e beginning, have shown a stronger and firmer
devotion to whatsoever has been designed, or to whatever has tended, to
preserve the union of these States and the stability of the free
government under which we live. The Constitution of the United States,
in regard to the various municipal regulations and local interests, has
left the States individual, disconnected, isolated. It has left them
their own codes of criminal law; it has left them their own system of
municipal regulations. But there was one great interest, one great
concern, which, from the very nature of the case, was no longer to be
left under the regulations of the then thirteen, afterwards twenty, and
now twenty-six States, but was committed, necessarily committed, to the
care, the protection, and the regulation of one government; and this was
that great unit, as it has been called, the commerce of the United
States. There is no commerce of New York, no commerce of Massachusetts,
none of Georgia, none of Alabama or Louisiana. All and singular, in the
aggregate and in all its parts, is the commerce of the United States,
regulated at home by a uniform system of laws under the authority of the
general government, and protected abroad under the flag of our
government, the glorious _E Pluribus Unum_, and guarded, if need be, by
the power of the general government all over the world. There is,
therefore, Gentlemen, nothing more cementing, nothing that makes us more
cohesive, nothing that more repels all tendencies to separation and
dismemberment, than this great, this common, I may say this overwhelming
interest of one commerce, one general system of trade and navigation,
one everywhere and with every nation of the globe. There is no flag of
any particular American State seen in the Pacific seas, or in the
Baltic, or in the Indian Ocean. Who knows, or who hears, there of your
proud State, or of my proud State? Who knows, or who hears, of any
thing, at the extremest north or south, or at the antipodes,--in the
remotest regions of the Eastern or Western Sea,--who ever hears, or
knows, of any thing but an American ship, or of any American enterprise
of a commercial character that does not bear the impression of the
American Union with it?

It would be a presumption of which I cannot be guilty, Gentlemen, for me
to imagine for a moment, that, among the gifts which New England has
made to our common country, I am any thing more than one of the most
inconsiderable. I