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mature and announce a purpose.
That flag lowered at Sumter, that flight at Ball Run, will rankle in the heart of the republic for centuries.
Nothing will ever medicine that wound but the government announcing to the world that it knows well whence came its trouble, and is determined to effect its cure, and, consecrating the banner to liberty, to plant it on the shores of the Gulf.
[Applause.] I say in the service of the negro; but I do. not forget the white man, the eight millions of poor whites, thinking themselves our enemies, but who are really our friends.
Their interests are identical with our own. An Alabama slaveholder, sitting with me a year or two ago, said:--
“ In our northern counties they are your friends.
A man owns one slave or two slaves, and he eats with them, and sleeps in the same room (they have but one), as much as a hired man here eats with the farmer he serves.
There is no difference.
They are too poor to send their sons North for education.
They have no newspapers, and they know nothing but what they are told by us. If you could get at them, they would be on your side, but we mean you never shall.”
In Paris there are one hundred thousand men whom caricature or epigram can at any time raise to barricade the streets.
Whose fault is it that such men exist?
The government's; and the government under which such a mass of ignorance exists deserves to be barricaded.
The government under which eight millions of people exist, so ignorant that two thousand politicians and a hundred thousand aristocrats can pervert them into rebellion, deserves to be rebelled against.
In the service of those men I mean, for one, to try to fulfil the pledge my fathers made when they said, “We will guarantee to every State a republican form of government.”
[Applause.] A privileged class, grown strong by the help and forbearance of the North, plots the establishment of aristocratic government in form as well as essence,--conspires to rob the
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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