142 Southern Historical Society Papers,
latitude, unconstitutional. This was welcome to the South, but it fired the Northern heart. In 1859, John Brown, fresh from the border warfare of Kansas, suddenly appeared at Harper's Ferry with a band of misguided men, and, murdering innocent citizens, invoked the in- surrection of the slaves. This solidified and almost frenzied the South, and in turn the fate he suffered threw oil upon the Northern flames. Thus fell out of the gathering clouds the first big drops of the bloody storm. In i860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and in his inaugural address he proclaimed his party's creed that the Dred-Scott decision might be reversed. The Southern Slates were already in procession of secession The high tides of revolution were in their flow.
THE SOUTH AND THE UNION— ITS BATTLES.
Pause, now, upon the threshold, and geography and history will alike tell you that neither in its people nor in its leader was there lack of love for the Union, and that it was with sad hearts that they saw its ligaments torn asunder.. Lo »k t th Southern map. There may be read the name of Alamanc^ , Aiiere in 1771 the first drop of American blood was shed against arbitrary taxation, and at Mecklen- burg, where was sounded the first note of Independence. Before the Declaration at Philadelphia ihnx had risen in the Southern sky what Bancroft termed ** the bright morning star of American Independ- ence,*' where, on the 28th of June, 1776, the guns of Moultrie at the Palmetto fort in front of Charleston announced the first victory of American arms. At King's Mountain is the spot where the rough- and-ready men of the Carolinas and the swift riders of Virginia and Tennessee had turned the tide of victory in our favor, and there at Yorktown is the true birth spot of the free nation. Right here I stand to-night on the soil of that Slate which first of all America stood alone free and independent? Beyond the confines of the South her sons had rendered yeoman service ; and would not the step of the British conqueror have been scarce less than omnipotent had not Morgan's riflemen from the Valley of Virginia and the peerless com- mander of Mt. Vernon appeared on the plains of Boston ? You may follow the tracks of the Continentals at Long Island, Trenton, Prince- ton, Brandywine, Germantown, Valley Forge, Monmouth and Mor- ristown by the blood and the graves of the Southern men who died on Northern soil, far away from their homes, answering the question with their lives : Did the South love the Union ?
