North has been much
to blame in bringing it upon us. What has been the language used at
the North? Men have used such expressions as this, "The South secede?
Why, you can't kick out the South." And men who knew no better
believed the statement to be true. I appeal to northern men to say
whether this has not been so. I myself thought four States would go,
but I believed secession would stop there. We had more to hope from
Louisiana than from any other Gulf State. She has gone, and has now
taken up a most offensive and threatening position. Virginia to-day is
in more danger of immediate secession than Louisiana was a few short
months ago.

My friend from New Jersey says that if this Convention does not
prevent it, there must be war. I agree with him. War! what a fearful
alternative to contemplate? War is a fearful calamity at best,
sometimes necessary I admit, but always terrible. It cannot come to
this country without a fearful expenditure of blood and treasure. It
will leave us, if it leaves us a nation at all, with an awful legacy
of widows' tears--of the blighted hopes of orphans--with a catalogue
of suffering, misery, and woe, too long to be enumerated and too
painful to be contemplated. For God's sake! let such a fate be averted
at any cost, from the country. If it comes at all, it will be such a
war as the world never saw. War is commonly, and almost universally,
between nations foreign to each other--whose individuals are strangers
to each other, and whose interests are widely separated. But we are a
nation of brothers, of a common ancestry, and bound together by a
thousand memories of the past--a thousand ties of interest and blood.
It will be a war between brothers--between you who come to us in
summer, and we who visit you in winter. It will be a war between those
who have been connected in business--associated in pleasures, and who
have met as brothers in the halls of legislation and the marts of
commerce. Save us from such a war! Let not the mad anger of such a
people be aroused. And, gentlemen, if war comes it must be long and
terrible. You will see both parties rise in their majesty at both ends
of the line. They will slough off every other consideration and devote
themselves, with terrible energy, to the work of death. Oh ye! who
bring such a calamity as this upon this once happy country! Pause,
gentlemen, before you do it, and think of the fearful accountability
that awaits you in time and in eternity.