He rose in his place, lifted his strong head with its leonine locks and
broad, high forehead, paused a moment and began his speech in the clear
steady tones of the trained orator, master of himself, his theme and his
audience. The Northern Senators met his gaze with scorn and he answered
with a look of bold defiance.
The formal announcement of the secession of his State he made in brief
sharp sentences and plunged at once into the reasons for their solemn
act.
"Forty-two years ago, Alabama was admitted into the Union," he declared
in ringing tones. "She entered it as she goes out, with the Republic
convulsed by the hostility of the North to her domestic institutions.
Not a decade has passed, not a year has elapsed since her birth as a
State that has not been marked by the steady and insolent growth of the
mob violence of the North which has demanded the confiscation of her
property and the destruction of the foundations of her civilization.
"Who are the leaders of these mobs who seek thus to overthrow the
Constitution? Who are these hypocrites who claim the championship of
freedom and the moral leadership of the world?
"The men who sold their own slaves to us because they could not use them
with profit in a northern climate; the men who built and manned every
American slave ship that ever sailed the seas; the sons of old Peter
Faneuil of Boston who built Faneuil Hall, their cradle of liberty, out
of the profits of slave ships whose trade the Southern people had
forbidden by law; the men who have flooded Congress for two generations
with petitions to dissolve the Union; the men who threatened to secede
with the addition of every foot of territory we have added to our
Republic!
"These are the men who have denied to the manhood of the South Christian
Communion because they could not endure what they have been pleased to
style the moral leprosy of Slavery! These are the men who refuse us
permission to sojourn or even pass through the sacred precincts of a
Northern State and dare to carry our servants with us.
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