January 14, 1863---"I was born in Ohio . . ."

JANUARY 14, 1863:             

Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, leader of the “Copperhead” faction in Congress delivers a very lengthy speech which makes him notorious. It reads in part:

I propose to consider the State of the Union to-day…

It is now two years, sir, since…the Presidential election…For the first time a President had been chosen upon a platform of avowed hostility to an institution peculiar to nearly one-half of the States of the Union…Repeated efforts for conciliation and compromise were attempted…All were rejected by the party just coming into power…South Carolina seceded; Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas speedily followed…The other slave States held back. Virginia demanded a peace congress…The President elect…jesting as he came…entered this city under cover of night and in disguise…On the 4th of March he was inaugurated...the policy of peace was proclaimed…Why that policy was suddenly abandoned, time will fully disclose…the…President, in fatal haste…issued his proclamation…calling out seventy-five thousand militia for three months, to repossess the forts, places, and property seized from the United States, and commanding the insurgents to disperse in twenty days. Again the gauge was taken up by the South, and thus the flames of a civil war, the grandest, bloodiest, and saddest in history, lighted up the whole heavens. Virginia forthwith seceded. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, followed; Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were in a blaze of agitation, and within a week from the proclamation, the line of the Confederate States was transferred from the cotton States to the Potomac, and almost to the Ohio and the Missouri, and their population and fighting men doubled…In the North and West, too, the storm raged with the fury of a hurricane…Thousands bent before the tempest; and here and there only was one found bold enough, foolhardy enough it may have been, to bend not, and him it smote as a consuming fire. The spirit of persecution for opinion’s sake, almost extinct in the old world, now, by some mysterious transmigration, appeared incarnate in the new. Social relations were dissolved; friendships broken up ; the ties of family and kindred snapped asunder…But the reign of the mob was inaugurated only to be supplanted by the iron domination of arbitrary power. Constitutional limitation was broken down ; habeas corpus fell; liberty of the press, of speech, of the person, of the mails, of travel, of one’s own house, and of religion; the right to bear arms, due process of law, judicial trial, trial by jury, trial at all…all went down at a blow…Whatever pleases the President, that is law!...An army of public plunderers followed…Five hundred thousand men, an immense navy, and two hundred and fifty millions of money were speedily granted…Thus was CIVIL war inaugurated in America. Can any man to-day see the end of it?

Sir, I am one of that number who have opposed abolitionism, or the political development of the anti-slavery sentiment of the North and West, from the beginning. In school, at college, at the bar, in public assemblies, in the Legislature, in Congress, boy and man, as a private citizen and in public life, in time of peace and in time of war, at all times and at every sacrifice, I have fought against it…I do not believe that if slavery had never existed here we would have had no sectional controversies. This very civil war might have happened fifty, perhaps a hundred years later. Other and stronger causes of discontent and of disunion, it may be, have existed between other States and sections, and are now being developed every day into maturity…I believed from the first that it was the purpose of some of the apostles of [abolition] to force a collision between the North and the South…disunion at last. The wolf had come…No man then pretended that a Union founded in consent could be cemented by force…And not that only, but I was satisfied — and you of the Abolition party have now proved it to the world — that the secret but real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery in the States…Believing this, I could not, as an honest man, a Union man, and a patriot, lend an active support to the war; and I did not… not the smell of so much as one drop of its blood is upon my garments…Our Southern brethren were to be whipped back into love and fellowship at the point of the bayonet…I can comprehend a war to compel a people to accept a master; to change a form of government; to give up territory; to abolish a domestic institution — in short, a war of conquest and subjugation; but a war for union!...I have denounced, from the beginning, the usurpations and the infractions, one and all, of law and Constitution…and the people, thank God ! have at last heard and heeded, and rebuked them, too…Sir, twenty months have elapsed, but the rebellion is not crushed out…and to-day the Confederate flag is still near the Potomac and the Ohio, and the Confederate Government stronger, many times, than at the beginning. Not a State has been restored, not any part of any State has voluntarily returned to the Union…The fabled hosts of Xerxes have been outnumbered. And yet victory, strangely, follows the standard of the foe. From Great Bethel to Vicksburg, the battle has not been to the strong…I learned it from Chatham: “My lords, you cannot conquer America.” And you have not conquered the South. You never will. It is not in the nature of things possible…The war for the Union is, in your hands, a most bloody and costly failure. The President confessed it on the 22d of September, solemnly, officially, and under the broad seal of the United States. And he has now repeated the confession. The priests and rabbis of abolition taught him that God would not prosper such a cause. War for the Union was abandoned; war for the negro openly begun, and with stronger battalions than before. With what success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer.

…Ought this war to continue ? I answer, no — not a day, not an hour. What then? Shall we separate? Again I answer, no, no, no ! What then?...Sir, the frequent civil wars and conflicts between the States of Greece did not prevent their cordial union to resist the Persian invasion; nor did even the thirty years Peloponnesian war…wholly destroy the fellowship of those States…Compromise did at last what ages of coercion and attempted conquest had failed to effect…Sir, many States and people, once separate, have become united in the course of ages…War, indeed, while it lasts, is disunion…Hence, I would hasten peace now, to-day…

And now, sir, is there any difference of race here so radical as to forbid reunion? I do not refer to the negro race, styled now, in unctuous official phrase, by the President, ”Americans of African descent”…First, the common descent — and, therefore, consanguinity — of the great mass of the people from the Anglo-Saxon stock…the statesmen of 1863 ought to know that two or more confederate governments, made up of similar States, having no natural boundary either, and separated only by different governments, cannot endure long together in peace, unless one or more of them be either too pusillanimous for rivalry, or too insignificant to provoke it, or too weak to resist aggression…These, sir, along with the establishment of justice, and the securing of the general welfare, and of the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, made up the causes and motives which impelled our fathers to the Union at first.

 “What then, I ask, is the immediate, direct cause of disunion and this civil war ? Slavery, it is answered…Certainly slavery was in one sense — very obscure, indeed — -the cause of the war. Had there been no slavery here, this particular war about slavery would never have been waged… But far better say that the negro is the cause of the war; for had there been no negro here, there would be no war just now. What then?...Sir, let us have an end of this folly…Abolition [is] the cause of this civil war…Neither will I be stopped by that other cry of mingled fanaticism and hypocrisy, about the sin and barbarism of African slavery. Sir, I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war…in considering terms of settlement, we will look only to the welfare, peace, and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have upon the condition of the African…believe, also, in the subordination of the negro race to the white, where they both exist together, and that the condition of subordination, as established in the South, is far better every way, for the negro, than the hard servitude of poverty, degradation, and crime, to which he is subjected in the free States…You cannot abolish slavery by the sword; still less by proclamations…Neither, sir, can you abolish slavery by argument…The South is resolved to maintain it at every hazard, and by every sacrifice; and if  “this Union cannot endure, part slave and part free,” then it is already and finally dissolved…But I deny the doctrine. It is full of disunion and civil war…African slavery has been, and is eminently conservative. It makes the absolute political equality of the white race everywhere practicable. It dispenses with the English order of nobility, and leaves every white man, North and South, owning slaves or owning none, the equal of every other white man… Prejudice is colder, and, therefore, more durable than the passions… Sir, after all, this whole war is…one of races, representing not difference in blood, but mind and its development…I…was born in Ohio, and am wholly of Southern ancestry…Sir, I would not deny nor disparage the austere virtues of the old Puritans of England or America. But I do believe that…there can be no possible or durable reunion of these States until Abolitionism, has been utterly extinguished. Sir…I would have the Union as it was…If, to-day, we secure peace, and begin the work of reunion, we shall yet escape ; if not, I see nothing before us but universal political and social revolution, anarchy, and bloodshed, compared with which, the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful visitation.