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sir; the tactics so successful in Mississippi, so nearly successful in Louisiana, will surely be repeated this year in other States.

The horrible and cowardly butchery at Hamburg the other day was not in itself poIitical, but it is fatal evidence to show the temper of a large class of white people, and the slight consideration given to life when that life, God-given as it is, is incased in a black skin.

If without provocation white men troop in arms from one State into another, besiege, seize upon, and murder unoffending persons, what bounds can be set to this lust of blood when heated by the stormy appeals of partisans and fired by the passions of a great political

* Flection ?

The Hamburg murders are symptomatic and the disease they reveal is constitutional, deep-seated in the very marrow of society itself. Yet gentlemen from the North made mockery on this floor of the horrible recitals, until shamed by the bolder, braver, and more honorable denunciations of representative men from the South. I wait to see if even in South Carolina any measure of justice shall be meted out to the ruffianly crew, and not till that is done shall I believe to any great extent either in the apology or the denunciation. One honest, effective, wholesome hanging of a murderer convicted, sentenced, and executed under the law will be more convincing to me than all possible speeches on this floor or elsewhere.

| enlistment of colored troops; which denounced
the proclamation of emancipation; which op
posed bitterly, stubbornly, and ably the three
great amendments to the Constitution; which
fought them by all tactics in Congress; which
|
fought them in State conventions and in
State Legislatures; which denied, and denies
still, that they did ever become part of the
Constitution or are now the supreme law of
the land.

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It is this same Democracy, unchanged in principles, unaltered in prejudices, full of the old passions and the old unholy traditions; less defiant than of old, because less secure, but more artful, more designing, with more of the fox and less of the lion, that is seeking again to worm its way into the confidence of the American people, and thus roll back the progress of the age, and plunge us into the bitter and dreary days that marked their last possession of national power.

A Senator the other day challenged the whole Senate to name one single creditable thing done by the Democracy in twenty-five years, and the challenge remains unanswered. But you decline the past. You say it is not fair to look back or to inquire into past life. Parties, like individuals, win reputation by their lives and acts, and they cannot and should not escape from this unconscious record they have made. It is by what you have done and left undone, by your acts of commission and of omission, that judgment must pass.

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One of the reasons why this Republican As a party you died out of popular esteem party must live is to hold some sort of terror and popular favor in 1860, and there was just over the perpetrators of all this crime; for cause. Since that time until now you have neither the past nor the present of the De- been nothing and done nothing except to mocracy give any hope of protection for the hinder and complain. Your best use has weak and oppressed from them. For, sir, it been to be a drag-chain upon the triumphal was Democracy that denied the colored man wheels of the Republican movement. any rights that a white man was bound to structors you have never been, obstructers respect, and so far as it dare it does so still. always. You have forgotten in this long It was Democracy that insisted that the Con- absence from power and position all the art stitution carried slavery into our Territories; of government, for your whole ability has if it dared it would say so still. It was De-been given to detraction and finding fault. mocracy that permitted the growth and progress of the slaveholders' rebellion; that joined with them in the cry of a Union dissolvable at will; that declared the election of Lincoln cause for secession; that denied the right of coercion; that stripped the unwary nation bare of her weapons in the time of need; that proposed neutrality where it dared not fight; that denied the right of self-pres-war-scarred and bearded man lisp the songs ervation.

It was Democracy assembled in its highest sanhedrim in Chicago in 1864, after Gettysburg and Vicksburg, that by its special high priests, of whom Tilden was chief, declared the war a failure and insulted at once the good sense and the high courage of the people.

It was Democracy which condamned the

The country had a right to expect you to be awkward and clumsy in unaccustomed work, and it has not been disappointed.

You have forgotten that this country of today is not the country of 1860 or of 1812, and yet you try to force the mighty limbs of this centenarian giant of ours into the swaddlingbands of his infancy. You try to make this

of his cradle, and dwarf the grandeur of his manly stride to the diminutive and feeble efforts of his first attempt to stand alone.

You either do not know or you choose to forget that this nation has "put away childish things;" that it has hardened into manhood; that its mighty limbs have grown strong by struggling; that its fearless eye

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has looked down the worst gathering of evil Hendricks is John Bunyan's "Mr. Facingspirits the world has known; that its love of both-ways," and therefore supremely fitted right has become its life; that it has power for the Saint Louis platform. to discern, firmness to endure, and courage to overcome all evil things at home and abroad.

You forget the tremendous advances, educational, physical, and moral, that it has made since Democracy died of its own inherent worthlessness. You stand, all of you, like so many Mrs. Partingtons, in mob-caps and brooms in hand, sweeping valiantly but hopelessly back the vast tide of the Atlantic. You who have never ventured over kneedeep for many years now propose to put a hook in the jaws of Leviathan.

Fresh-water sailors whose experience has been in flat-bottomed bateaux upon some muddy and shallow inland pond, you ask to man and command the ship of state in the midst of storm and peril.

For captain you propose a sleek and snug attorney, who shall bring the tactics of Tammany and the ethics of railway practice upon the quarter-deck where Lincoln stood; a cold calculating partisan who made the most of his scoundrelly associates while they were prosperous and sold them out at a handsome profit when they fell into disrepute.

You would give the flag, symbol of the national honor, to the care of one whose narrow soul never knew the enthusiasm of patriotism.

Thus candidates and platform are equally deceptive, equally intended to deceive, and the whole programme of the approaching campaign is a speculation upon the credulity and gullibility of the American people.

It is the right and the duty of every citizen to sound the note of alarm when danger is impending; and both as individual citizen and as one of the Representatives of the people I arraign before the bar of public opinion the party, the candidates, the platform, and the Democratic majority of this House. I arraign them for their bad and bitter record in the past, for their sympathy with great wrongs and their hatred to great rights. I prove them by their own words and acts as unfaithful stewards and false guardians when in power. I prove them obstinately and persistently in the way of all the great developments of individual justice and of national purification from the sins and crimes of a century. I prove them justly condemned and despised in the past of the country they betrayed; and I see them now emerging from the sackcloth and ashes of sixteen years with the same unconquered prejudice, the same lust of arbitrary dominion, the same greediness for places, the same horror and contempt for equal rights reduced to practice, with the same hollow professions and the same emptiness of results which characterized their last appearance in pub

The great acts of the Republican party stand in wonderful relief in contrast with these; for, sir, from 1860 till 1876 they were the nation, and to them as a party is due the mighty fact that we endure as a nation History cannot be obliterated; for

You would give the great questions. of American industry into the hands of one whose whole active life has been a successful legal robbery of all the great means of inter-lic history. communication on which industry depends. You would give the great question of American currency into the hands one who represents, and is represented by, the gambling element of Wall street and the foreign jobbers who have possession of our bonds-to-day. the hard creditors of the nation and the when you strike out the record of the Repubharder creditors of our people as individ-lican party you blot out with it the greatest uals. glory and the greatest triumph of the country.

For first lieutenant of this old ship your proposition is dark, misty, double-faced, and uncertain. Some of us out West thought we knew him, but the waters of Saratoga and the company of Tilden have had so singular an effect on him that he might safely be made chairman of our Committee on Banking and Currency, which said committee, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is the most utterly unsolvable problem yet enunciated.

Strong in the past, secure of full appreciation for things well done, that party stands to-day rooted in the affections of millions of people, and by reason of its high and honorable course in the times of anguish and trial has won a reputation which makes its promises of value and gives assurance of the full and honest redemption of all its engagements to the people.

FAREWELL ADDRESS

OF

ANDREW JACKSON

то

THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES:

AND THE

INAUGURAL ADDRESS

OF

MARTIN VAN BUREN,

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

WASHINGTON:
BLAIR & RIVES, PRINTERS.

PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

FELLOW CITIZENS:

:

Being about to retire finally from public life, I beg leave to offer you my grateful thanks for the many proofs of kindness and confidence which I have received at your hands. It has been my fortune, in the discharge of public duties, civil and military, frequently to have found myself in difficult and trying situations, where prompt decision and energetic action were necessary, and where the interest of the country required that high responsibilities should be fearlessly encountered and it is with the deepest emotions of gratitude that I acknowledge the continued and unbroken confidence with which you have sustained me in every trial. My public life has been a long one, and I cannot hope that it has, at all times, been free from errors. But I have the consolation of knowing that, if mistakes have been committed, they have not seriously injured the country I so anxiously endeavored to serve; and, at the moment when I surrender my last public trust, I leave this great people prosperous and happy; in the full enjoyment of liberty and peace; and honored and respected by every nation of the world.

If my humble efforts have, in any degree, contributed to preserve to you these blessings, I have been more than rewarded by the honors you haye heaped upon me; and, above all, by the generous confidence with which you have supported me in every peril, and with which you have continued to animate and cheer my path to the closing hour of my political life. The time has now come, when advanced age and a broken frame warn me to retire from public concerns; but the recollection of the many favors you have bestowed upon me is engraven upon my heart, and I have felt that I could not part from your service without making this public acknowledgment of the gratitude I owe you. And if I use the occasion to offer to you the counsels of age and experience, you will, I trust, receive them with the same indulgent kindness which you have so often extended to me; and will, at least, see in them an earnest desire to perpetuate, in this favored land, the blessings of liberty and equal laws.

We have now lived almost fifty years under the constitution framed by the sages and patriots of the Revolution. The conflicts in which the nations of Europe were engaged during a great part of this period; the spirit in which they waged war against each other; and our intimate commercial connexions with every part of the civilized world, rendered it a time of much difficulty for the Government of the United States. We have had our seasons of peace and of war, with all the evils which precede or follow a state of hostility with powerful nations. We encountered these trials with our constitution yet in its infancy, and under the disadvantages which a new and untried Government must always feel when it is called upon to put forth its whole strength, without the lights of experience to guide it, or

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