y
are thrown into jail or sold into slavery. If we send a lawyer and
statesman to remonstrate, he is driven out. Our newspapers are excluded
from your mails. You have extinguished free speech among your own
citizens. If the Republican party is sectional, it is because any man
who supports it, south of the Ohio, is liable to abuse and exile. You
have shaped our national policy in lines of dishonor. With your
Northern allies you have forced war on a weak neighbor and despoiled her
of territory. You have poured thousands of fraudulent voters into
Kansas, have supported their usurping government by Federal judges and
troops, and have tolerated the ruffians who harried peaceful settlers.
One of your congressional leaders has answered a senator's arguments by
beating him into insensibility, and you have honored and reelected the
assailant. And now, when we have fairly won the day in a national
election, and for purposes peaceful, constitutional, and
beneficent,--you propose to break up the nation, and reorganize your
part of it expressly for the maintenance and promotion of slavery.

"With such complaints on your part, and such complaints on ours, what is
the manly, the patriotic, the sufficient recourse? That which we offer
is that you and we, the whole American people, go forward loyally and
patiently with the familiar duties of American citizens. Let Time and
Providence arbitrate our controversies. Let us trust the institutions
under which for seventy years our nation has grown great; let us, now
and hereafter, acquiesce in that deliberate voice of the people which
our fathers established as the sovereign authority. For thirty years you
have had in the Presidency either a Southerner or a Northern man with
Southern principles,--and we acquiesced. Now we have chosen a genuine
Northerner,--will not you acquiesce? Four years ago the Presidential
contest was held on the same lines as this year; you won, and we
cheerfully submitted,--now we have won, will not you loyally submit? We
disclaim any attack on your domestic institutions. The invasion by John
Brown was repudiated by practically the entire North. Honor for a brave,
misguided man meant no approval of his criminal act. For the advance of
our distinctive principles,--inimical, we own, to your system of slave
labor,--we look only to the gradual conversion of individual opinion,
and to the ultimate acceptance by your own people of the principles of
universal liberty. We beli