Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[232] conspirators, Slidell pointed to the inevitable hostility, as he conceived, of the European naval powers, when commerce and the supply of cotton should be interfered with by “mere paper blockades,” and asked: “What will you be when, not only emasculated by the withdrawal of fifteen States, but warred upon by them with active and inveterate hostility?” This significant question was answered four years afterward, when the naval powers of Europe had been so offended without committing acts of resentment, and the threatened civil war had raged inveterately, by the fact that the Republic was stronger, wealthier, and more thoroughly respected by foreign powers than ever. The crowning infamy of this farewell speech of Slidell was the utterance of the libel upon the people of Louisiana, in his declaration that the secession movement was theirs, and not of political leaders!

Benjamin followed Slidell in a temperate and argumentative speech on the right of secession. He bade the Senators from the Slave-labor States farewell, with the expectation of a speedy reunion; and he eulogized those Representatives from the Free-labor States who sympathized with himself and fellow-traitors in their rebellious movements, predicting that they would be honored above all others. “When in after days the story of the present shall be written,” he said, “and when your children shall hear repeated the familiar tale, it will be with glowing cheek and kindling eye; their very souls will stand a-tiptoe as their sires are named, and they will glory in their lineage from men of spirit as generous, and of patriotism as high-hearted, as

Judah P. Benjamin.

ever illustrated or adorned the American Senate.”

This peroration was quite different in language and in its reception from that of his speech delivered on the same spot a month before,

December 31, 1860.

when, with insinuations which only his own malignant nature could conceive, concerning the intentions of the supporters of the Government, and with the usual bravado of his class, he said :--“The fortunes of war may be adverse to our arms; you may carry desolation into our peaceful land; and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flames;¹ you may even emulate the atrocities of those who, in the war of the Revolution, hounded on the bloodthirsty savage to attacks upon the defenseless frontier; you may, under the protection of your advancing armies, give shelter to the furious fanatics who desire, and profess to desire, nothing more than to add all the horrors of a servile insurrection to the calamities of civil war; you may do all this — and more too, if more there be — but you never can subjugate us; you never can convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, ”