om the white man of the South,--My
Constitutional and my natural rights are denied me; and then the cry
came up from the black man of the South--My Constitutional and my
natural rights are denied me. These complaints are utterly
antagonistic, the one to the other; and this convention is called to
say which is right. Upon that question, if upon the truth as you feel
it, speak the truth as you know it, speak the truth as you love
permanent peace, as you may hope to establish the institutions of this
Government so that our children and our children's children shall enjoy
a peace that we have not known. . . . The convention to which I have
referred, as I read its history, came here to simply record in abject
submission the commands of one man. That convention did his commands.
The loyal Congress of the United States had refused to do his commands;
and whenever you have a Congress that does not resolutely and firmly
refuse, as the present Congress has done, to merely act as the
recording secretary of the tyrant at the White House, American liberty
is gone forever."

Mr. Speed's language was a complete revelation, more emphatic than
had yet been made, of the great differences which had prevailed in the
Cabinet of the President with respect to his policy; and his words
naturally created a sensation, not alone in the convention, but
throughout the country. The fact of his identification with the
President, in the closest official intercourse, ever since his
accession, added vastly to the weight of Mr. Speed's address and gave
to it an influence which he had not, perhaps, anticipated when he
delivered it. This influence was doubtless enhanced by the fact that
the author of the speech was a native and citizen of the South. It was
a stimulus to the patriotic zeal of Northern Republicans to find a man
from the South taking advanced ground that possibly involved peril
to himself before the angry contest should be finally settled.

--The address agreed upon in the Southern Convention was in the form
of an appeal "from the loyal men of the South to their fellow-citizens
of the United States." It declared that the representatives of eight
millions of American citizens "appeal for protection and justice to
their friends and brothers in the States that have been spared the
cruelties of the Rebellion and the direct horrors of civil war."
"Having," said the address, "lost our champion, we return to you who
can make presidents and