Loyalty and Disloyalty

3 this misery upon us, or with our brethren of the South, whose wrongs we feel as our own, or whether Pennsylvania shall stand by herself, ready, when occasion offers, to bind together the broken Union, and resume her place of loyalty and devotion. This extraordinary doctrine, that the secession of the South would put an end to the Union here, free Pennsylvania from her allegiance to the United States, and authorize her citizens to side with the alien Government established by Jefferson Davis, and against the glorious Constitution framed and bequeathed by Washington, Hamilton, and Madison, was indignantly repudiated not long afterwards by the great body of the Democracy, at the memorable uprising of all parties which followed the capture of Fort Sumpter, and showed how little politicians, who have outlived their hearts, can judge of the effect which great events will produce on the hearts of others. But though rejected by the people, it was never disavowed or retracted by its authors. It still lay as an anchor to windward, a proof, if the South should in the end be triumphant, that they had always been true to its cause, and were entitled to receive from its hands those rewards which are most coveted by such political martyrs. Accordingly, no sooner did the National Star begin to lose its ascendancy in the disasters of last summer, than this ill-omened resolution was dragged from the oblivion to which it had willingly been consigned by all good citizens. Its disorganizing doctrines were avowed and defended in a so-called “Vindication,” and the people of this Commonwealth again impliedly told that all national obligation was at an end, and the people of each State free to choose between the United Statesand the “Confederacy.” What that choice should be was not left to conjecture. The Confederates were described as our injured brethren, whose wrongs were our own; those arrayed in support of the National Government as fanatics engaged in an unjust war, who had brought all this misery to our doors. Is it possible to conceive of anything more insidious, more seditious, more disloyal, than such a “Vindication” of disloyalty, in the midst of the struggle which the American people are now making for their existence as a nation ? To understand this fully, we must remember that the Confederate Government is not only revolutionary, but alien; that its avowed purpose is to establish a new and distinct nation, which, when recognized as Mr. Reed would have it, will be as foreign to ourselves and our children as France or England. It will deal with us as selfishly and harshly as if it was not of the same race and language ; will, as it does now, confound all Northern men in one common epithet of contempt and execration, as “Yankees,” and know no distinction between the farmers of Pennsylvania, and the merchants and manufacturers of New England. Yet at the outset, while the South was, according to the author of the “Vindication, ” still hesitating, before blood had been shed or any irrevocable step taken, she was encouraged to go on by the assurance that this Commonwealth was ready to join her in the path of revolution; and this encouragement is now more cr less covertly reproduced and repeated at the height of the struggle, and when the fate of the nation, perhaps for centuries, is trembling in the balance. The example of Mr. Fox is cited in the “ Vindication”

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