January 2, 1861. |
 |
| Austin Blair. |
January 3. |
February 2. |
 |
| Richard Yates. |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[212]
during the first year and a half of the war, and the people were grandly faithful to the end, as our record will show.
North of Ohio and Indiana, on a vast peninsula, whose shores are washed by magnificent inland seas, lies Michigan, with a population of almost eight hundred thousand.
Its Legislature met at the beginning of January,
when the retiring Governor, Moses Wisner, in a message to that body, denounced the President of the United States as a partisan, and the Democratic party as the cause of the discontent, alarm, and hatred in the South, because of its misrepresentations of the principles and intentions of the Republican party.
He declared the Personal Liberty Act of that State, and other measures inimical to the Fugitive Slave Law, to be right, and the exponents of the sentiments of the people.
“Let them stand,” he said; “this is no time for timid and vacillating counsels, while the cry of treason is ringing in our ears.”
The new Governor, Austin Blair, who was
inaugurated the next day,
took substantially the same ground; argued that secession was disintegration, and that the Republic was a compact Nation, and not a League of States.
He recommended the Legislature to make the loyalty and patriotism of the people of Michigan apparent to the country; whereupon, that body passed some resolutions,
pledging to the National Government all the military power and material resources of the State.
They expressed an unwillingness to offer compromises and concessions to traitors, and refused to send delegates to the Peace Congress, or to repeal the Personal Liberty Act. The best blood Michigan flowed freely in the war, and the people nobly sustained the Government in the struggle for the life of the Republic.
Illinois, the home of the President elect, and more populous than its neighbor, Indiana, the number of its inhabitants being over one million seven hundred thousand, had a loyal Governor at the beginning of
1861, in the person of Richard Yates.
The Legislature of the State assembled at Spring-field, on the 7th of January.
The Governor's message was temperate and patriotic; and he summed up what he believed to be the sentiment of the people of his State, in the words of General Jackson's toast,1 thirty years
1 John C. Calhoun, and other conspirators against the Republic, inaugurated the first act in the great drama of treason, in the spring of 1880, in the form of the assertion that a “Sovereign State may nullify or disobey an Act of the National Congress.” As Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which seemed to favor the doctrine of nullification, they resolved to plant their standard of incipient revolt under the auspices of his great name. A dinner was prepared at Washington City, on the birthday of Jefferson, professedly to honor his memory. It was the work of Calhoun and others. President Jackson and his Cabinet were invited to attend. There was a numerous company. The doctrine of Nullification had lately been put forth as an orthodox dogma of the Democratic creed, and the movements of Calhoun and his political friends were looked upon with suspicion. At this dinner. it was soon apparent that the object was, not to honor Jefferson's memory, but to commence treasonable work with the sanction of his name and deeds. Jackson perceived this plainly, and offered as a toast, “Our Federal Union: it must be preserved.” Calhoun immediately arose and offered the following:--“The Union: next to Liberty, the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States, and distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union.” “The proceedings of that day,” said Mr. Benton, who was present, “revealed to the public mind the fact of an actual design tending to dissolve the Union.” See Benton's Thirty Years View, i. 148.
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.