re to abate the tithe of a hair
from his just character and just fame, may my tongue cleave to the roof
of my mouth!

Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in
refreshing remembrance of the past; let me remind you that, in early
times, no States cherished greater harmony, both of principle and
feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that
harmony might again return. Shoulder to shoulder they went through the
Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of
Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind
feeling, if it exist, alienation, and distrust are the growth, unnatural
to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, the seeds
of which that same great arm never scattered.

Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she
needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is
her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure.
There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there
they will remain for ever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great
struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State
from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie for ever. And, Sir,
where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was
nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its
manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall
wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it,
if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary
restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that Union, by which
alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side
of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth
its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain over the friends who
gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the
proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.

There yet remains to be performed, Mr. President, by far the most grave
and important duty, which I feel to be devolved on me by this occasion.
It is to state, and to defend, what I conceive to be the true principles
of the Constitution under which we are here assembled. I might well have
desired that so weighty a task should have fallen into other and abler
hands. I could have wished that it shoul