torily adjusted, a permanent
dissolution of the Union is inevitable; and the General Assembly,
representing the wishes of the people of the Commonwealth, is desirous
of employing every reasonable means to avert so dire a calamity, and
determined to make a final effort to restore the Union and the
Constitution, in the spirit in which they were established by the
fathers of the Republic."

Therefore she invites all States, whether slaveholding or
non-slaveholding, who were willing to unite with her in an earnest
effort to adjust the unhappy controversies in the spirit of the
Constitution, to come together to secure that adjustment. She asks us
to agree to some suitable adjustment. She does not leave us to suggest
what that adjustment shall be. She tells us herself. She requests us
to adopt it, and to submit it to Congress. She does not ask that
Congress should call a convention, for Congress could not. Try, if we
can, says Virginia, to come to some settlement of these unhappy
controversies, and send that settlement to Congress, that Congress may
submit it to the country.

Virginia invited you here. She told you just what she wanted. She says
if you cannot consent to that, then let her commissioners come home
and report the result. If this cannot be done, if the mode of
adjustment indicated by her cannot be substantially carried out, then
our whole authority is at an end.

This matter of amending the Constitution is not as intricate and
difficult a work as gentlemen imagine. Are there not twelve amendments
to the Constitution already? Were they submitted to the people by each
member of Congress acting under his official oath? Or were they
submitted in the very way the gentleman would avoid? Were they not
brought into the Constitution by outside pressure?

The Constitution has been amended. I wish to mark how it was done, and
then note why it was done.

There was a time when fears were entertained that wrongs might be done
to different sections of the Union under the Constitution as it then
stood. Congress listened to those fears, and did not hesitate to
propose amendments suggested from outside its own body--to submit them
to the people for adoption. It was necessary, in the judgment of
Congress, to do this, in order to restore confidence. It was done, and
confidence was restored. Is not that precisely our case now? Is not
confidence lost in the North and in the South?--not exactly lost,
perhaps, but shaken. The cre