e Niobe of nations, veiled and weeping the
loss of her sons, her property confiscated and her homes in ashes.
Perhaps, you may say, the punishment is not disproportionate to her
trespass, but nevertheless there she is, and I say for her, that
Virginia is loyal to the Union. [Applause.] And never more, mark what I
say, never more will you see from Virginia any intimations of hostility
to the Union; she has weighed the alternative of success, and she sees
now, every sensible man in the South sees, that the greatest calamity
that could have befallen the South would have been the ascendency of
this ill-starred Confederacy. [Applause.] Because that Confederacy
carried to the utmost extreme, to the _reductio ad absurdum_, the right
of secession, carried in its bosom the seed of its own destruction, and
even in the progress of war, welded together as we were under pressure,
some were so recalcitrant, that the president of the Confederacy
recommended the suspension of the _habeas corpus_ act for the
suppression of disaffection, and let me say, rebels as we were, so true
were we to the traditions of Anglo-Saxon liberty that we never would
suspend for a moment that sacred sanction of personal freedom.
[Applause.] And, moreover, we see now, you will be surprised at what I
say, I voice the sentiment of every reflecting man in Virginia, and
woman too. We see now that slavery was a material and a moral evil, and
we exult that the black man is emancipated and stands as our equal under
the law.

Why didn't we see it before? You know the story of the view of the
opposite sides of the shield. We had been educated under slavery, our
preachers had taught us that it had the sanction of the Divine
Scripture, we never saw any other aspect of the question, but now since
it is changed, we look at it and we perceive that slavery is not only
incompatible with the moral principles of government, but is hostile to
the material interests of the country, and I repeat that to-day, if the
people of the South were permitted to vote upon the question to
re-establish African slavery, there would not be a hundred votes in the
entire South, in favor of reshackling the limbs of the liberated negro.

Gentlemen, that is the attitude of old Virginia, the Old Dominion, as we
proudly call her, and as such I am sure you will pardon her, because
when she was in the Union she never failed you in any emergency; when
you were menaced by the invasion of the British, i