Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 8.
Frank Moore, Ed.

[345] will come to our rescue to save and preserve us from the enemy? Banish it from your minds; it is a wild and visionary dream; it is a false delusion. The sympathy of the world is against you. If you are cowards, you will falter and faint when the fact is announced to you; if you are brave men, it will arouse in your hearts the spirit of true manhood, which you have inherited from your revolutionary fathers and mothers, and make you truer than ever to your country and her cause.

Do you look forward with some hope to what has been termed the conservative element of the North, and expect to be preserved and protected by it from Lincoln's power and dominion? Banish the fatal delusion. Conservatism at the North lies prostrate in the dust. In their mad efforts to take away our liberties, they have lost their own. They are as powerless to aid you as they are to protect themselves. You must either submit to Lincoln and abolitionism, or, by your own unaided arm, with the blessing of a kind Providence, win your liberty and your independence. Think not that there is a power at the North to restore to you the Constitution and the Union as they were, even if you were prepared to accept it. You must either be freemen or you must submit to Lincoln, and he has given you his terms.

I put the picture before you. Do you stagger before it, or does it arouse within you anew the spirit of resistance, the spirit of freemen, worthy of the ancestry from which we sprung? Look at these things; consider well of them, and let us, with hearts purged and purified with afflictions, appeal to Him who alone can give victory and success to our arms.