ery vestige of recognition of your Government. They discarded all
their official oaths, and took, in their places, oaths to support
your enemies' government. They seized, in their States, all the
Nation's property. Their senators and representatives in your Congress
insulted, bantered, defied and then left you. They expelled from
their land or assassinated every inhabitant of known loyalty. They
betrayed and surrendered your arms. They passed sequestration and
other Acts in flagitious violation of the law of nations, making every
citizen of the United States an alien enemy, and placing in the
treasury of their rebellion all money and property due such citizens.
They framed iniquity and universal murder into law. For years they
besieged your Capital and sent your bleeding armies in rout back here
upon the very sanctuaries of your national power. Their pirates
burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea. They carved the bones
of your unburied heroes into ornaments and drank from goblets made
out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains, put mines under
your soldiers' prisons, organized bands whose leaders were concealed
in your homes, and whose commissions ordered the torch to be carried
to your cities, and the yellow-fever to your wives and children.
They planned one universal bonfire of the North, from Lake Ontario
to the Missouri. They murdered, by systems of starvation and
exposure, sixty thousand of your sons as brave and heroic as ever
martyrs were. They destroyed, in the four years of horrid war,
another army so large that it would reach almost around the globe
in marching-column. And then to give to the infernal drama a fitting
close, and to concentrate into one crime all that is criminal in
crime and all that is detestable in barbarism, they murdered the
President of the United States."

"I allude to these horrid events," continued Mr. Shellabarger, "not
to revive frightful memories, or to bring back the impulses towards
the perpetual severance of this people which they provoke. I allude
to them to remind us how utter was the overthrow and the obliteration
of all government, divine and human, how total was the wreck of all
constitutions and laws, political, civil and international. I allude
to them to condense their monstrous enormities of guilt into one
crime, and to point the gentleman from New York to it and tell him
that that was the _specific act_."

Mr. Voorhees of Indiana followed on