to prostrate this government; and, sir, when that is done, so long as it please God to give me a voice to express my sentiments, or an arm, weak and enfeebled as it may be by age, that voice and that arm will be on the side of my country, for the support of the general authority, and for the maintenance of the powers of this Union!”
The enthusiasm of the galleries became so demonstrative that the presiding officer was obliged to ask the Senator from Kentucky to sit down until order could be restored.
He warned the disunionists, who expressed the belief that the army, commanded in so large a part by officers from Virginia, South Carolina, and other Southern States, would not draw their swords, that they would find themselves gravely mistaken. And, to leave no shadow of a doubt as to his conception of true loyalty to the Union, he said: —
“The honorable Senator speaks of Virginia being my country. This Union is my country; the thirty states are my country; Kentucky is my country, and Virginia no more than any other of the states of this Union. She has created on my part obligations and feelings and duties toward her in my private character which nothing upon earth would induce me to forfeit or violate. But even if it were my own state, — if my own state lawlessly, contrary to her duty, should raise the standard of disunion against the residue of the Union, — I would go against her; I would go against Kentucky in that contingency, much as I love her.”
Thus, believing his compromise to have been
