his powers of oratory, so far as words
can portray that power, we give the speech as follows:--

This step, secession, once taken can never be recalled, and all the
baleful and withering consequences that must follow, as you will see,
will rest on this convention for all coming time. When we and our
posterity shall see our lovely South desolated by the demon of war which
this act of yours will inevitably provoke, when our green fields and
waving harvests shall be trodden down by a murderous soldiery, and the
fiery car of war sweeps over our land, our temples of justice laid in
ashes and every horror and desolation upon us; who, but him who shall
have given his vote for this unwise and ill-timed measure shall be held
to a strict account for this suicidal act by the present generation, and
be cursed and execrated by all posterity, in all coming time, for the
wide and desolating ruin that will inevitably follow this act you now
propose to perpetrate?

Pause, I entreat you, and consider for a moment what reasons you can
give that will satisfy yourselves in calmer moments? What reasons can
you give to your fellow-sufferers in the calamity that it will bring
upon us? What reasons can you give to the nations of the earth to
justify it? They will be calm and deliberate judges of this case, and to
what cause, or one overt-act can you point on which to rest the plea of
justification? What right has the North assailed? Of what interest has
the South been invaded? What justice has been denied? And what claim
founded in justice and right has been unsatisfied? Can any of you name
to-day one governmental act of wrong deliberately and purposely done by
the government at Washington, of which the South has a right to
complain? I challenge an answer.

On the other hand, let me show the facts (and believe me, gentlemen, I
am not here the advocate of the North, but I am here the friend, the
firm friend and lover of the South and her institutions, and for this
reason I speak thus plainly and faithfully for yours, mine, and every
other man's interest, the words of truth and soberness), of which I wish
you to judge, and I will only state facts which are clear and
undeniable, and which now stand in the authentic records of the history
of our country. When we of the South demanded the slave trade, or the
importation of Africans for the cultivation of our lands, did they not
yield the right for twenty years? When we asked a three-fifths
repre