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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
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