nothing, sir. But I infinitely prefer
to see a peaceful separation of these States, than to see endless,
aimless, devastating war, at the end of which I see the grave of public
liberty and of personal freedom.'

CLEMENT L. VALLANDIGHAM,

OF OHIO. (BORN 1820, DIED 1871.)

ON THE WAR AND ITS CONDUCT;

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JANUARY 14, 1863.

SIR, I am one of that number who have opposed abolitionism, or the
political development of the antislavery sentiment of the North and
West, from the beginning. In school, at college, at the bar, in public
assemblies, in the Legislature, in Congress, boy and man, in time of
peace and in time of war, at all times and at every sacrifice, I have
fought against it. It cost me ten years' exclusion from office and honor
at that period of life when honors are sweetest. No matter; I learned
early to do right and to wait. Sir, it is but the development of the
spirit of intermeddling, whose children are strife and murder. Cain
troubled himself about the sacrifices of Abel, and slew his brother.
Most of the wars, contentions, litigation, and bloodshed, from the
beginning of time, have been its fruits. The spirit of non-intervention
is the very spirit of peace and concord. * * *

The spirit of intervention assumed the form of abolitionism because
slavery was odious in name and by association to the Northern mind,
and because it was that which most obviously marks the different
civilizations of the two sections. The South herself, in her early and
later efforts to rid herself of it, had exposed the weak and offensive
parts of slavery to the world. Abolition intermeddling taught her
at last to search for and defend the assumed social, economic, and
political merit and values of the institution. But there never was an
hour from the beginning when it did not seem to me as clear as the sun
at broad noon that the agitation in any form in the North and West of
the slavery question must sooner or later end in disunion and civil war.
This was the opinion and prediction for years of Whig and Democratic
statesmen alike; and, after the unfortunate dissolution of the Whig
party in 1854, and the organization of the present Republican party upon
the exclusive antislavery and sectional basis, the event was inevitable,
because, in the then existing temper of the public mind, and after
the education through the press and the pulpit, the lecture and the
political canvass, for twenty years, of a g