selves for the losses and sufferings of the past by dragging the country into civil war.
When we disappointed those to whom "the wish was father to the thought" and refused to make or to suffer war to establish a presidential succession, they taunted us with a want of spirit and decried our boasted chivalry. They should have known that whatever of blood our people have shed, or may have to shed, on questions of controversy with their brethren, is consecrated to the cause of the Constitution of their country.
Neither malice, nor revenge, nor lust of power, nor even any wrong or insult, however grievous, for which the Constitution and laws afford a remedy has caused us, or will ever cause us to open our veins, or theirs, in any controversy with our brethren. But a fatal blow, aimed at that instrument, which no other means can meet or parry, will never find our hearts too weak for resentment, nor our arms too feeble to strike in its defence.
The men who saved the land from bloodshed in 1877, because the Constitution, though in some sense violated, was not broken beyond the reach of a peaceful remedy, are the same who in 1861 attempted to supply the remedy of armed resistance against those who outlawed their rights, and declared them beyond the pale of the Constitution.
Many of these men yet live, and their sons, who were little children in 1861, have taken the places of their heroic dead, with not a vacancy in the ranks to tell that ever one was lost. It is a mistake to suppose that they are numerically weak, or that they are broken in spirit.
Those heroes of a thousand battle-fields, whose very graves are lost beyond the power of recognition, are all replaced with men just such as they were; men who have no higher conceptions of honor and glory than to wish to live or die just such as they were; men who feel that the grave of every Confederate soldier contains the ashes of a patriot whose memory is a sacred legacy—fathers and sons, they are the same men now that they have always been.
These younger men, however, are not amenable to any accusation of treason, except that they had hearts to love their venerable fathers and the cause which they espoused; their brothers, and the country whose bosom was bathed with the outpouring of their blood.
The framers of the Constitution, remembering that its most important principles were born of Anglo-Saxon rebellion against royal power, and that attainder and confiscation had too often been the badges of a noble martyrdom, protected the children of rebels against confiscation and their blood against attainder by positive provisions of the organic law.
How insulting to the spirits of the great men who ordained this Constitution is that unworthy prejudice which would visit upon the children, even then unborn, the penalties which have been denounced against
