The Day Book

Letter of Littleton Tazewell, Esq.

The following eloquent letter contains the substance of a speech delivered by L. Tazewell, Esq.

Richmond, Dec. 23rd, 1859.

To Messrs. L. Tazewell, J. Randolph Tucker, B. C. Welford, and Wm. Green.

Gentlemen: At a called meeting of the students, held at the Virginia Medical College on the evening of the 23d inst., we, the undersigned, were appointed as a committee to solicit earnestly a copy of your eloquent, admirable and patriotic addresses for publication. We take pleasure in adding our personal solicitations, that you may comply with their request.

Very respectfully,
Your obedient servants,
T. C. HILL, Ala.
H. V. GRAY, Va.
J. M. KEYES, Miss.
A. J. STONE, N. C.
G. W. THOMAS, Ga.

MR. TAZEWELL'S LETTER.

Richmond, Dec. 26th, 1859.

Gentlemen: I have made an effort to comply with your request, but find it impossible. My address to the Students at the College on Friday evening was almost entirely extemporaneous, and I cannot recall it. I must therefore, content myself, though but a poor return for the honor they have done by making my acknowledgements to you in this wise.

Though I had but recently renounced all participation in the current politics of the day, I could not forego the opportunity you gave me of endeavoring to strike if possible a chord of deep enthusiasm in hearts already strung with devotion to the South. Nor can my share in your meeting be deemed a departure from my resolution. I am a conservative of the strictest sect, and as resolute in my party politics as ever, but upon the momentous questions which now agitate the whole country, there is no party in the South. Partial interest and feelings are suspended, the spirits of the body re-collected at the heart, and we are awaiting with painful solicitude, but without one throb of dismay, the discharge, or the dispersion, of that black and muttering war-cloud which hangs upon the Northern horizon. Gentlemen, nothing has happened, recently, more likely to cause or contribute to cause, a dispersion of that cloud than the fact that you, two hundred and sixty-seven enlightened young men, have been driven by your native sympathies to quit the foetid political atmosphere of Philadelphia, and to bid adieu forever to the city of Brotherly Hate.

I have not the presumption, gentlemen, to imagine it in my power to aid anything to those considerations which have induced your exodus. The cause speaks for itself; it excites feelings which words cannot express. To say that I welcome you back to our own dear native South, is too tame. Gentlemen, there is not in all the broad extent of this 'Old Dominion' a Virginian, worthy of the name, who does not feel his heart swell within him at the proud thought that the spirited young men of the South are at length disgusted away from Northern schools, and that they are at length resolved to inaugurate the intellectual, as their fathers have resolved to establish the material, independence of their native country. If you wish to know the true sentiments of this people, go not to politicians, but go to the people themselves. There is not a house in this city (unless it is inhabited by a fresh Yankee) where you would not be embraced with open arms and ardent hearts, ready to share with you their warmest hospitalities. (I say fresh Yankees, because after they have been here long enough to find out what a negro is and what a white man ought to be, Northerners by birth are almost all of them as true to the South as Southerners themselves.)

Gentlemen, I not only approve your course, I admire you for it, I honor and thank you for it. Even in a selfish point of view, in your future professional prospects, I tell you now that the fact of being one of the glorious, immortal two hundred and sixty-seven will confer more distinction and give you more vantage ground than could the 'Imprimatur' of the most learned medical university the world ever saw. I wish I was one of you. I wish so not only for weighty personal reasons urged by me the other night, but because this movement of yours will redound immensely to the advantage of the South by contributing to build up her medical schools at once, and thus rendering her independent of the North in that, as she should be in everything; and because it is well calculated to convince the terrapin-like conservatives of the North that it is time for them to be doing something more to satisfy the South than holding mass meetings and shouting huzzas to the Union. If it shall convince them that actions, not words are what we want—that they must hurl from the places of power and dignity in the State the vile Abolition incumbents who now occupy and disgrace them—if they become convinced by this and like movements that they must overthrow the Black Republican party, or we must go out of the Union, you will have entitled yourselves to their gratitude as well as ours. I think that such action as yours is calculated to produce a consummation so devoutly to be wished for. I know nothing about medicine, gentlemen. I never saw but one body dissected in my life, and then I fainted; but I know enough about anatomy to tell you where the heart of a Yankee is. It is in his pocket. The blow you have struck has fallen upon that heart, and it will be followed by others calculated to bring Conservatives, as they call themselves, to their senses, and cause them, if necessary, to fight bodily, man to man, the miserable party which threatens to run riot with their interests as well as ours. We have had to fight them on our own soil. Are not they who begat, and bred, and fed, and nursed, and raised, and educated, and taught, and armed, the miserable crew, more bound than we, in morality, and in justice, to fight them—to exterminate them if necessary, from their soil.

As for the pseudo-patriotic paeans they chant to the Union, they are of no more use than singing psalms to a dead horse. As far as feelings are concerned, the Union is already dissolved, and nothing now remains but its form. The Union was dissolved, if not before, on the day and hour when John Brown's atrocities were received at the North with shrieks of delight from the Black Republicans, and with a silence on the part of the self-styled Conservatives more significant than those shrieks—for it betokened either indifference or fear. It was on the day and hour when the republicans, emulating the Egyptians who embalm the most putrid carcasses in the most precious odors, canonised John Brown—a robber, a murderer, a traitor, a man who had reached as near to perfect depravity as the infirmities of human nature will permit—and not one conservative could be found to interrupt or denounce their profane orgies. That the knell of this Union was sounded. It is now dissolved—the spell is broken, the charm is gone—and if the North really desire such a Union as has led us, through peace and war, along the hitherto bright career of our national prosperity and glory, it must be re-united, reinstated, re-established. In the meantime let the blind followers of a false philanthropy, and the bigoted Pharisees of a perverted religion, beware lest their evil machinations recoil on their own heads with dreadful retribution.

Abolition can assume as many shapes as the fabled Proteus. At one time it assumes the simple but attractive guise of universal philanthropy, at another the more imposing robe of religious enthusiasm, but, unmasked, it is nothing but agrarianism. The laboring classes at the North constitute a majority. They have shown more than once that they look with jealous eyes upon the wealthy and luxurious ease of their merchant masters. Let them set the example of a disregard of the rights of property in slaves, and they will show their respect for the rights of property in all other chattels by a general division and distribution of the heaped and overflowing treasures of their purse-proud princes.

Let the North, then, no longer, like the foolish bird in the desert, hide its head in self-illusion from the dangers that beset it—dangers incalculably greater than any which environ us. Let them not disregard the voice of warning by denouncing all who tell them the truth as disunionists. I yield to none in my veneration for the wonderful wisdom and beauty and symmetry of our federal government. It is the proudest temple which man in the fullest fruition of his most cultivated powers has ever erected to the Genius of Liberty. He who would wantonly destroy or weaken it, were an incendiary more felonious far than he, of old, who fired the far-famed Ephesian fane, and he would be handed down from generation to generation with a more infamous immortality. As long as we can worship at its altars as equals we will bow in profound submission to all of its ordinances. But when the money changers aspire to take sole and exclusive possession of it, we will kick them out. Let the alternative continue to present itself of inequality in the Union, or equality out of it, and the South will not be persuaded to abide by it though one should come to her in the form of an angel, and with the eloquence of an archangel on his lips. Let another attempt at robbery, rapine, murder and treason be made on her soil—or let a consolidated Northern majority present, in any other shape, the dire alternative of disunion or dishonor—and Southern steel will leap from its scabbard, and Southern hearts bound to the field where our property, our honor, and the sanctity of our firesides are at stake. We will teach the fanatical followers of John Brown and all kindred foes, that the fires which sleep in the ashes of our revolutionary fathers are glowing with all their wonted fervor in the bosoms of their sons!

Of one thing be certain. We shall not go to the ballot box, nor to popular meetings nor to Legislative halls to proclaim disunion to our Northern enemies. They shall hear it in the thunder of our cannon; they shall feel it in the thrust of the bayonet; they shall see it in the sacking of their cities; they shall know it by the silence, more expressive than all, of extended desolation, despair, devastation and death. In such a conflict they who fall, on either side, shall welcome the shades that shut them from the surrounding horrors!

I must acknowledge to you, individually, gentlemen, the too complimentary terms in which you have been pleased to couch your request. You will allow me to ascribe them to the generous ardor of youth. May your professional life lend additional lustre to distinction which your recent action has already conferred on you.

Warmly and truly your friend,
LITTLETON TAZEWELL.

To Messrs. T. C. Hill, Ala; H. V. Gray, Va.; J. M. Keyes, Miss.; A. J. Stone, N. C.; G. W. Thomas, Ga.