New York Daily Tribune

CALEB CUSHING ON THE STATE OF THE UNION.
From the Boston Journal.

On Monday evening the Hon. Caleb Cushing addressed the citizens of Newburyport, Mass., as follows:

Gentlemen: We, the people of the United States, are in the midst of a revolution—bloodless as yet. It were simple cowardice to seek to disguise the fact from ourselves or others. Men at the South have taken the initiatory step to dissolve the Union; and however injurious to us that step may be—however extreme—we know they cannot go back, unless induced by a spirit and by acts of just accommodation on the part of the North. At such a moment it is idle to suppose that we gain anything by shrinking to look the truth square in the face. The ship of State is among the breakers. She is drifting, let us hope not desperately, however threateningly, on the lee shore of destruction. It behooves all of us, instead of shutting our eyes to the peril, instead of wringing our hands in imbecile consternation, instead of contemptibly complaining of the lookouts who signal the danger—instead of this, I say, it behooves all of us to do each what he may to avert the impending evil, and to stand ready with heart and hand to cooperate in efforts for the salvation of the Union. Therefore do we assemble here on this occasion.

The Union in danger? Alas, it is so: the Union is in danger, not by reason of invasion from abroad, but of revolution at home, produced by conflict of opinion and action between the Northern and Southern States. as to that slave labor which exists in the Southern States alone, it is true, but which exists there to the benefit, use and profit of the Northern not less than of the Southern States. Is it not so? Is there any doubt that such is the cause of the danger? We in Massachusetts do not doubt—we know—that the danger is produced by the wish, purpose, attempt, of a great party at the North to act against Slavery in the South, in contravention of the rights of the Southern States; that in the minds of many at the North the thought, it is true, is merely to circumscribe slave labor within its present limits, albeit that also may contravene the constitutional rights of the Southern States; but that the thought of many others, perhaps of more, is to abolish it where it now exists—“everywhere,” as the Governor elect of Massachusetts, I think, has once said; that the wish, purpose, attempt at the North, so to abolish slave labor at the South, has from small beginnings of scattered Abolition Societies swollen to the proportions of a crusade to that end; that the manifestation of this wish, purpose and attempt at the North is resisted by the Southern States as an unconstitutional interference with their sole power and right of domestic legislation; that such attack from the North has produced defense at the South; that attack and defense both, commencing on both sides with acts of individuals, sometimes lawful, sometimes unlawful, have extended themselves to act of States, some lawful and some unlawful, and thus imperil the Union.

Can we do anything for the security of the Union? Can we do anything to avert the dangers which threaten it? To determine that, we must penetrate to the very center and heart of the controversy; we shall then see how it affects the Union; and then, and not until then, we shall be competent to judge whether it be possible, and if possible, whether desirable, for us to do anything toward the preservation of the Union, and if so, what that shall be. Alas! I repeat—alas! that such should be the question of the hour—the question whether it be worth while to try to do anything—and what that anything may be, to preserve the Union.

The Union! the Union! How proudly have not our hearts been accustomed to beat as we contemplated the Union—the glories of the career of these States before the Revolution, during it, after it—that birth of our Union on the field of battle—its baptism of blood in the arms of victory—its great achievement of independence—its upward rise into power and fame—its overspreading of this continent—its lofty position of youthful nationality by the side of the highest and greatest of the old powers of Europe.

The Union! How gratefully have we not regarded that noble work of our Fathers, by which we are not separated into hostile foreign States, but a family of confederated Republics, without vexatious custom-houses or impeded commercial intercourse along our respective frontiers; without conflict of commercial systems; with free interchange of our respective productions—agricultural mineral, marine, or manufacturing; with right of free passage from one to the other, and of freely following the pursuits of industry and happiness in either; with complete exemption at home from all those horrors of local war; in a word, specially privileged by our federal organization from all the terrible drawbacks on public and private prosperity which, meanwhile wasted the resources and destroyed the power of all the rest of Christendom!

The Union! How delightedly have we not contemplated that grand spectacle of the American Constitution over-canopying our country as a luminous firmament of sublimity and beauty, filled with all beneficent emanations—causing the wilderness to blossom as a garden, and new State after State to spring up under the light and heat of its radiance—so that by the arts of peace and the expansive lifehood of our institutions the New World seemed to belong to us of right, and the name of Americans had come to be ours alone, and rang on the ear as round and full as ever that of Roman did in the palmier days of the civilization of the Old World!

Such was the Union which our fathers established— a Union founded on the corner-stone idea of the original independence and constitutional co-equality of all the States—a Union for the purpose of assuring each and all against foreign aggression, but not less to assure each and all in the complete possession and full enjoyment of its own domestic rights, so as to retain laws of religious conformity and compulsion, like Massachusetts, or to repeal them, like Virginia, so as to legalize entails of land like Massachusetts, or to unlegalize it like Virginia, so as to maintain serf-labor like Virginia, or to exclude it like Massachusetts. That was the fundamental idea of the fathers. Without having that idea originally, they never could have created a Union—without adhering to that idea so long as they lived, they never could have transmitted the Union to the sons. It was left to degenerate sons of theirs to begin to undo that great work, which they had not wisdom to comprehend or virtue to maintain in its pristine integrity and strength.

It was not until twenty years after the establishment of the Constitution, when the last of the Revolutionary Presidents was in the seat of Federal power, that men of the Northern States began to strike blows at the equality of the States, by insisting on the putting of the institutions of Southern States under the ban of the Union, in excluding them from the common Federal territory. Treading in the same path, the next step of abandonment or perversion of the Constitution by the sons, was for the Northern States to assume to confiscate the property and other domestic rights of citizens of the South sojourning or in transit at the North, the possession of which, during such sojourn or transit, is guaranteed to them by the same explicit provision of the Constitution which guarantees to the citizens of the North the privilege to go with their property and other domestic rights in transit or sojourn into any Southern State. Then, the sons proceeded to pass acts in the Northern States to nullify or impede the right of reclamation of fugitives from service which the Constitution had explicitly stipulated for, and which constitutional right the fathers had confirmed by an appropriate act of Congress. Next, degenerate sons, in contempt of the idea and work of their fathers, proceeded to organize in the Northern States a system of agitation and propagandism by means of Societies, incorporated and others, for the purpose of preaching at the North a crusade against the institutions and the people of the Southern States. This agitation went on until the minds of too many at the North had got to be utterly lost to all sense of truth or falsehood, right or wrong; and everything of good gave way to the frantic clamor of mere unreasoning and senseless sympathy with black men—to such degree that to break covenants, to steal property, or to facilitate the stealing of it, to write and distribute documents inciting to insurrection, murder, and rapine, to petition for, to insist upon, to advocate and to urge, in season and out of season, the deliberate violation of the compacts of the Constitution or the overthrow, of the Union—such came to be the familiar sights and sounds of our daily life. The sacred pulpit, to a great extent, became in.