, Louis Wigfall, one of the rebel chiefs, said, in Richmond, 'Sir, I wish to live in no country where the man who blacks my boots or curries my horse is my equal'. Three months afterwards, when the rebel was skulking away to Mexico, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, walked through the streets of Richmond and respectfully lifted his hat to the men who blacked Louis Wigfall's boots and curried his horse. What did it mean? It meant that the truest American president we have ever had, the companion of Washington in our love and honor, recognized that the poorest man, however outraged, however ignorant, however despised, however black, was, as a man, his equal. The child of the American people was their most prophetic man, because, whether as small shop-keeper, as flat-boatman, as volunteer captain, as honest lawyer, as defender of the Declaration, as President of the United States, he knew by the profoundest instinct and the widest experience and reflection, that in the most vital faith of this country it is just as honorable for an honest man to curry a horse and black a boot as it is to raise cotton or corn, to sell molasses or cloth, to practice medicine or law, to gamble in stocks or speculate in petroleum. He knew the European doctrine that the king makes the gentleman; but he believed with his whole soul the doctrine, the American doctrine, that worth makes the man. He stood with his hand on the helm, and saw the rebel colors of caste flying in the storm of war. He heard the haughty shout of rebellion to the American principle rising above the gale, 'Capital ought to own labor and the laborer, and a few men should monopolize political power'. He heard the cracked and quavering voice of medieval Europe in which that rebel craft was equipped and launched, speaking by the tongue of Alexander Stephens, 'We build on the comer-stone of slavery'. Then calmly waiting until the wildest fury of the gale, the living America, which is our country, mistress of our souls, by the lips of Abraham Lincoln thundered jubilantly back to the dead Europe of the past, 'And we build upon fair play for every man, equality before the laws, and God for us all'.

Mister Toombs was willing to dissolve the Union to save slavery, Mister Phillips, to save liberty; while Mister Seward, denounced and derided by both, declared that the deepest instinct of the American people was for union. Reserved rights. State rights, limited powers, the advantages of union and disunion, were the cucumbers from which we were busily engaged in distilling light, overlooking the fact of nationality in discussing the conditions of union. We were speculating upon costume. We gravely proved that the clothes were the clothes of a woman, or of a child, without seeing that whatever the clothes might be there was a full-grown man inside of them. 'The Constitution is a contract between sovereign States', shouted Mister Toombs, 'let Georgia tear it and separate'. 'The Constitution is a league with hell', calmly replied Mister Phillips, 'let New York cut off New Orleans to rot alone'. 'Oh, dear! it's a dreadful dilemma', whimpered President Buchanan. 'States have no right to secede, and the United States have no right to coerce. Oh, dear me! it's perfectly awful! I'm the most patriotic of men, but what shall I do? what shall I do?' Separate! Cut off! Secede! It was of a living body they spoke, which, pierced anywhere, quivered everywhere.