ood of Americans, with the banner of the Union
floating over them. I know the valor of Carolina, that, man to man, she
is invincible; but, unaided and alone, she would have fallen in the
Revolution. She would have fallen gloriously, her soil would have drunk
the blood of her children; but still she must have fallen in the unequal
contest. When Carolina was made the battlefield of the Revolution, from
the very rock of Plymouth and the heights of Bunker Hill, from
Pennsylvania, from Virginia, American citizens flew to her rescue. Side
by side with Carolina's sons they marched beneath the banner of the
Union; they fought, they conquered; Carolina was redeemed from bondage,
but upon her many and well-fought fields was mingled the blood and
repose the ashes of our common ancestors, the pledges of our Union in
victory and in death.

Shades of these departed patriots! arise, and say to the sons of
Carolina, it was the Union that made you free. Without it, you would yet
be subjects, colonial vassals, and slaves; without it, the chains are
now forging that will bind you to the thrones of despots. And could we
stand with folded arms, and behold the Union dissolved? Could we see the
seventeen thousand freemen of Carolina, who cling with the grasp of
death to the banner of the Union, deprived of their privileges as
American citizens, proscribed, disfranchised, expelled from all offices,
civil and military, driven by glittering bayonets from the bench and the
jury box, tried and convicted by judges and jurors sworn to condemn,
attainted as traitors, torn from the last embraces of wives and
children, consigned to the scaffold or the block, or immured within the
walls of a dungeon, where the light of heaven or liberty should never
visit them, with no consolation but their patriotism, and no companions
but their chains? And, gracious Heaven, for what? Oh! Liberty, when was
thy sacred temple profaned by deeds like this? Thy martyrs suffered only
for clinging to the banner of the American Union. And could we see them
torn from around that sacred banner, and move not to their rescue? No;
the glow that beams on every countenance, the patriot's answer that
speaks from every throbbing breast, proclaims that, as in '76 our
fathers marched to free their sires from tyrants' power, so would their
children go, to save from death or bondage Carolina's friends of
union--with them, beneath the standard of our common country, to die or
conquer.

Ci