Smyrna Times

ADDRESS OF THE HON. JOS. HOLT,
AT LOUISVILLE, KY.

The Masonic Temple at Louisville was crowded on Saturday night week, on the occasion of the reception of the Hon. Joseph Holt, late a member of Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet. Mr. Holt was introduced to the audience by the Hon. Henry Pirtle, and amid prolonged and deafening cheers, spoke as follows:

Fellow Citizens:—A few weeks since, in another form, I ventured freely to express my views upon those tragic events which have brought sorrow to every hearthstone and to every heart in our distracted country, and it is not my purpose on this occasion to repeat those views, or to engage in any extended discussion of the questions then examined. It is not necessary that I should do so, since the argument is exhausted, and the popular mind is perfectly familiar with it in all its bearings. I will, however, with your permission, submit a few brief observations upon the absorbing topics of the day, and if I do so with an earnestness and emphasis due alike to the sincerity of my convictions and to the magnitude of the interests involved, it is trusted that none will be offended, not even those who may most widely differ from me.

SERIOUSNESS OF SOUTHERN TREASON.

Could one, an entire stranger to our history, now look down upon the South and see there a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand men marching in hostile array, threatening the capture of the capital and the dismemberment of the territory of the republic; and could he look again and see that this army is marshalled and directed by officers recently occupying distinguished places in the civil and military service of the country, and further, that the States from which this army has been drawn appear to be a vast seething cauldron of ferocious passion, he would very naturally conclude that the Government of the United States had committed some great crime against its people, and that this uprising was in resistance to wrongs and outrages which have been borne until their endurance was no longer possible. And yet, no conclusion could be further from the truth than the. The Government of the United States has been faithful to all its Constitutional obligations.

For eighty years it has maintained the national honor at home and abroad, and by its prowess, its wisdom, and its justice has given to the title of an American citizen an elevation among the nations of the earth which the citizen of no republic has enjoyed since Rome was mistress of the world. Under its administration the national domain has stretched away to the Pacific, and that constellation which announced our birth as a people has expanded from thirteen to thirty-four stars, all, until recently, moving undisturbed and undimmed in their orbs of light and grandeur. The rights of no State have been invaded; no man's property has been despoiled, no man's liberty abridged, no man's life oppressively jeopardized by the action of this Government. Under its benign influences the rills of public and private prosperity have swelled into rivulets, and from rivulets into rivers, ever brimming in their fullness, and everywhere, and at all periods of its history, its ministrations have fallen as gently on the people of the United States as do the dews of a summer's night on the flowers and grass of the gardens and fields.

ITS TRUE ORIGIN.

Whence, then, this revolutionary outbreak? Whence the secret spring of this gigantic conspiracy, which, like some huge boa, had completely coiled itself around the limbs and body of the Republic, before a single hand was raised to resist it! Strange, and indeed startling as the announcement must appear, when it falls upon the ears of the next generation, the national tragedy in whose shadow we stand to-night, has come upon us because in November last, John C. Breckinridge was not elected President of the United States and Abraham Lincoln was. This is the whole story. And I would pray now to know on what was John C. Breckinridge fed that he has grown so great, that a republic founded by Washington and cemented by the best blood that has ever coursed in human veins, is to be overthrown because, forsooth, he cannot be its President? Had he been chosen, we well know that we should not have heard of this rebellion, for the lever with which it is being moved would have been wanting to the hands of the conspirators. Even after his defeat, could it have been guaranteed, beyond all peradventure, that Jefferson Davis or some other kindred spirit would be the successor of Mr. Lincoln, I presume we hazard nothing in asserting that this atrocious movement against the Government would not have been set on foot. So much for the principle involved in it. This great crime, then, with which we are grappling, sprang from that sin by which the angels fell”—an unmastered and profligate ambition—an ambition that “would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven”— that would rather rule supremely over a shattered fragment of the Republic than run the chances of sharing with others the honors of the whole.

The conspirators of the South read in the election of Mr. Lincoln a declaration that the Democratic party had been prostrated, if not finally destroyed by the selfish intrigues and corruptions of its leaders; they read, too, that the vicious, emaciated and spavined hobby of the slavery agitation, on which they had so often rode into power, could no longer carry them beyond a given geographical line of territory, and that in truth this factious and treasonable agitation, on which so many of them had grown great by debauching and demoralizing the mind of people naturally generous and patriotic, had run its course, and hence, that from the national disgust for this demagoguism and from the inexorable law of population, the time had come when all these who had no other political capital than this would have to prepare for retirement to private life, so far at least as the highest offices of the country were concerned. Under the influence of these grim discouragements, they resolved to consummate at once—what our political history shows to have been with them a long cherished purpose—the dismemberment of the Government.

They said to themselves:—" Since we can no longer monopolize the great offices of the Republic as we have been accustomed to do, we will destroy it and build upon its ruins an empire that shall be all our own, and whose spoils neither the North nor the East nor the West shall share with us." Deplorable and humiliating as this certainly is it is but a rehearsal of the sad, sad story of the past. We had, indeed, supposed, that under our Christian civilization we had reached a point in human progress, when a republic could exist without having its life sought by its own offspring; but the Catalines of the South have proved that we were mistaken.

THE LEADERS OF THE REBELLION.

Let no man imagine that because this rebellion has been made by men renowned in our civil and military history, that it is therefore the less guilty or the less courageously to be resisted. It is precisely this class of men who have subverted the best governments that have ever existed. The purest spirits that have lived in the tide of times, the noblest institutions that have arisen to bless our race, have found among those in whom they had most confided, and whom they had most honored, men wicked enough, either secretly to betray them unto death, or openly to seek their overthrow by lawless violence.

The Republic of England had its Monk; the Republic of France had its Bonaparte; the Republic of Rome had its Caesar and its Cataline, and the Saviour of the world had his Judas Iscariot. It cannot be necessary that I should declare to you, for you know them well, who they are whose parricidal swords are now unsheathed against the Republic of the United States. Their names are inscribed upon a scroll of infamy that can never perish. The most distinguished was educated by the charity of the Government on which they are now making war. For long years they were fed from its table, and clothed from its wardrobe, and had their brows garlanded by its honors. They are the ungrateful sons of a fond mother, who dandled them upon her knee, who lavished upon them the gushing love of her noble and devoted nature, and who nurtured them from the very bosom of her life: and now in the frenzied excess of a licentious and baffled ambition, they are stabbing at that bosom with the ferocity with which the tiger springs upon its prey.— The President of the United States is heroically struggling to baffle the machinations of these wicked men. I have unbounded gratification in knowing that he has the courage to look traitors in the face, and that, in discharging the duties of his great office, he takes no counsel of his fears. He is entitled to zealous support of the whole country, and, may I not add without offence, that he will receive the support of all who justly appreciate the boundless blessings of our free institutions?

THE INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCES.

If this rebellion succeeds it will involve necessarily the destruction of our nationality, the division of our territory, the permanent disruption of the republic. It must rapidly dry up the sources of our material prosperity, and year by year we shall grow more and more impoverished, more and more revolutionary, enfeebled and debased. Each returning election will bring with it grounds for new civil commotions, and traitors, prepared to strike at the country that has rejected their claims to power, will spring up on every side. Disunion once begun will go on indefinitely, and under the influence of the fatal doctrine of secession, not only will States secede from States, but counties from counties, until universal anarchy will be consummated in each individual who can make good his position by force of arms, claiming the right to defy the power of the Government.

Thus we should have brought back to us the days of the robber Barons with their moated castles and marauding retainers. This doctrine, when analyzed, is simply a declaration that no physical force shall ever be employed in executing the laws or upholding the Government, and a government in whose practical administration such a principle has been introduced, could no more continue to exist than a man could live with an angered cobra in his bosom. If you would know what are the legitimate fruits of secession, look at Virginia and Tennessee, which have so lately given themselves up to the embraces of this monster.— There the schools are deserted; the courts of justice closed; public and private credit destroyed; commerce annihilated; debts repudiated; confiscations and spoliations everywhere prevailing; every cheek blanched with fear and every heart frozen with despair; and all over that desolated land the hand of infuriated passion and crime is waving, with a vulture's scream for blood the sword of civil war. And this is the Pandemonium which some would have transferred to Kentucky.

THE UNION ONE AND INDIVISIBLE, AT ALL HAZARDS.

But I am not here to discuss this proposition to night. I wish solemnly to declare before you and the world, that I am for this Union without conditions, one and indivisible, now and forever. I am for its preservation at any and every cost of blood and treasure against all its assailants. I know no neutrality between my country and its foes, whether they be foreign or domestic; no neutrality between that glorious flag which now floats over us and the ingrates and traitors who would trample it in the dust. My prayer is for victory, complete, enduring and overwhelming, to the armies of the republic over all its enemies. I am against any and every compromise that may be proposed to be made under the guns of the rebels, while at the same time I am decidedly in favor of affording every reasonable guarantee for the safety of Southern institutions, which the honest convictions of the people—not the conspirators—of the South may demand, whenever they shall lay down their arms, but not until then. The arbitrament of the sword has been defiantly thrust into the face of the Government and the country, and there is no honorable escape from it.

All guarantees and all attempts at adjustment by amendments to the Constitution are now scornfully rejected, and the leaders of the rebellion openly proclaim that they are fighting for their independence. In this contemptuous rejection of guarantees, and in this avowal of the objects of the rebellion now so audaciously made, we have a complete exposure of that fraud which, through the slavery agitation has been practiced upon the public credulity for the last fifteen or twenty years. In the light of this revelation we feel as one awakened from the suffocating tortures of a nightmare, and realize what a baseless dream our apprehensions have been, and of what a traitorous swindle we have been made the victims. They are fighting for their independence! Independence of what! Independence of those laws which they themselves have aided in enacting; independence of that Constitution which their fathers framed and to which they are parties and subject by inheritance; independence of that beneficent Government on whose treasury and honors they have grown strong and illustrious.

When a man commits a robbery on the highway, or a murder in the dark, he thereby declares his independence of the laws under which he lives, and of the society of which he is a member. Should he, when arraigned, avow and justify the offence, he thereby becomes the advocate of the independence he has thus declared; and if he resists by force of arms the officer, when dragging him to the prison, the penitentiary or the gallows, he is thereby fighting for the independence he has thus declared and advocated; and such is the condition of the conspirators at the South at this moment.

It is no longer a question of Southern rights, which have never been violated, nor of security of Southern institutions, which we know perfectly well have never been interfered with by the General Government but it is with us a question purely of national existence.

In meeting this terrible issue which rebellion has made up with the loyal men of the country, we stand upon ground infinitely above all party lines and party platforms—ground as sublime as that on which our fathers stood when they fought the battles of the Revolution. I am for throwing into the contest thus forced upon us all the material and moral resources and energies of the nation, in order that the struggle may be brief and as little sanguinary as possible. It is hoped that we shall soon see in the field a half a million of patriotic volunteers, marching in columns which will be perfectly irresistible, and, borne in their hands—for no purpose of conquest or subjugation, but of protection only—we may expect within nine months to see the stars and stripes floating in every Southern breeze, and hear going up, wild as the storm, the exultant shout of that emancipated people over their deliverance from the revolutionary terror and despotism, by which they are now tormented and oppressed.

The war, conducted on such a scale, will not cost exceeding four or five hundred millions of dollars; and none need be startled at the vastness of this expenditure. The debt thus created will press but slightly upon us; it will be paid and gladly paid by posterity, who will make the best bargain which has been made since the world began if they can secure to themselves, in its integrity and blessings, such a Government as this, at such a cost.— But if in this anticipation we are doomed to disappointment; if the people of the United States have already become so degenerate—may I not say so craven—in the presence of their foes as to surrender up this Republic to be dismembered and subverted by the traitors who have reared the standard of revolt against it, then I trust the volume of American history may be closed and sealed up forever, and that those who shall survive this national humiliation will take unto themselves some other name— some name having no relation to the past, no relation to our great ancestors, no relation to those monuments and battle fields which commemorate alike their heroism, their loyalty and their glory.

THE TERM "SUBMISSIONISTS"

But with the curled lip of scorn we are told by the Disunionists, that in thus supporting a Republican Administration in its endeavors to uphold the Constitution and laws, we are "Submissionists," and when they have pronounced this word, they suppose they have imputed to us the sum of all human abasement." Well, let it be confessed we are "Submissionists," and weak and spiritless, as it may be deemed by some, we glory in the position we occupy.

For example: the law says, "Thou shalt not steal;" we submit to this law, and would not for the world's worth, rob our neighbor of his forts, his arsenals, his arms, his munitions of war, his hospital stores, or anything that is his. Indeed, so impressed are we with the obligations of this law, that we should no more think of plundering from our neighbor half a million of dollars because found in one of his unprotected mints, than we would think of filching a purse from his pockets in a crowded thoroughfare. Write us down, therefore, "Submissionists."

Again: The law says "thou shalt not swear falsely"; we submit to this law, and while in the civil or military service of the country, with an oath to support the Constitution of the United States resting upon our consciences, we would not for any earthly consideration, engage in the formation or execution of a conspiracy to subvert that very Constitution, and with it the government, to which it has given birth. Write us down, therefore, again "submissionists." Yet again: When a President has been elected in strict accordance with the forms and spirit of the Constitution, and has been regularly installed into office, and is honestly striving to discharge his duty by snatching the Republic from the jaws of a gigantic treason which threatens to crush it, we care not what his name may be, or what the platform on which he stood during the Presidential canvass; we believe we fulfill in sight of earth and heaven our highest obligation to our country, in giving to him earnest and loyal support in the struggle in which he is engaged.

Lucifer was a non submissionist, and the first Secessionist of whom history has given us any account, and the charry which he wears fully expresses the fate due to all who openly defy the laws of their Creator and of their country. He rebelled because the Almighty would not yield to him the throne of Heaven; the principle of the Southern rebellion is the same. Indeed, in this submission to the laws is found the chief distinction between good men and devils. A good man obeys the laws of truth, of honor, of morality, and all those laws which have been enacted by competent authority for the government and protection of the country in which he lives; a devil obeys only his own treacherous and profligate passions. The principle on which this rebellion proceeds, that laws have in themselves no sanctions, no binding force upon the conscience, and that every man, under the promptings of interest or passion, or caprice, may at will, and honorably, too, strike at the Government that shelters him, is one of utter demoralization, and should be trodden out, as you would tread out a spark that has fallen on the roof of your dwelling— Its unchecked prevalence would resolve society into chaos, and leave you without the slightest guarantee for life, liberty, or property. It is time that, in their majesty, the people of the United States should make known to the world that this Government, in its dignity and power, is something more than a mock court, and that the citizen who makes war upon it is a traitor, not only in theory but in fact, and should have meted out to him a traitor's doom. The country wants no bloody sacrifices, but it must and will have peace, cost what it may.

IMPOSSIBLE FOR KENTUCKY TO REMAIN NEUTRAL.

Before closing I desire to say a few words on the relations of Kentucky to the pending rebellion; and, as we are all Kentuckians here to-night, and as this is purely a family matter, which concerns the honor of us all hope we may be permitted to speak to each other upon it with entire freedom.

Is there a Kentuckian within the sound of my voice to-night who can hear the anguished cry of his country, as she wrestles and writhes in the folds of this gigantic treason, and then lay himself down upon his pillow with this thought of neutrality, without feeling that he has something in his bosom which stings him worse than would an adder? Have we, within the brief period of eighty years, descended so far from the mountain heights on which our fathers stood, that already, in our degeneracy, we proclaim our blood too precious, our treasure too valuable to be devoted to the preservation of such a Government as this? They fought through a seven years' war with the greatest power on earth for the hope, the bare hope of being able to found this Republic, and now that it is no longer a hope nor an experiment but a glorious reality which has excited the admiration and the homage of the nations, and has covered us with blessings as "the waters cover the channels of the sea," have we, their children, no years of toil, of sacrifice, and of battle even, if need be, to give to save it from absolute destruction at the hands of men who, steeped in guilt, are perpetrating against us and humanity a crime, for which, I verily believe, the blackest page of the history of the world's darkest period furnishes no parallel.

Can it be possible that in the history of the American people we have already reached a point of degeneracy so low that the work of Washington and Franklin, of Adams and Jefferson, of Hancock and Henry, is to be overthrown by the morally begrimed and pigmied conspirators who are now tugging at its foundations? It would be the overturning of the Andes by the miserable reptiles that are crawling in the sands at their base.

But our neutral fellow citizens in the tenderness of their hearts say:—" This effusion of blood sickens us." Then do all in your power to bring it to an end. Let the whole strength of this Commonwealth be put forth in support of the government, in order that the war may be terminated by a prompt suppression of the rebellion. The longer the struggle continues the fiercer will be its spirit, and the more fearful the waste of life attending it. You, therefore, only aggravate the calamity you deplore, by standing aloof from the combat. But again they say, "We cannot fight our brethren" Indeed! But your brethren can fight you, and with a good will, too. Wickedly and wantonly have they commenced this war against you and your institutions, and ferociously are they prosecuting it. They take no account of the fact that the massacre with which they hope their swords will ere long be clogged, must be the massacre of their brethren. However much we may bow our heads at the confession, it is nevertheless true that every free people that have existed have been obliged, at one period or other of their history, to fight for their liberties against traitors within their own bosoms, and that people who have not the greatness of soul thus to fight cannot long continue to be free, nor do they deserve to be so.

INACTION AN ENDORSEMENT OF REBELLION.

There is not and there cannot be any neutral ground for a loyal people between their own Government and those who at the head of armies are menacing its destruction. Your inaction is not neutrality, though you may delude yourselves with the belief that it is so. With this rebellion confronting you, when you refuse to co-operate actively with your Government in subduing it, you thereby condemn the Government and assume towards it an attitude of antagonism. Your inaction is a virtual endorsement of the rebellion, and if you do not thereby give to the Rebels precisely that "aid and comfort" spoken of in the Constitution, you certainly afford them the most powerful encouragement and support. That they regard your present position as friendly to them, is proved by the fact, that, in a recent enactment of the Confederate Congress confiscating the debts due from their own citizens to those of loyal States, the debts due the people of Kentucky are expressly excepted. Is not this significant! Does it leave any room for doubt that the Confederate Congress suppose they have discovered under the guise of your neutrality a lurking sympathy for their cause which entitles you to be treated as friends if not as active allies?

THE CHOICE.

I will only add, if Kentucky wishes the waters of her beautiful Ohio to be dyed in blood; if she wishes her harvest fields, now waving in their abundance, to be trampled under the feet of hostile soldiery as a flower garden is trampled beneath the threshing of the tempest; if she wishes the homes where her loved ones are now gathered in peace, invaded by the proscriptive fury of a military despotism, sparing neither life nor property; if she wishes the streets of her towns and cities grown with grass, and the steamboats of her rivers to be rotting at her wharves, then let her join the Southern Confederacy. But if she would have the bright waters of that river flow on in their gladness; if she would have her harvests peacefully gathered to her garners; if she would have the lullabies of her cradles and the songs of her homes uninvaded by the cries and terrors of battle; if she would have her streets of her towns and cities again filled with the hum and throngs of busy trade, and her rivers and their shores once more vocal with the steamer's whistle—that hymn of a free and prosperous commerce—then let her stand fast by the Stars and Stripes, and do her duty and her whole duty as a member of this Union. Let her brave people say to the President of the United States, "You are our Chief Magistrate; the Government you have in charge and are striving to save from dishonor and dismemberment is our Government; your cause is indeed our cause; your battles are our battles; make room for us therefore in the ranks of your armies, that your triumph may be our triumph also."

Even as with the father of us all I would plead for salvation, so my countrymen, as upon my very knees, would I plead with you for the life, aye, for the life, of our great and beneficent institutions. But if the traitor's knife, now at the throat of the republic, is to do its work, and this Government is fated to add yet another to that long line of sepulchres which whiten the highway of the past, then my heart-felt prayer to God is that it may be written in history, that the blood of its life was not found upon the skirts of Kentucky.