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

[85] the erection of (what he was pleased to call the armed power of the United States) “a military despotism.” “The edifice is not yet completed,” he said. “South Carolina, thank God! has laid her hands upon one of the pillars, and she will shake it until it totters first, and then topples. She will destroy that edifice, though she perish amid the ruins.”

Such were some of the ravings of conspirators in the Senate of the Republic, who possessed only the “guinea stamp” of statesmen. They were counterfeit coin, made of the basest metal, and lacking every ingredient of true statesmanship. They had been palmed off upon the confiding inhabitants of the Southern States by the arrogant Slave interest, as men fitted for the high and holy work of legislating for a free people. They were mere demagogues — instruments chosen for their known usefulness as such, to an interest which had resolved to rule the Republic with relentless rigor, and crush out from its political and social systems every element of Democracy, or to lay that Republic in ruins.

It will forever appear incredible — an inconsistent tale of romance — that these men should have thus played the traitor, undisturbed by competent authority, upon the very proscenium of the great theater of National legislation, with the Chief Magistrate of the Republic and his constitutional advisers sitting quietly as a part of the audience, while holding in their hands the lightning of the sovereign power of the people, which might, at their bidding, have consumed in a moment those enemies of the Constitution and violators of the law. Why were they permitted thus to play the traitor, undisturbed? Perhaps only at the Great Assize will the question be answered.

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