The Daily Dispatch: July 5, 1861., [Electronic resource]

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Abolitionism Jubilant burning of the Constitution.
[from the New York Daily News, June 24.]

Year by year, the people of the United States have witnessed the ceremony, on each recurring Fourth of July, of the ‘"burning of the Constitution,"’ by Abolition fanatics. --They have met together, and, after listening to the diabolical harangues of a Senator Wilson, a Wendell Phillips, or a Garrison, have renewed the proclamation that the Constitution was ‘"a league with hell and a covenant with death;"’ that the God of the Old Testament possessed no attributes of the Deity, because that sacred book sanctions slavery, and, amid blasphemous orgies worthy of the Mahichean Conventicles of the middle ages, have consigned to the flames the wise at instrument of legislation that ever was framed in the history of mankind.--In these disordered times, men have been threatened with hanging, shooting, and other consign punishments, for calmly asserting that brothers should not shed each other's blood; for asserting the opinion that civil war was an evil, and protesting against the utter overthrow of civil liberty, and the substitution in its place of anarchy and a military despotism. Yet, during a period of thirty years, traitors, notoriously instigated by British statesmen, and paid by subscriptions collected at Exeter Hall have warred against the integrity of the Union, with scarcely a rebuking word, until they have acquired strength to occupy every important position of power in the land. They have warred their way into authority, with no symbol on their flag but the Constitution in flounces, and their first act, upon obtaining the control of the Government, has been to rend it into fragments and trample upon every one of its provisions.

No wonder that the leaders of the Abolition Society have announced that the ceremony of ‘"burning the Constitution"’ will ‘"this year be dispensed with!" ’ They have made it as obsoleted as the laws of Lycurgus. The Executive chair, once occupied by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and Monroe, is desecrated, and a tyranny established tenfold worth then that which compelled our ancestors to throw off the yoke of George III, and the acts of whose advisers throw the memory of Lord North and his compeers into the shads. They have gone through the Constitution, article by article, and, violating every oath of office, perjuring their souls beyond redemption, dishonoring the very they hear, and making them, like that of Arnold, the symbols of treachery and perthy have trampled is requirements under foot, and realizing the insane, wicked wishes of the fanatics who gave them office, have turned a treasonable appearance into a dire reality.

Only cowards fail to perceive that the United States, within three short months, have ceased to be a Constitutional Republic, and has become an autocracy. The ruthless Administration at Washington has robbed the people of every right which the traditions of centuries had caused the Anglo-Saxon race to hold sacred. Mob law; a gag upon the freedom of the Press and the liberty of speech; illegal enlistments; a blockade of Southern ports, in defiance of international comity; the seizure of telegraphic dispatches; the invasion of Virginia; the false pretences upon which war was forced upon the country; massacre upon massacre, with accompanying outrages unparalleled in history, at St. Louis; the unconstitutional proclamation of military law in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Missouri and Alexandria; the subversion of the schools at West Point and Annapolis; the augmentation, without authority of Congress, of the national debt by hundreds of millions of dollars; the atrocity of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, encroachments upon order in the army, and the annihilation of every security for the property and freedom of private citizens; the insane attempts to force the country into a war with England and France, are all only outlines of a horrible picture, against which the aged Chief Justice of the United States has felt compelled to raise his voice in protest, and which have inspired every good citizen with mingled shame and fear. Abolitionists, on the contrary, are contented to suspend the ‘"ceremony of burning the Constitution"’ They feel that it has perished irreclaimably; the object of their scheming, for over a quarter of a century, is gained, and they may rejoice with impunity at the destruction they have created.

God, the arbiter of human events, can alone foresee when the fearful calamities into which the country has fallen will end. He alone can tell to what depths of ruin and degradation it may be necessary for us to sink. Were peace this moment to be declared between the North and South, the revived sober thought of the country would cause every upright patriot to mourn over the wreck and demoralization of the last half year. The nation would sit down in dust and ashes over the lives that have already been lost, the blood that has been shed, and the misery that has been occasioned. But, alas, it is too evident that the end is not yet. Only one thing is certain, that the howling fiends who have so long yearly burned the sacred document which contains the schedule of our freedom, have ceased to do so, because they believe that they have achieved a final triumph over it, and that its provisions can never obtain, respect and obedience again.