the final extinction of
slavery.

This, now, is the ruling idea of your great sectional party. It is
simply the rule of one portion of the country over another. There is
no difference between attacking slavery in the States and keeping it
out of the territories. It is only drawing a parallel around the
citadel at a more remote point.

Now, see how the South is placed. The South has forborne as long as it
can, just as long as party organization existed, and as long as the
South could keep it in existence. It was only when we saw that the
whole united Government was to be turned against us, that we began to
think of taking the subject into our own hands.

What are we to expect now, when the power, direct and indirect, of
this great Government is to be used in the most effective manner
against us? A power which claims that we shall not exercise the rights
of States even, a power which seeks to coerce us, when we propose to
protect ourselves against this lowering and impending danger. You of
the North are descended from men who honored the scaffold for the very
rights we now seek to exercise. So are we. You would deserve to be
spurned by the maids and matrons among you, if you refused to protect
yourselves against the dangers thus drawing around you. Can you expect
less of us?

Do you tell me that this is an artificial crisis? Would seven States
have abandoned all the grand interest they possessed in a glorious and
happy Confederacy like ours, but for more serious and vital interests,
the interests of safety, security, and honor? Think well of these
things, gentlemen!

I have hastily endeavored to show you where I conceive we of the South
stand. The feelings which I express are entertained likewise by the
border States, by all the citizens of the South, by every householder
of my State in a greater or less degree.

The State to which I refer, Virginia, is now met in solemn convocation
to consider whether she shall remain in the Union or go out of it; and
with the most earnest desire to secure to herself a longer connection
with the American Union, a Union of so much honor and pride, and with
an equally earnest desire to bring back the wandering States of the
South which have already left us, she, my own, my native State, comes
here to ask for these guarantees. In my deliberate judgment, the Union
and the Constitution, as they now stand, are unsafe for the people of
the South, unsafe without other guarantees which w