The States which especially threaten secession are on the Mexican Gulf, and they have become known already as “The Gulf Squadron.” Not yet wolves, they are now ships. Let them sail, with the black flag at the mast-head. I know not how the tale would end, but I know well that Slavery could not gain. Their dismal fate is, perhaps, prefigured in that of the slaver loaded down with its human cargo, where the crew were all struck with ophthalmia, and in this condition of blindness, while vainly striving to navigate the vessel, and weltering on the sea, were at last picked up by a charitable cruiser and carried into port. Or perhaps it is prefigured in that of the famous craft known in story as “The Flying Dutchman,” which, darkened by piracy and murder, was doomed to perpetual cruise, unable to enter a port:--
“Faint and despairing on their watery bier, To every friendly shore the sailors steer; Repelled, from port to port they sue in vain, And track with slow, unsteady sail the main.… Unblest of God and man! Till time shall end, Its view strange horror to the storm shall lend.”[22]
Such is Disunion, in the history of its threats,--also in the reasons now alleged for it, the difficulties in its way, and its dismal consequences. But in all these aspects, from the beginning, we find but one supreme absurdity. It is the same, whether we ask Why? How? or What?
And yet you and I here in Massachusetts are summoned, under threats of disunion, to withdraw opposition to the extension of Slavery, and in token thereof to vote for Bell, or Breckinridge, or Douglas. I can do no such thing; nor do I see how any Northern man, with a head on his shoulders, or a heart in his bosom, or a backbone in his body, can do any such thing. Nor must fealty to the Union be measured by loud-mouthed profession. Not Cordelia, loving her father, in all simplicity, “according to her bond,” but the sisters Goneril and Regan, so fervent in professions, sacrificed him. And I do not hesitate to declare that the Republican party is the only true Union party. In the first place, it is the only party which is not connected in some way, by association, affiliation, communion, or sympathy, with disunionists; and, in the second place, it is the only party which seeks the establishment of those national principles of Freedom on which the Union was originally founded, and without which it cannot exist in security or honor.