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It was a happy accident, for just across the river the people of northwestern Virginia were meditating resistance to the secession movement, which under the guidance of Governor Letcher threatened to sever them from the Union-loving population of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Reconstruction, as finally agreed upon, means this and only this, except that the late slave was enfranchised, giving an increase, as was supposed, to the Union-loving and Union-supporting votes. If free in the full sense of the word, they would not disappoint this expectation.
In the outraged and resentful minds of those who had sustained the Union cause through its trials, the real offenses of the President were clearly seen, and bitterly denounced: his hostility to the Fourteenth Amendment; his unwillingness to make citizenship National; his opposition to all efforts to secure the safety of the public debt, and the sacredness of the soldier's pension; his resistance to measures that would put the rebel debt beyond the possibility of being a burden upon the whole nation or even upon the people of the Southern States; his determination that freedmen should not be placed within the protection of Organic law; his eagerness to turn the Southern States over to the control of the rebel element, without condition and without restraint; his fixed hostility to every form of reconstruction that looked to national safety and the prevention of another rebellion; his opposition to every scheme that tended to equalize representation in Congress, North and South, and his persistent demand that the negro should be denied suffrage, yet be counted in the basis of apportionment; his treacherous and malignant conduct in connection with the atrocious massacre at New Orleans; his hostility to the growth of free States in the North-West, while he was constantly urging the instant re-admission of all the rebel States; his denial of a morsel of food to the suffering and starving negro and white Unionist of the South in their dire extremity, as shown by his veto of the Freedmen's-bureau Bill; his cruel attempt to exclude the colored man from the power to protect himself by law, in his shameless veto of the Civil Rights Bill; and last, and worst of all, his heartless abandonment of that Union-loving class of white men in the South who became the victims of rebel hatred, from which he had himself escaped only by the strength of the National arms.
If ever a situation called for a man who might at once command the confidence of the people and arouse the latent patriotism of our wide-spread population, a man who might do the work of years in a few months' time, who might in his own persuasive personality become a center of patriotism around which Union-loving men of all parties, and of no party, could unite in defense of the imperilled country; one unfettered by old antagonisms, or misled by personal ambition, a heaven-sent man destined to a work no other could accomplish this the situation plainly demanded.
He declared in his message that he recognized "No allegiance as paramount to that which the citizens of South Carolina owe to the State of their birth or their adoption" that doctrine of "paramount allegiance to the State" which in after-years gave so much trouble to the Union and to Union-loving Southerners and declared that he held himself "bound by the highest of all obligations to carry into effect, not only the Ordinance of the Convention, but every act of the Legislature, and every judgment of our own Courts, the enforcement of which may devolve upon the Executive," and "if," continued he, "the sacred soil of Carolina should be polluted by the footsteps of an invader, or be stained with the blood of her citizens, shed in her defense, I trust in Almighty God * even should she stand alone in this great struggle for constitutional liberty, encompassed by her enemies, that there will not be found, in the wide limits of the State, one recreant son who will not fly to the rescue, and be ready to lay down his life in her defense."
'Temperate, reasonable, kindly persuasive' it seems strange that Lincoln's inaugural address did not disarm at least the personal resentment of the South toward him, and sufficiently strengthen Union-loving people there against the red-hot Secessionists, to put the 'brakes' down on rebellion."
Edward Everett wrote to Crittenden, "I saw with great satisfaction your patriotic movement, and I wish from the bottom of my heart it might succeed"; and August Belmont in a letter to Crittenden spoke for the moneyed interest: "I have yet to meet the first Union-loving man, in or out of politics, who does not approve your compromise proposition...."
He declared in his message that he recognized "No allegiance as paramount to that which the citizens of South Carolina owe to the State of their birth or their adoption" that doctrine of "paramount allegiance to the State" which in after-years gave so much trouble to the Union and to Union-loving Southerners and declared that he held himself "bound by the highest of all obligations to carry into effect, not only the Ordinance of the Convention, but every act of the Legislature, and every judgment of our own Courts, the enforcement of which may devolve upon the Executive," and "if," continued he, "the sacred soil of Carolina should be polluted by the footsteps of an invader, or be stained with the blood of her citizens, shed in her defense, I trust in Almighty God * even should she stand alone in this great struggle for constitutional liberty, encompassed by her enemies, that there will not be found, in the wide limits of the State, one recreant son who will not fly to the rescue, and be ready to lay down his life in her defense."
If the border slave States and the border free States could arbitrate the question of slavery, the Union would last forever. Arbitration and compromise these were the words with which the venerable Crittenden of Kentucky, successor to Clay, now endeavored to rally Union-loving men.
God knows we do not want them in our Section of the Union. But, Sir, having learned and believing that these persons have been employed with arms in their hands to shed the blood of the Union-loving men of this Country, I shall now vote in favor of that amendment with less regard to what may become of these people than I had on Saturday. I will merely instance that there is a precedent for this.
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