Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 2.
Frank Moore, Ed.

[281] Lincoln overruns us — if we are subjugated, these bonds will not be worth a single dime, and nothing else you have will be worth any thing. If we are overrun, they will be worth just as much as any thing else you have, and nothing else you have got will be worth any thing. (Laughter.) So that is the whole of it.

Let us, then, come up and contribute what we can. I say to the planters that I do not wish to urge anybody, but let everybody discharge his duty to the country as he feels it. But upon this subject of the war I will detain you a few minutes, because it is a common inquiry with me, how long I think the war will last — whether or not it will be a short one? Well, my countrymen, I will tell you this, that it is known only to the Ruler of events. It is curtained from mortal knowledge and mortal vision. I know not; I would not know if I could. It is the mysterious future; but there is one thing I can tell you with confidence, and that is, it is going to last until the enemy is whipped and driven from our soil. (Tremendous applause.) And it will require men and money to do it, and the best way to make it a short war is to send men into the field, and to raise means enough to support them in the field to drive the enemy out. That is the best way. That is the way to make it a short war, and in this the cotton planters can contribute; and when I tell it is an uncertain war, I cannot account for its duration upon any rational principle. It is a fanatical war, and whenever fanaticism gets control of reason, you can make no speculation in regard to it.

This is a war against reason in every sense of the term. In the first place, many of those engaged in it are engaged in a crusade nominally to ameliorate the condition of a portion of our population. They are engaged in a crusade to make things better than the Creator made them, or to make things equal, which he made unequal. It is impious in that a great deal of the fanaticism of the war springs, I doubt not, from that source. Such an effort never could succeed were they to overrun us and drive us away. These very people would do as some are now reported to be doing in Virginia, (of which I neither affirm nor deny the truth,) capture the black population and send them off to Cuba for sale. But there is one thing certain that they can no more carry out their fanatical designs than they can make the Savannah run to the mountains; for the great Creator, the Ruler of the heavens and the earth, He that made man and fashioned him, made one inferior to the other, and made some to differ from others, as one star differs from others.

This fanatical sentiment of the North will no more make the negro equal to the white man than it will make the leopard change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin. It is a war against the interest of those who wage it, and of all the people who will suffer by it, the New England States will suffer the most. Their trade cut off, their supplies cut off, their source of wealth cut off, where are they to trade hereafter? We furnish them a market; no other people of the world do. They cannot sell their goods to Great Britain, for they are supplied by British manufactories. Nor can they furnish Germany or France. Out of the two hundred and fifty millions of goods they sold, they did not send ten millions to the old world. It all came to the South. We are their market.

We wished to continue to trade with them, but they would not perform their part of the compact, and carried out the old adage of the “man who cut off his nose to spoil his face,” (laughter;) and I cannot account for it except on the old Roman maxim that he “whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad.” This is a war against the principles which their fathers and our fathers fought for — that every State Government derived its powers from the consent of the governed. These were the principles of Hancock, Jackson, Madison, Randolph, Pinckney, and others. They were the principles their fathers and our fathers united in fighting for; and now they have made them a mockery of all history, and the shame of their ancestors.

These people are now warring against that principle, and attempting to govern us just as King George did; it is, therefore, an unnatural and irrational, and a suicidal war, and you cannot count upon its duration. When a people become mad, there is no telling what they will do. It is so in the history of other empires; it was so in France. They say we are revolutionists; they call us rebels. I think it will be a revolution before it is over; but if a change of government makes revolution, the revolution is at the North.

At the South our movements from the beginning have been planted upon the principles, as I have told you, of our revolutionary fathers, and the Confederate States to-day rescued the Constitution with some improvements, some changes, all of which we think improvements. They stand to-day the defenders, supporters, and maintainers of that Constitution which was the admiration and devotion of us all. But a change of government has taken place at the North. The Constitution of our fathers has already been trampled in the dust. From the time Mr. Lincoln went into his office until to-day, it has been but one step after another, one stride after another, upon the Constitution of the country. The first thing he did was to call out seventy-five thousand militia. He had no power to do it. The Constitution that Madison and Washington, and the patriots of the South, as well as the North, gave their consent to — that Constitution that was our admiration — that Constitution the Southern States have rescued, declares that Congress alone shall raise armies.

His next act was to increase the army to 25,000 men. This he did by an edict. The Constitution says Congress shall increase the