Staunton Vindicator

An Unjust Prejudice.

One of the staple arguments of the secessionists is that the election of Lincoln will be a practical declaration that the people of the North are at war with the people of the South. This assumption is contrary to the actual facts in the case, and unjustly prejudicial to the conservative sentiment of the North. Let the conservative, national, union-loving element of the North have a hand-to-hand contest with the fanatical hordes who, with vandal impulses, seek to destroy the force of constitutional obligations and infringe upon the rights of the citizens of one portion of the confederacy, and we will guarantee that the friends of equality and the Constitution will significantly triumph over the ismatists. Instead of that, however, party leaders, and designing demagogues initiate political movements which are calculated to divide the conservative sentiment, and thus give power to an united and consolidated enemy who is really in the minority. There is a preponderance in favor of conservatism in the North, decidedly and uncompromisingly friendly to all the guaranteed rights of the South, yet when divided it is powerless to accomplish the very object for which we blame them in failing to effect. We should no more hold the great mass of the Northern people responsible for the Personal Liberty Bills of Massachusetts and Vermont, than should the entire South be held accountable for the extreme views of South Carolina. It is unjust to the people of the North to brand them as enemies of the Constitution and the rights of the South, when we assist in creating the divisions which paralyze their efforts to give practical efficiency to their real sentiments. It is hypocrisy and cowardice and ingratitude in us to charge the brave and true and high-souled men of the North with being our enemies when they are daily grappling with an avowed foe and seeking to strangle him to death. There never has been exhibited a grander and more sublime devotion to the Union and the constitutional rights of the South than the late fusion in New York between the friends of three candidates for the Presidency opposed to the "irrepressible conflict" candidate. Laying aside party attachments, yielding up party organizations and individual predilections as a holy oblation upon the alter of the Constitution and the Union, the conservative elements have banded together in a common fight against the avowed enemy of the South. When and where has ever been presented in the political history of the country a nobler spectacle of love for the right than in this union? It is for our rights that they have united--it is to defend us that these brave and true men have come together to beat down our enemies. And yet men in the South talk about dissolving their connection with such men! No! If a Black Republican should be elected by the divisions we are helping to create among the conservative men at the North, and that Black Republican should attempt to transgress one single letter or syllable of the Constitution, we will not, like cowards and poltroons, fly from the invader, but calling upon the conservative and constitution-loving majority of the North, we will march upon the traitor, and in the language of Judge Douglas, "hang him ten feet higher than Virginia hung old John Brown." We cannot, as men, respecting our manhood, be driven away from the Constitution. We must stand by and defend it. It is our inheritance, and we owe it to ourselves and to our posterity to keep it spotless from the touch of traitorous hands. It would be a pretty spectacle for those who boast themselves of their chivalry and courage, to run from a shadow, a phantom, and leave it in the hands of their sworn foe all that should be held dear by a patriot! If the South should fly from the contest, we will avouch that the Northern conservatives will rally as one man to the rescue, and wrest the government from the hands of the spoilers and traitors. It was never designed by God Almighty that this edifice, founded and built up for his glory in the spread of free religious and political principles and the development of human capacity for self-government--unfettered by imperial edicts or arbitrary enactments--should be torn down to gratify the passions of a band of infidels in heart to every principle of rational progress and legitimate and healthy intellectual expansion.

We must stand by the brave men of the North who, rising above sectional prejudice, are now standing by the Constitution. We must fight for it as we would our own firesides, and consider every man a friend and brother, who will lock shields with us to meet the charge of the enemy. Whenever the contest comes, if come it should, Southern men who have reviled and traduced and belied and besmeared the character of Judge Douglas will see him coming forward, as in times past, boldly and firmly bearing aloft the banner of the Union under the Constitution and equal rights to all, to join hands and heart with them in its defense. He now leads a column of gallant spirits in the North, many of whom have extended a helping hand to the South in time of need. They will do it again, and from such men we cannot separate. We have a common object in view, and by united action we can and will achieve it.

Hon. Wm. L. Yancey.

This gentleman delivered a speech to between two and three hundred persons, in the armory building of this place, on Wednesday evening last. As a declaimer and specious reasoner, he has few superiors. As an ingenious debater, seeking to place fairly and frankly before the country a faithful record of facts and an incontrovertible accumulation of unimpeachable testimony, he was, in his effort of Wednesday, totally and painfully deficient. While at times the flashes of a great mind would mark its line through the mass of his sophistry and superficiality, yet no one could fail to perceive that he relied upon impassioned appeals to sectional prejudice, and excited denunciation and execration to produce an effect. For instance, in alluding to the charges preferred against him, based upon his own writings, of entertaining disunion sentiments, he denied that he did, and indignantly exclaimed--"I scorn it--(stamp)--I trample it under my feet--(stamp)--I grind it beneath my heel"--(stamp). This kind of logic did not answer the demand of a reading, intelligent people, like the audience that listened to him. They wanted him to explain why it was he had written his Slaughter letter, in which he faintly foreshadowed his plan for "precipitating the Cotton States into a revolution" by "keeping up the old party relations on all other questions," and holding the "Southern issue paramount," "influencing PARTIES, LEGISLATURES and STATESMEN." He said in that letter it would not do at that time--1858--to dissolve the Democratic party.--"If the Democracy were overthrown, it would result in giving place to a greater and hungrier swarm of flies." Mark--it was merely a matter of policy with him to keep the Democracy united then, and not regard for the time-honored principles and historical and canonized patriotism of the Democracy. The "Southern issue" was "paramount," and every other issue and agency had to be bent to subserve that one. It was the Aaron's rod that swallowed up all others. The people of Augusta desired and expected to hear from Mr. Yancey's own lips the true interpretation of that remarkable letter, if by any process of contortion he could change the literal and palpable meaning of his own language. It is an easy matter to prate about the "Constitution--Union of the Constitution," and the like. It would not have been very politic for him to have talked in any other way before a conservative, law-abiding people, such as inhabit the "mountain fastnesses of West Augusta." But Mr. Yancey, when down in Alabama, remote from the "slave depopulated" border State of old Virginia [all bosh--we have more slaves now than we had ten years ago] can write his disunion manifestoes, and then come to Virginia and stir the inmost depths of the soul by his eloquent appeals for "the Union of the Constitution." What does Stephen A. Douglas both write and speak on this subject?--In his letter accepting the nomination of the Baltimore Convention, he says: "The Federal Union must be preserved. The Constitution must be maintained in all its parts. Every right guaranteed by the Constitution must be protected by law in all cases where legislation is necessary to its enjoyment. The judicial authority, as provided in the Constitution, must be sustained, and its decisions implicitly obeyed and faithfully executed. The laws must be administered and the Constitution authorities upheld, and all unlawful resistance suppressed." Not only has he thus written, but in every speech that he has made since the Baltimore Convention, he has declared from the hustings the same undying and unswerving devotion to the Constitution--or, if you please, "the Union of the Constitution and the equality of the States." Mr. Douglas' word will go as far with the people of Virginia as will Mr. Yancey's--therefore Mr. Y. gains nothing in his tour in the wake of Judge Douglas in his lachrymose paeans to the "Union of the Constitution." This being so, then compare their writings, and which of the two will Virginians trust in this hour of contention? W. L. Yancey, who is in favor of "precipitating the Cotton States into a revolution," or Stephen A. Douglas, who declares that the "FEDERAL UNION MUST BE PRESERVED. THE CONSTITUTION MUST BE MAINTAINED INVIOLATE IN ALL ITS PARTS?" It is true Mr. Yancey is not a candidate for any high office, ["although he might have been," as he says,] yet he is the representative man of the Breckinridge party. He is the great entity of the secession movement that nominated Mr. Breckinridge. He is the selected champion to follow after Mr. Douglas, and dispel his "heresies." He is the mouth piece, fugle-man, and thinking machine of that faction;--and the friends of Mr. Breckinridge are responsible for his sentiments, heretofore and now uttered. The Executive Committee at Washington are afraid to let Mr. Breckinridge himself take the stump. They prefer a more indirect and irresponsible course to counteract the uprising of the popular heart for Douglas wherever he has been. Hence they keep Mr. B. at home--seal his lips--and send Mr. Yancey out, whose remarkably versatile intellect and great power as a public debater, they imagine will stay the onward current in favor of Douglas and Democracy. How misguided!

Those who listened to Mr. Yancey and who also heard Mr. Douglas, could not fail to have marked the difference in the character of their speeches. Douglas was frank, open, bold, courteous and statesman-like. He denounced no one, but like a man anxious to conceal nothing and give to the country his entire views, he marched to the work of eliminating his opinions upon current questions, and especially the Territorial "dogma." Mr. Yancey was disingenuous and evasive, and not unfrequently absolutely suppressed facts materially affecting the points he was discussing and the true position of Judge Douglas.

To sum up the whole of the effects of his speech and the impression created on his audience--the expectation of his hearers was fully met in his power as a speaker. His immediate friends were satisfied with the speech throughout. The bulk of the audience were dissatisfied in his not clearing up his Slaughter and Pryor letters. They were chagrined at the quibbles and special pleading to which he resorted to prejudice the popular mind against Judge Douglas, and in which he exhibited a liberal proneness to do him gross injustice. The Bell men were disgusted at the raking of their candidate, and Democrats of both parties highly delighted.