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handle on the first fancied provocation, and which has made the South the favorite arena of the duelling code, are but other cases in point showing how disregard of one class of rights has begotten disregard of all. The spirit which shot the President in his chair is the same spirit which has been inflicting mutilation and death upon men and women who dared open their mouths to condemn the benignant institution of slavery, and sometimes on mere suspicion of their sentiments. It is the same spirit that struck down Charles Sumner in his place in the United States Senate for daring to hold the mirror up to slavery, and to call things by their right names, and which gave public ovations to the miscreant who did the deed. And if you want a catalogue without end, turn over the history of this war, leaf by leaf, and see whether the spirit of slavery can be expected to respect any right. Rights! even the grave has had no rights. We have lived to see enacted on this land which we have claimed for Christian civilization, the feats that were deemed heroic, centuries ago by barbarians who could quench their rage only in draughts from the skulls of their slain foes. We have driven the Indian from his native forest, and wept sentimentally over the

horrors of the scalping knife, only to see the mutilation of the dead incorporated into the civilized warfare of the chivalrous South, and to have our murdered sons and brothers dug from their graves, and their bones hacked into pieces to furnish amulets for dainty Southern dames. We have lived not only to read of the Inquisition as history, but to see it revived with refinements of cruelty in Southern prisons. We have seen even the hard mercies of civilized warfare ignored, and the policy deliberately inaugurated of maiming and disabling hundreds and thousands of Northern men. Have you seen the photographer's work? Have you marked the idiotic stare, the ghastly features, the protruding bones, the swollen joints? Have you studied the horrors of fever in the stockades of Andersonville? Do you think it a small cause that will send men deliberately across the dead-line to be shot rather than pine longer amid such misery? Did you see the bread which George Stuart brought here a year ago, the staple of our imprisoned soldiers' fare? Do you know that Libby Prison was undermined when the authorities of Richmond anticipated the approach of our troops, and that the hellish machinery was all in readiness to blow the prison

into the air with its whole living tenantry? Do you remember that this very act of murder over which we grieve was in contemplation four years ago, and that only a superintending Providence saved Abraham Lincoln to the United States, and Baltimore from adding another crime to the murder of Massachusetts troops? And are you to think this last event strange ? Is an assassination out of keeping with the antecedents of slavebarbarism? No, no! Slavery has done this deed, and upon it I call down the curse of Heaven. I invoke it in the name of a down-trodden race; I invoke it in the name of the hearts it has torn, the domestic ties it has severed, the virtue it has corrupted, the ignorance it has fostered; in the name of man robbed of the image of his Maker, and of woman shorn of her dearest and most sacred rights; in the name of slave mothers sitting like Niobes all over the wasted heritage of the South; in the name of the blighted hopes. and desolate hearths of the North; in the name of the emaciated skeletons in our hospitals, and the maimed forms that crawl along our streets; in the name of the mutilated and pillaged dead; in the name of that bereaved widow and her fatherless children, and of the bereaved nation

lying to-day in sackcloth and ashes; I call down upon it the blight of heaven; I brand it as the representative trampler upon human rights. Oh! that when its vile head shall have been crushed, as crushed it will be ere long, its vestiges might be obliterated forever. But this cannot be. They will remain to bear testimony against the Southern lords who have fostered and fought for it, and against the Northern men who, in admiration of its patriarchal beauties, have lavished upon it their sympathy, and truckled to its imperious demands. The reminders are written all over the land. The white tablets gleaming from a thousand hill-side churchyards shall tell the story. The rough boards that mark the thousands of graves by the Rappahannock and Potomac and Chickahominy shall moulder, but the grass shall grow more greenly there, and flowers bloom more luxuriantly; and even in their summer loveliness, the voice of brothers' blood shall cry from the ground. The plow shall turn up mute witnesses, and the fields, with their multitudinous relics of battle, be vocal with slavery's reproach.

And the West shall remember it. It shall keep

the lesson to whet its good sword, and to fire its heart, if ever traitors attempt a like experiment; for there, in one of its quiet cemeteries, shall rise the monument of slave-treason's last and greatest victim. To the home of his early struggles and successes, to the home from which he went with prayer and faith to assume his high destiny, to it shall be the honored task of cherishing his loved remains, and his obelisk shall stand when our beloved land shall have emerged purified and triumphant from this bloody ordeal, with its marble finger ever pointing to heaven in protest against the barbarism which tore him from the hearts of a loving people.

But I turn now from the authorship of this calamity to the illustrious dead himself.

Our late beloved President, while in no sense à sectional President, represented nevertheless a peculiar phase of our national life—its youngest, its most progressive side. The West was his birth-place; the West, that grand theatre where the pent up energy and glowing aspiration of all other portions of the land find ample room for development. While the West furnishes types of the best growths of other soils, it superadds to them a character peculiarly its own. It exhibits

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