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two peers and thirty commoners which England shed after the Rebellion of 1715, or that of five peers and twenty commoners shed after the rising of 1745, which crushed the House of Stuart. Though the fight had lasted only a few months, those blocks and gibbets gave Charles his only chance to recover. But the confiscated lands of his adherents, and the new political arrangement of the Highlands,—just, and recognized as such, because necessary,—these quenched his star forever.
Our rebellion has lasted four years. Government has exchanged prisoners and acknowledged its belligerent rights. After that, gibbets are out of the question. A thousand men rule the rebellion,—are the rebellion. A thousand men. We cannot hang them all. We cannot hang men in regiments. What! cover the continent with gibbets! We cannot sicken the 19th century with such a sight. It would sink our civilization to the level of Southern barbarism. It would forfeit our very right to supersede the Southern system, which right is based on ours being better than theirs. To make its corner-stone the gibbet would degrade us to the level of Davis and Lee. The structure of Government which bore the earthquake shock of 1861 with hardly a jar, and which now bears the assassination of its Chief Magistrate, in this crisis of civil war, with even less disturbance, needs, for its safety, no such policy of vengeance; its serene strength needs and should use only so much severity as will fully guarantee security for the future.
Banish every one of these thousand rebel leaders—every one of them, on pain of death if they ever return! [Loud applause.] Confiscate every dollar and acre they own. [Applause.] These steps the world and their followers will see are necessary to kill the seeds of caste, dangerous State rights and secession. [Applause.] Banish Lee with the rest. [Applause] No government should ask of the South which he has wasted, or of the North which he has murdered, such superabundant Christian patience as to tolerate in our streets the presence of a wretch whose hand upheld Libby Prison and Andersonville, and whose soul is black with sixty-four thousand deaths of prisoners by starvation and torture.
What of our new President? His whole life is a pledge that he knows and hates thoroughly that caste which is the Gibraltar of secession. Caste, mailed in State rights, seized slavery as its weapon to smite down the Union. Said Jackson in 1833, "Slavery will be the next pretext for rebellion." Pretext! That pretext and weapon we wrench from rebel
