e again and again passed resolutions against
receiving petitions even to repeal taxes; and this, those who formed our
Constitution well knew, and yet adopted the provision almost
identically contained in the British Bill of Rights, without guarding
against the practice under it. Is not the conclusion irresistible, that
they did not deem it inconsistent with the right of "the citizens
peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievance," as
secured in the Constitution? The thing is clear. It is time that the
truth should be known, and this cant about petition, not to redress the
grievances of the petitioners, but to create a grievance elsewhere, be
put down....

I know this question to the bottom. I have viewed it under every
possible aspect. There is no safety but in prompt, determined, and
uncompromising defense of our rights--to meet the danger on the
frontier. There all rights are strongest, and more especially this. The
moral is like the physical world. Nature has incrusted the exterior of
all organic life, for its safety. Let that be broken through, and it is
all weakness within. So in the moral and political world. It is on the
extreme limits of right that all wrong and encroachments are the most
sensibly felt and easily resisted. I have acted on this principle
throughout in this great contest. I took my lessons from the patriots of
the Revolution. They met wrong promptly, and defended right against the
first encroachment. To sit here and hear ourselves and constituents, and
their rights and institutions (essential to their safety), assailed from
day to day--denounced by every epithet calculated to degrade and render
us odious; and to meet all this in silence,--or still worse, to reason
with the foul slanderers,--would eventually destroy every feeling of
pride and dignity, and sink us in feelings to the condition of the
slaves they would emancipate. And this the Senator advises us to do.
Adopt it, and the two houses would be converted into halls to debate our
rights to our property, and whether, in holding it, we were not thieves,
robbers, and kidnappers; and we are to submit to this in order to quiet
the North! I tell the Senator that our Union, and our high moral tone of
feeling on this subject at the South, are infinitely more important to
us than any possible effect that his course could have at the North; and
that if we could have the weakness to adopt his advice, it would even
fail to effect the ob