9 I am somewhat troubled to know how to reconcile the consistency of my colleague in his position of the “ Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was,” with his great idea of the formation of a confederacy with “ New England left out in the cold.” No doubt, however, the gentleman can do it—at least, to his own satisfaction, if not to that of the “rest of mankind.” “New England must be sacrificed,” cries Jeff Davis, the great bull-dog of the southern traitors, and thereupon every sympathizing cur in the free States, with his mouth frothing with treason, barks out, “ New England must be humbled.” Now, sir, what does all this mean? What has New England done that demagogues should now threaten to drive her out of the Union ? Has she failed or faltered in the least in this great struggle for constitutional freedom ? Her soldiers ^re found in every battle; and every field ofconflict has been whitened with the bones and fertilized with the blood of her most patriotic children. Mr. Speaker, I shall enter upon no encomium upon New England; in the language of her immortal Webster, “She needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history ; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit.” Sir, leave New England out of the Union, and what a Union would be left to us I But gentlemen say they don’t contemplate this. Why, then, talk about it ? Is all this tirade against New England a mere rhetorical flourish ? Does it mean nothing ? Why, sir, this cry commenced in Richmond, and soon thereafter, we find honorable gentlemen leaving their places in this House to harangue the multitude in the city of New York, representing the people of the West as saying, “ New England fanaticism and speculation have made disunion! New England stands in the way of re-union! Perish New England, that the Union may live.” Can any man fail to see that all such attacks, at this time, upon any of the loyal States can have but the one effect—to cause dissensions among those who should be friends ? These attacks on New England, sir, can have no other purpose than to produce a division at the North, for the object, and the only object of aiding the rebels of the South in this struggle. This, sir is the only hope of the, rebels in this contest against, the Union. General Johnson, commander of one of the rebel armies, said some months since, that he did not expect to “ conquer the North by force of armsf but he did expect to conquer by the force of northern dissensions!1 This is the expectation all through rebeldom, and keeps the war spirit up in the South. The Richmond Despatch says : “ Illinois is a powerful State of the great Northwest, whose real interests are just as hostile to Puritan New England as our own. That she should take this decided stand against the Abolitionism, fanaticism, and malignity of New England is a sign of the times at the North that is full of significance. It cannot but be regarded as the outgiving of the impatience of the Puritan rule that must ultimately terminate in a more formidable resistance to it, and separation from the detestable portion of the Union, which has been the source of all the troubles among the States, as it has been of all the new schools of philosophy and religion which have so fearfully demoralized society at the North.”
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