Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[535] word: This country will never know peace nor union until the South (using the words in the sense I have described) is annihilated, and the North is spread over it. I do not care where men go for the power. They may find it in the parchment,--I do. I think, with Patrick Henry, with John Quincy Adams, with General Cass, we have ample constitutional powers; but if we had not, it would not trouble me in the least. [Laughter and applause.] I do not think a nation's life is bound up in a parchment. I think this is the momentous struggle of a great nation for existence and perpetuity. Two elements are at war to-day. In nineteen loyal and fourteen rebellious States those two elements of civilization which I have described are fighting. And it is no new thing that they are fighting. They could not exist side by side without fighting, and they never have. In 1787, when the Constitution was formed, James Madison and Rufus King, followed by the ablest men in the Convention, announced that the dissension between the States was not between great States and little, but between Free States and Slave. Even then the conflict had begun. In 1833, Mr. Adams said, on the floor of Congress: “Whether Slave and Free States can cohere into one Union is a matter of theoretical speculation. We are trying the experiment.” In June, 1858, Mr. Lincoln used the language: “This country is half slave and half free. It must become either wholly slave or wholly free.” In October of the same year, Mr. Seward, in his great “irrepressible conflict” speech at Rochester, said: “The most pregnant remark of Napoleon is, that Europe is half Cossack and half republican. The systems are not only inconsistent, they are incompatible ; they never did exist under one government They never can.” “Our fathers,” he goes on to say, “recognized this truth. They saw the conflict developing when they made the Constitution. And while tenderconscienced ”