pon the country the distinct issue, "immediate dissolution or blood."

And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It
presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional
republic or democracy--a government of the people by the same people--can
or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic
foes. It presents the question whether discontented individuals, too few
in numbers to control administration according to organic law in any
case, can always, upon the pretenses made in this case, or on any other
pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up their government,
and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It
forces us to ask: Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal
weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties
of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?

So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power
of the government, and so to resist force employed for its destruction by
force for its preservation.

The call was made, and the response of the country was most gratifying,
surpassing in unanimity and spirit the most sanguine expectation. Yet
none of the States commonly called slave States, except Delaware, gave
a regiment through regular State organization. A few regiments have been
organized within some others of those States by individual enterprise,
and received into the government service. Of course the seceded States,
so called (and to which Texas had been joined about the time of the
inauguration), gave no troops to the cause of the Union.

The border States, so called, were not uniform in their action, some
of them being almost for the Union, while in others--as Virginia,
North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas--the Union sentiment was nearly
repressed and silenced. The course taken in Virginia was the most
remarkable--perhaps the most important. A convention elected by the people
of that State to consider this very question of disrupting the Federal
Union was in session at the capital of Virginia when Fort Sumter fell. To
this body the people had chosen a large majority of professed Union men.
Almost immediately after the fall of Sumter, many members of that majority
went over to the original disunion minority, and with them adopted an
ordinance for withdrawing the State from the Union. Whether this change
was wrought by their grea