00-802. Lincoln,
_Complete Works_, Vol. 2, p. 347.]

[Footnote 897: 4 Wallace, p. 125.]

Much as Seymour resented the arrest of Vallandigham, he did not allow
the incident to interfere with his official action, and to the
Secretary of War's call for aid when General Lee began his midsummer
invasion of Pennsylvania, he responded promptly: "I will spare no
effort to send you troops at once," and true to his message he
forwarded nineteen regiments, armed and equipped for field service,
whose arrival brought confidence.[898] But governed by the sinister
reason that influenced him earlier in the year, he refused to
acknowledge the President's letter of thanks, preferring to express
his opinion of Administration methods unhindered by the exchange of
courtesies. This he did in a Fourth of July address, delivered at the
Academy of Music in New York City, in which he pleaded, not
passionately, not with the acrimony that ordinarily characterised his
speeches, but humbly, as if asking a despotic conqueror to return the
rights and liberty of which the people had been robbed. "We only ask
freedom of speech,--the right to exercise all the franchises conferred
by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these
things?" Mingled also with pathetic appeals were joyless pictures of
the ravages of war, and cheerless glimpses into the future of a
Republic with its bulwarks of liberty torn away. "We stand to-day," he
continued, "amid new made graves; we stand to-day in a land filled
with mourning, and our soil is saturated with the blood of the
fiercest conflict of which history gives us an account. We can, if we
will, avert all these disasters and evoke a blessing. If we will do
what? Hold that Constitution, and liberties, and laws are suspended?
Will that restore them? Or shall we do as our fathers did under
circumstances of like trial, when they battled against the powers of a
crown? Did they say that liberty was suspended? Did they say that men
might be deprived of the right of trial by jury? Did they say that men
might be torn from their homes by midnight intruders?... If you would
save your country and your liberties, begin at the hearthstone; begin
in your family circle; declare that their rights shall be held sacred;
and having once proclaimed your own rights, claim for your own State
that jurisdiction and that government which we, better than all
others, can exercise for ourselves, for we best know our own
interes