s. We have succeeded in a constitutional way in
electing a President of the United States. All we ask is that he
may be inaugurated in peace, and may develop his policy in the
usual manner. We can add that this is the demand of all our people,
not only of those who voted for Mr. Lincoln, but of every loyal
citizen. You tell us your people are excited and alarmed, that
they apprehend that an overwhelming anti-slavery element is about
to be inaugurated in power that will, directly or indirectly, affect
the constitutional rights of your states.

"Perhaps you will confess, what you know to be true, that for
political purposes, in the struggle of partisans for ascendancy,
both parties in the south have united to fire the southern mind
against the hated 'black Republicans' of the north. Speeches have
been distorted, single sentences have been torn from their context
and made to deceive and mislead. Garrison, Wendell Phillips,
Seward, Lincoln and latterly Douglas, have been mixed in a hated
conglomerate, and used to excite your people. A philosophic opinion
of Mr. Seward has been construed as the statement of a settled
purpose to overthrow slavery in the states, although in the very
paragraph itself all idea of interference by the people of the free
states with slavery in the slave states is expressly excluded. It
is but a year since you inflamed your constituents because some of
your fellow-Members recommended, without reading, a book written
by one of your own citizens, containing obnoxious opinions about
slavery. Nearly all of you gave birth, vitality, and victory to
the Republican party, by adopting a policy you now join in condemning.
Some of you broke down the only political organization that could
compete with us, and thus gave us an easy victory. You have all
contributed, more or less, in perverting the public mind as to our
principles and purposes. And I tell you, gentlemen, that when you
call the Republican party an abolition party, in the sense you use
the word abolition; when you quote from Garrison, Wendell Phillips,
and from like extreme men, and circulate their opinions all over
the south, telling the people of your states that the people of
the north have been educated in these sentiments, profess them,
and are going to put down slavery in the states, you do a great
injustice to the intelligence and the safety of your people.

"I have heard here, over and over again, this course of agitation,
purs