Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

When the South cannonaded Fort Sumter, the bones of Adams stirred in his coffin. (Cheers.) And you might have heard him, from that granite grave, at Quincy, proclaim to the nation, “The hour has struck! Seize the thunderbolt God has forged for you, and annihilate the system which has troubled peace for seventy years” (Cheers.) Do not say that it is a cold-blooded suggestion. I hardly ever knew Slavery to go down in any other circumstances. Only once, in the broad sweep of the world's history, was any nation lifted so high that she could stretch her imperial hand across the Atlantic, and lift, by one peaceful word, a million of slaves into Liberty. God granted that glory only to our mother-land.

How did French Slavery go down? How did the French slave trade go down? When Napoleon came back from Elba, when his fate hung trembling in the balance, and he wished to gather around him the sympathies of the liberals of Europe, he no sooner set foot in the Tuileries than he signed the edict abolishing the slave trade against which the Abolitionists of England and France had protested for many years in vain. And the trade went down, because Napoleon felt that he must do something to gild the darkening hour of his second attempt to clutch the sceptre of France. How did the slave system go down? When, in 1848, the Provisional Government found itself in the Hotel de Ville, obliged to do something to draw to itself the sympathy and liberal feeling of the French nation, they signed an edict — it was the first from the rising republic — abolishing the death penalty and Slavery. The storm which rocked the vessel of State almost to foundering, snapped forever the chain of the French slave. Look, too, at the history of Mexican and South American emancipation; you will find that it was, in every instance, I think, the child of convulsion.

That hour has come to us. So stand we to-day. The Abolitionist who will not now cry, when the moment serves, “Up boys, and at them,” is false to liberty. (Great cheering.) (A voice--“So is every other man.” ) Say not it. is a hard lesson. Let him who fully knows his own heart and strength, and feels, as he looks; down into his child's cradle, that he could stand and see that little nestling borne to Slavery and submit — let him cast the first stone, But all you, whose blood is wont to stir over Naseby and Bunker Hill, will hold your peace, unless you are ready to cry with me--Sic Semper Tyrannis! So may it ever be with tyrants. (Loud applause.)

Why. Americana I believe in the might of nineteen millions of people. Yes, I know that what sowing-machines, and reaping-machines, and ideas, and types, and school-houses cannot do, the muskets of Illinois and Massachusetts can finish up. (Cheers.) Blame me not that I make every thing turn on Liberty and the slave. I. believe in Massachusetts. I know that free speech, free toil, school-houses and ballot-boxes are a pyramid on its broadest base. Nothing that does not sunder the solid globe can disturb it. We defy the world to disturb us. (Cheers.) The little errors that dwell upon our surface, we have medicine in our institutions to cure them all. (Applause.)

Therefore there is nothing left for a New-England man, nothing but that he shall wipe away the stain that hangs about the toleration of human bondage. As Webster said at Rochester, years and years ago, “If I thought that there was a stain upon the remotest hem of the garment of my country, I would devote my utmost labor to wipe it off.” (Cheers.) To-day that call is made upon Massachusetts. That is the reason why I dwell so much on the slavery question. I said I believed in the power of the North to conquer; but where does she get it? I do not believe in the power of the North to subdue two million and a half of Southern men, unless she summons justice, God, and the negro to her side; (cheers,) and in that battle we are sure of this — we are sure to rebuild the Union down to the Gulf. (Renewed cheering.) In that battle, with that watchword, with those allies, the thirteen States and their children will survive — in the light of the world, a nation which has vindicated the sincerity of the Fathers of ‘87, that they bore children, and not peddlers, to represent them in the nineteenth century. (Repeated cheers.) But without that — without that, I know also, we shall conquer. Sumter annihilated compromise. Nothing but victory will blot from history that sight of the Stars and Stripes giving place to the Palmetto. But without justice for inspiration, without God for our ally, we shall break the Union asunder; we shall be a Confederacy, and so will they. This war means one of two things — emancipation or disunion. (Cheers.) Out of the smoke of the conflict there comes that — nothing else. It is impossible there should come any thing else. Now, I believe in the future and permanent union of the races that cover this Continent from the Pole down to the Gulf. One in race, one in history, one in religion, one in industry, one in thought, we never can be permanently separated. Your path, if you forget the black race, will be over the gulf of disunion,--years of unsettled, turbulent, Mexican and South American civilization back through that desert of forty years to the Union which is sure to come.

But I believe in a deeper conscience, I believe in a North more educated than that. I divide you into four sections. The first is the ordinary mass, rushing from mere enthusiasm to

A battle whose great aim and scope
     They little care to know,
Content like men at arms to cope,
     Each with his fronting foe.

Behind that class stands another, whose only idea in this controversy is sovereignty and the flag. The seaboard, the wealth, the just-converted hunkerism of the country, fill that class.