47 four rivers which, descending through a common territory, find their way to the sea and serve as the great outlets of the industry and commerce of the whole people, they modestly propose to take to themselves the possession and control of seventy-two, including the largest and most important ; leaving to us but the number of twelve, watering that comparatively small strip of territory extending from the Hudson River to the northern boundary of Maine. [Groans ] They propose to cut us off from those elements of national existence determined by the curvature of mountain forms and by the course of rivers, and leave us a territory so irregular and so badly adjusted in respect to its dependent parts, as to make it impossible for us to keep it together as a nation. Look at the political boundaries of the nations upon the map of the globe, and not one will be found with a territory so disjointed and fragmentary as the one that would then be left us. If a foreign nation undertook to do this, we would resist to the last drop of our blood ; and does it make any difference that those who are seeking to accomplish it, have hitherto been a part of ourselves, and proffer to us in the future nothing but vows of eternal hate ? [Applause.] After eighty-six years of existence as one government and one people, eight millions rise up and say to twenty millions, " We will take the largest part of this country for ourselves, and you must accept what we thinkproper to leave you ; we are the better born, the nobler race, the aristocracy ; we do not choose to labor ourselves, we prefer to have a servile class to labor for us, and therefore have no sympathy with the trading spirit by which you have increased and multiplied, nor with the mechanical, manufacturing and various industrial pursuits to which you are devoted." [Groans.] They say to us, " There has never been such a thing as the American nation ; it has been only a mere partnership of sovereign states which any one might dissolve at its pleasure. We have respectively dissolved it, and in the partition of the partnership effects we have made our own adjustment, taken what has pleased us, and left to you what we thought proper." To submit to this is to allow the weaker to dictate to the stronger [cries of " Never "] to allow the eight millions of the South to prescribe to the twenty millions of the North what shall be there future position. The man who was born in a Northern State, or who became a citizen by adoption, is as much a citizen of South Carolina as those who were born or who dwell there. [Cheers.] And neither their Southern doctrine of State rights, nor their rebellious attempt at exclusiveness, can deprive him of it. To submit to the designs of the South, is to consent to national annihilation. It is to consent, in a national point of view, to take territorially an inferior and subordinate position ; to take a territory so placed geographically, that its dismemberment, the breaking of it up into several parts, must be the inevitable consequence. The question, then, is not whether we shall conquer the South, but whether the South shall conquer us. [Cheers.] It is whether the present aristocracy of the Southern States, and their retainers, shall deprive the intelligent and industrious masses of the North of a territory, the joint possession of which they have equally inherited, and which is essential to the unfettered exercise of their industry, and to their full development as a nation. It is this which gives to this contest the character of a mortal struggle, in which neither will yield unless compelled to do so by the superior military prowess of the other. [Applause.] It is not like other
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