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Mr. President, and gentlemen of the Senate and
House of Representatives of the State
of Georgia:
I am profoundly sensible of the delicate and
important
duty imposed upon me, by the courtesy of this public reception.
Under different circumstances, it would have
afforded
me great pleasure, as a native Georgian --- reared and educated
on her soil --- to express to you fully, the views which prevail
in my native State, in relation to the great measures of
deliverance and relief from the principles and policy of the new
Administration, which are there in progress.
I cannot consent, however, upon the very heel of
your
arduous and exciting session, to avail myself of your respectful
courtesy to the State I have the honor to represent, as well as
your personal kindness to her humble representative, to prolong
the discussion of a subject which, however, important and
absorbing, has, doubtless, been already exhausted in your
hearing, by some of the first intellects of your State, if not of
the nation.
I beg, therefore, to refer you to the action of
Mississippi --- already submitted to your Executive --- to ask
for her the sympathy and cooperation she seeks for the common
good, and briefly to suggest to you some of the motives which
influence her conduct.
I am instructed by the resolution from which I
derive
my mission, to inform the State of Georgia, that Mississippi has
passed an act calling a convention of her people, "to
consider the present threatening relations of the Northern and
Southern sections of the Confederacy --- aggravated
by the recent election of a President, upon
principles of hostility to the States of the South; and to
express the earnest hope of
Mississippi, that this State will co-operate with her in the
adoption of efficient measures for
their common defence and safety."
It will be remembered, that the violation of our
constitutional rights, which has caused such universal
dissatisfaction in the South, is not of recent date. Ten years
since, this Union was rocked from centre to circumference, by the
very same outrages, of which we now complain, only now
"aggravated" by the recent election. Nothing but her
devotion to the Union our Fathers made, induced the South, then,
to yield to a compromise, in which Mr. Clay
rightly said, we had yielded everything but our honor. We had
then in Mississippi a warm contest, which finally ended in
reluctant acquiescence in the Compromise measures. The North
pledged anew her faith to yield to us our constitutional rights
in relation to slave property. They are now, and have been ever
since that act, denied to us, until her broken faith and impudent
threats, had become almost insufferable before
the late election.
There were three candidates presented to the
North by
Southern men, all of whom represented the last degree of
conservatism and concession, which their respective parties were
willing to yield, to appease the fanaticism of the North. Some of
them were scarcely deemed sound, in the South, on the slavery
question, and none of them suited our ultra men. And yet the
North rejected them all; and their united voice,
both before and since the overwhelming triumph in this election,
has been more defiant and more intolerant than ever before. They
have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and
negro races, under our Constitution; equality in representation,
equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and
emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in
the rights of matrimony. The cry has been, and now is, "that
slavery must cease, or American liberty must perish," that
"the success of Black Republicanism is the triumph of
anti-slavery," "a revolution in the tendencies of the
government that must be carried out."
To-day our government stands totally
revolutionized in its
main features, and our Constitution broken and overturned. The
new administration, which has effected this revolution, only
awaits the 4th of March for the inauguration of the new
government, the new principles, and the new policy, upon the
success of which they have proclaimed freedom to the slave, but
eternal degradation for you and for us.
No revolution was ever more complete, though
bloodless, if you will tamely submit to the destruction of that
constitution and that Union our fathers made.
Our fathers made this a government for the white
man,
rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race,
incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be
associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or
social equality.
This new administration comes into power, under
the
solemn pledge to overturn and strike down this great feature of
our Union, without which it would never have been formed, and to
substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal
equality of the black and white races.
Our fathers secured to us, by our Constitutional
Union, now being overturned by this Black Republican rule,
protection to life, liberty and property, all
over the Union, and wherever its flag was
unfurled, whether on land or sea.
Under this wretched, lawless spirit and policy,
now
usurping the control of that government, citizens of the South
have been deprived of their property, and for attempting to seek
the redress promised by the compromise laws, have lost their
liberty and their lives.
Equality of rights secured to white men, in equal
sovereign States, is among the most prominent features of the
Constitution under which we have so long lived.
This equality has been denied us in the South for
years in the common territories, while the North has virtually
distributed them as bounties to abolition fanatics and
foreigners, for their brigand service in aiding in our exclusion.
Our Constitution, in unmistakable language,
guarantees
the return of our fugitive slaves. Congress has recognized her
duty in this respect, by enacting proper laws for the enforcement
of this right.
And yet these laws have been continually
nullified,
and the solemn pledge of the Compromise of 1850, by which the
North came under renewed obligations to enforce them, has been
faithlessly disregarded, and the government and its officers set
at defiance.
Who now expects these rebels against the laws
passed
by their own consent and procurement --- rebels against justice
and common honesty --- to become pious patriots by the
acquisition of power? Who now expects Mr. Lincoln to become
conservative, when the only secret of his success, and the only
foundation of his authority, is the will and command of that
robber clan, whose mere instrument he is, who have achieved this
revolution in our government by treading under their unhallowed
feet our Constitution and laws and the Union of our fathers, and
by openly defying high heaven by willful and corrupt perjury?
And, above all, who is it in the South, born or
descended of Revolutionary sires, who so
loves such company, as that he will long
hesitate before he can obtain the consent of a virtuous and
patriotic heart and conscience to separate from them
forever?
Mississippi is firmly convinced that there is but
one
alternative:
This new union with
Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without
slavery, or, slavery under our old
constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln
Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.
If we take the former, then submission to negro
equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession
is inevitable --- each State for itself and
by itself, but with a view to the immediate formation of a
Southern Confederacy, under our present Constitution, by such of
the slave-holding States as shall agree in their conventions to
unite with us.
Mississippi seeks no delay --- the issue is not
new to
her people. They have long and anxiously watched its approach
they think it too late, now, to negotiate more compromises with
bankrupts in political integrity whose recreancy to justice, good
faith and constitutional obligations is the most cherished
feature of their political organization.
She has exhausted her rights in sacrificial
offerings
to save the Union, until nearly all is lost but her honor and the
courage to defend it. She has tried conventions until they have
become the ridicule of both our friends and our enemies --- mere
instruments of fraudulent evasion and delay, to wear out the
spirit of our people and encourage the hopes of our common enemy.
In short, she is sick and tired of the North, and pants for some
respite from eternal disturbance and disquiet.
She comes now to you, --- our glorious old
mother, ---
the land of Baldwin, who first defiantly asserted and preserved
your rights as to slavery, in the federal convention, in
opposition to Messrs. Madison, Mason, and Randolph, and the whole
Union except the two Carolinas, --- the land of Jackson, who
immortalized himself by his bold exposure and successful
overthrow of a legislative fraud and usurpation upon the rights
of the people, --- the land of Troup, the sternest Roman of them
all, who, single-handed and alone, without cooperation, without
consultation, but with truth and justice, and the courage of
freemen at home on his side, defied this National Government in
its usurpations on the rights of Georgia, and executed your laws
in spite of the threats of Federal coercion. It is to you we
come, --- the brightest exemplar among the advocates and
defenders of State rights and State remedies, --- to take counsel
and solicit sympathy in this hour of our common trial.
I ask you, shall Mississippi follow in
the footsteps of Georgia, when led by her
gallant Troup? Or, is
it
reserved for this generation to repudiate and expunge the
brightest page in the history of my native State? Impossible! God
forbid it! Forbid it, ye people of all Northern and Western
Georgia, who, to-day, owe your existence and unparalleled
prosperity to the maintenance of your rights at the risk of civil
war.
I see around me some gallant spirits who bore
their
share in the dangers, and now wear with honor, here to-day in
this Hall the laurels won on the side of their State, under the
banner, inscribed "Troup and the treaty" in that
memorable struggle. Need I appeal to them in behalf of my adopted
State, to know on what side they will range themselves in this
struggle of right, against assumption of brute force, against the
Constitutional rights of a sister of this confederacy of equal
States? I make no such appeal; I know where you stand. To doubt
it would be to offer you the grossest insult.
In this school of old republican orthodoxy, I
drew my
first breath. It was here, I first studied, then embraced, and
next feebly advocated the principle of State Rights and State
remedies of resistance to tyranny --- of the supremacy and
sovereignty of the people of a State, and the subserviency of
governments to their peace and happiness and safety. These
principles will descend with me to the grave, when this frail
tenement of dust must perish; but they will live on with time,
and only perish when tyranny shall be no more.
I need not remind your great State, that
thousands and
thousands of her sons and daughters, who have sought and found
happy homes and prosperous fortunes in the distant forests of her
old colonial domain, though now adopted children of Mississippi,
still cling with the fond embrace of filial love to this old
mother of States and of statesmen, from whom both they and their
adopted State derive their origin. It will be difficult for such
to conceive, that they are not still the objects of your kind
solicitude and maternal sympathy.
Mississippi indulges the most confident
expectation
and belief, founded on sources of information she cannot doubt,
as well as on the existence of causes, operating upon them, alike
as upon her, that every other Gulf State will stand by her side
in defence of the position she is about to assume; and she would
reproach herself, and every Georgia son within her limits, would
swell with indignation, if she hesitated to believe that Georgia
too, would blend her fate with her natural friends; her sons and
daughters --- her neighboring sisters in the impending struggle.
Whatever may be the result of your deliberations,
I
beg to assure her from my intimate knowledge of the spirit and
affections of our people, that no enemy to her constitutional
rights, may consider his victory won, while a Mississippian lives
to prolong the contest. Sink or swim, live or die, survive or
perish, the part of Mississippi is chosen, she will never submit
to the principles and policy of this Black Republican
Administration.
She had rather see the last of her race, men,
women
and children, immolated in one common funeral pile [pyre], than
see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and
social equality with the negro race.
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