•7 
 
DEMOCRATIC PEACE 
 
 OFFEEED FOR THE AOOEPTANOE 
 
 OF 
 
 PENNSYLVANIA YOTERS- 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 1864. 
 
 
^ 
 
 : U - 
 
A DEMOCEATIC PEACE. 
 
 As Pennsylvania goes, so goes the Union. No candidate for 
 the Presidency has ever succeeded in the. popular vote without 
 receiving that of the Keystone State. Her soil has thus came 
 to be regarded as the decisive battle-ground in a Presidential 
 campaign, and no efforts are spared to secure her all-powerful 
 influence. This casts an additional responsibility upon her 
 voters, and every citizen should feel, as he approaches the polls, 
 that perhaps his ballot may decide the destiny of the Nation. 
 
 For this is no common election which is now upon us. It is 
 no mere struggle between opposing hordes of office-seekers. It 
 is the inevitable strife between Light and Darkness, between 
 Liberty and Despotism, between Order and Anarchy. Let the 
 right triumph, and a regenerated Nation will again spring for- 
 ward on the mission of civilization, which will render it the con- 
 trolling power of the earth. Let the enemies of Union succeed, 
 and our future lies darkly threatening before us — a mass of war- 
 ring republics, reduced, to anarchy, till half a century of name- 
 less suffering shall make our children fly to the arms of military 
 despotism, as a refuge from worse evils. 
 
 This is no fancy picture, but the sober, stern reality. Ex- 
 amine for yourselves the principles and policy avowed by the 
 two parties which now solicit your suffrages ; give to them the 
 close, earnest attention which the momentous choice demands of 
 freemen, and you cannot but realize the truth. 
 
 On the one hand the National Union Party asks you to bear 
 for yet a brief space the sacrifices of war ; to give an earnest 
 
support to those wlio are carrying on the struggle ; to resolve 
 that nothing shall dissever the Union of our fathers. Nerve 
 your manhood to do this, and from the St. John's to the Rio 
 Grande, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we shall have one na- 
 tion, one people, whose happy industry will in a few short years 
 erase all traces of our destructive strife, and when we shall have 
 passed away, our children will rise and call us blessed. 
 
 On the other hand the so-called Democracy appeals to your 
 basest fears, and asks you to purchase a year or two of delu- 
 sive peace with an indefinite period of strife, to which our recent 
 struggles offer no comparison. Demagogues seek to appal you 
 with prophecies of bankruptcy and defeat. They tell you that 
 the rebellion cannot be subdued, and must be treated with. That 
 war has failed, and that diplomacy must settle terms of peace. 
 The rebels have declared that no terms will be listened to that 
 do not concede as an indispensable preliminary the independence 
 of the South. A Democratic peace, therefore, means separation, 
 and separation means eternal war. 
 
 Examine the Chicago platform. It is short and simple, and 
 in what it says and what it omits to say, it reduces the issues 
 between the two great parties practically to the one point — 
 honorable peace through successful war, or disastrous peace 
 through negotiation. There is in it no word respecting slavery 
 or abolition. That question is thrown out of sight, for it is 
 superseded by the expectation of a divided nation, with freedom 
 on one side of the line, and slavery on the other. There is no 
 word respecting the Monroe doctrine and Mexico, for a Northern 
 republic has no interests on the Gulf, and when two nearly equal 
 Nationalities shall be established, it were folly for one of them to 
 dictate what shall be the destinies of a continent no longer under 
 our control. 
 
 So much for what it does not say. "What it does say is re- 
 ducible to two points — condemnation of the Administration for 
 the exercise of unconstitutional power, and the cessation of hos- 
 tilities to negotiate for peace. 
 
 The former of these, to which so large a portion of the rcso- 
 
lutions is devoted, scarcely needs an allusion. The unexampled 
 violence of language habitually used by Democratic orators and 
 journals, when abusing the Administration, is sufficient refutation 
 of the assertion that liberty, and even license of speech and of 
 the press, has been endangered. That no real difference exists 
 between the two great parties on this point is abundantly evi- 
 dent in the choice of the Chicago candidate. It was General 
 McClellan himself who initiated the policy of military arrests 
 when he seized the Maryland Legislature in full session in Sep- 
 tember,,1861, an act perfectly justifiable, but which hSs since 
 had no parallel. So likewise in the Maryland election of No- 
 vember, 186J, he set the example of military surveillance over . 
 elections, by "protecting" Union voters with a file of soldiers 
 at each poll. Mr. Harris, a delegate from that State, brought 
 these matters before the Convention, and in opposing the nomi- 
 nation of General McClellan, declared that "all the charges you 
 can make against Abraham Lincoln and against Benjamin 
 Butler, I can make and sustain against this man, George B. 
 McClellan." — " Those things that we have charged so frequently 
 against Abraham Lincoln, he, George B. McClellan, has been 
 guilty of himself." When, in the face of these facts, the Con- 
 vention nominated General McClellan unanimously, the party 
 accepted and endorsed his acts, and committed itself to the 
 policy and doctrine of " military necessity." Between the parties 
 there is no difference on that score. 
 
 The question of war or peace is, therefore, the only one at 
 issue. The National Union men boldly declare that the war 
 must be prosecuted until military resistance is overcome by the 
 sword, until the supremacy of the National Government and of 
 the Constitution shall be acknowledged everywhere within the 
 territories of the United States. They pledge the whole re- 
 sources of the Nation to accomplish this, and will be satisfied 
 with nothing less. They hold that in no other way can a Union 
 worth having be restored ; that no compromises shall tempt 
 future rebellions by rewarding rebels ; and that no sacrifices are 
 too great to secure the future stability of the institutions which 
 
so long conferred upon us unexampled prosperity and hap- 
 piness. 
 
 The Democrats on the other hand proclaim that " the ex- 
 periment of war" has been a failure, and that our highest 
 interests demand an "immediate" " cessation of hostilities, with 
 a view to the ultimate convention of all the States, or other 
 peaceable means to that end, that at the earliest practicable 
 moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal 
 Union of the States." 
 
 No thoughtful man can fail to see that this means simply 
 Disunion, in spite of the saving clause at the end. To openly 
 advocate Disunion itself, would cost too many votes, for the 
 people have not sunk so low as to knowingly abandon the price- 
 less heritage bequeathed to them by their fathers. It was safer 
 and more politic to profess a moderate zeal for "the basis of the 
 Federal Union," whatever that may be, and to advocate a course 
 which would indirectly but not less surely, lead to that result. 
 
 To grant an armistice, or "cessation of hostilities," is to 
 abandon at once and forever all hope of subduing the rebellion. 
 It means to raise the blockade, and allow the free export of 
 cotton and naval stores to Europe, and the importation of un- 
 limited munitions of war in exchange. It means the withdrawal 
 of our forces from New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, Little Rock, 
 Charleston Harbor, Port Royal, Newberne, Petersburg, Chat- 
 tanooga, Nashville, Knoxville and Memphis. Perhaps even 
 St. Louis, Louisville, Wheeling and Baltimore would have to be 
 abandoned ; for Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Mis- 
 souri arc claimed by the Confederacy, with fully as much show 
 of legal right as Tennessee, Arkansas, or Louisiana. An 
 armistice thus means the giving up of all that we have gained 
 during three years of mighty war, and permitting the rebels to 
 restore and consolidate their power. It gives them all that they 
 could have asked had they been successful on every field of battle. 
 It means recognition abroad and independence at home. 
 
 At the expiration of such an armistice, a resumption of hos- 
 tilities for the suppression of the rebellion would be impossible. 
 
Thrown back to the starting point, dispirited, our credit de- 
 stroyed, our patriotic ardor checked, we should be in no condition 
 to undertake again the gigantic task which we had abandoned 
 when nearly accomplished. Our expenditures would have con- 
 tinued during the interval with but little abatement, for we 
 should have felt it necessary to keep our navy and land forces 
 on their present footing, to resist the aggression which would 
 otherwise follow any refusal of the demands of our triumphant 
 enemy, and our capacity to raise funds by loan would be virtually 
 annulled, for a Government which cannot maintain its authority 
 cannot maintain its credit. Humiliated and discredited, quar- 
 relling among ourselves, with discordant interests no longer re- 
 pressed by any central authority worthy of respect, we should 
 enter a conference or convention in the worst possible position 
 for negotiation. 
 
 The Confederacy on the other hand, would hold all the winning 
 cards. Keleased from the iron gripe which is now threatening 
 its destruction, the relentless despotism which controls it would 
 turn to the best account the magnificent opportunities afforded 
 by our cowardice and folly. Credit abroad, based upon cotton, 
 would give it all the resources it would want. Deserters from 
 conscription would be remorselessly hunted down and forced 
 into the ranks. The vast territories abandoned by our troops 
 would yield large levies of men and open a wide area for the 
 impressment of supplies. Salt, coal and iron would be indus- 
 triously mined, and stores, munitions and implements of war 
 would be rapidly accumulated. Ere the necessary preliminaries 
 of a convention could be gone through with, the Confederacy 
 would stand before us armed at every point, and menacing us 
 on every border. 
 
 As, by the fact of our consenting to an armistice and turning 
 from war to negotiation, we should have confessed our inability 
 to enforce a restoration of the Union, there could arise in the 
 convention no question of restoration, unless the Confederacy 
 should choose to propose it. Any insistance on such a point by 
 us would be laughed to scorn. We might beg for it, — wc could 
 
8 
 
 not demand it. What chance there would be that such a prayer 
 would be granted, we know from the unwarying declarations of 
 the rebels. If the unequivocal assertions of Messrs. Clay and 
 Holcombe at the Niagara conference be rejected as unauthorized, 
 we have the official manifests of the Richmond Congress during 
 its last session, and the official statements of Jefferson Davis 
 himself in his recent interview with Colonel Jaquess and Mr. 
 Gilmore: — "The war came, and now it must go on till the last 
 man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize 
 his musket and fight his battles, unless you acknowledge our 
 right to self-government. AVe are not fighting for slavery. We 
 are fighting for independence, and that or extermination we will 
 Jiave. — Say to Mr. Lincoln from me that I shall at any time be 
 pleased to receive proposals for peace on the basis of our inde- 
 pendence. It will be useless to approach me with any other." 
 Or, in the more diplomatic form of Mr. Secretary Benjamin's 
 protocol : — 
 
 " The President (Jeff. Davis,) said that the separation of the 
 States ivas an accomplished fact ; that he had no authority to 
 receive proposals for negotiations except hy virtue of his office as 
 President of an independent Confederacy ^ and on this basis 
 alone must proposals he made to him." 
 
 No one, not wilfully blind and deaf, can imagine that the 
 oligarchs who rule the South, and who can thus defiantly assert 
 their independence when Grant, Sherman, Farragut and Sheridan 
 are thundering upon the shrunken limits of their Confederacy, 
 would listen to our supplications and submit themselves to the 
 Constitution which they have spurned, after we had abandoned 
 all our advantages, and acknowledged our inability to make a 
 permanent impression upon their territories. 
 
 We are thus brought face to face with Disunion. We are 
 to recognize as an independent nation the States which have re- 
 belled against the common authority of the Constitution ; and 
 the " Convention," which the Chicago platform proposes as the 
 panacea for all our woes, will find its functions limited to the 
 treating of the terms of separation. Into that dismal negotia- 
 
■ 9 
 
 tion we shall enter under every possible disadvantage. The 
 armistice will have placed us in an inferiority of position against 
 which we may vainly struggle, and the questions of the boundary 
 line, the status of the border slave States, the division of the 
 Territories, the^ navigation of the Mississippi, the partition of 
 the navy, the apportionment of the old public debt, the rendition 
 of fugitive slaves, and the thousand other perplexing questions 
 arising from the settlement of our complicated interests, will be 
 decided against us by the imperious and triumphant Con- 
 federacy. 
 
 How they may be decided is, however, a matter of compara- 
 tively minor importance in view of the tremendously greater 
 evils of simple Disunion. In yielding that, we yield all. Have 
 we ever looked this dread contingency full in the face, and 
 realized all its awful purport ? If not, it were well we did so 
 now, when it may depend upon the ballot of each individual 
 citizen. 
 
 Disunion, then, means the establishment of a boundary line 
 of a thousand leagues, with no natural barrier. It means to 
 have a hostile nation, embittered by the wrongs inflicted and en- 
 dured during four years of furious war, separated from us by 
 an imaginary boundary, and ready, on the slightest pretext, to 
 renew the conflict. It means to have Lee's army posted per- 
 manently on our border, prepared, at any unguarded moment, 
 to lay waste our territories, and to repay, on our smiling valleys, 
 , the waste and desolation of Virginia. It means to live in per- 
 petual war or apprehension of war. Causes of quarrel would be 
 BO numerous, that peace would be exceptional, and the narrow 
 intervals of peace would be poisoned by the uncertainty of 
 their continuance. The farmer sowing his grain would never 
 know who might reap the harvest. The trader laying in his 
 stock could never tell what unwelcome customer might empty his 
 shelves. Industry would be paralyzed, for the capitalist would 
 scarcely dare to trust his hoards to the railroad, the mine, or the 
 factory, which might at any moment be at the mercy of the 
 thousand vicissitudes of war. Our substance would be eaten up 
 
10 ' 
 
 by huge standing armies requisite for protection. Permanent 
 systems of conscription would become obligatory, and every man 
 ■would have to give the fairest years of his youth to military 
 service. Taxation, such as we now have no conception of, 
 would be necessary to keep up huge warlike, establishments. 
 The whole structure of our society would be changed, and our 
 liberties would fall a sacrifice in adapting ourselves to the new 
 order of things. 
 
 The South would be essentially a military nation. Slavery, 
 secured and perpetuated, would establish forever an aris- 
 cracy, which, released from labor, would seek in arms and 
 politics an employment for its energies. The " poor white 
 trash," disdaining honest labor, would afford material for its 
 armies, and on many bloody fields we have learned what their 
 disciplined valor can accomplish. With agricultural products 
 commanding the markets of the world, a few years would enable 
 them to build or buy a navy equal to our own in strength, and 
 in no future war could we pretend to blockade their thousands 
 of miles of coast. We have found that slavery is an element of 
 strength in war, instead of weakness, as we formerly supposed ; 
 and the turbulent ambition of the oligarchy would devote itself 
 to founding a great military empire, which would permit none 
 to live in peace in its neighborhood, and which would be far 
 more formidable than its mere numbers would indicate. We 
 have learned to our cost how admirably its territory is suited to 
 defensive warfare, and we must calculate that all future wars 
 would be waged upon our own soil. 
 
 No State in the Union has so much to dread from this as 
 Pennsylvania. In any division, she must be content to be upon 
 the border. She must bear the first brunt of every attack. 
 Countless raids and invasions will lay waste her fields and 
 villages, and her industrious population will be driven away to 
 seek some safer refuge, for love of home will not withstand the 
 repetition of such deeds as the destruction of Chambersburg. 
 She, of all others, must turn her attention from honest industry 
 to warlike preparation. Her coal and iron and lumber and oil. 
 
11 
 
 her wheat and corn may be neglected, but her camps and for- 
 tresses cannot. The first condition of her existence will be that 
 her military interests overrule all others, and that the whole 
 strength of her, population constitute a thoroughly drilled and 
 organized army,. ready for deadly service at a moment's notice. 
 Such a condition is incompatible with progress or improvement, 
 and she must be content to be the bulwark of her Northern sis- 
 ters, and the battle-ground of a continent. 
 
 Should Pennsylvania cast her lot with the South, as has been 
 suggested by some of our Democratic leaders, her position would 
 be no better. They would have no community of interests or 
 of feeling with her, and would use her mercilessly for their own 
 ends. Her sons, conscripted for their armies, would perish 
 ingloriously in the effort to extend the area of slavery over 
 Mexico, or to reduce their Northern brethern to our own con- 
 dition of slavery. We should be virtually a conquered country, 
 and though we might be permitted to send Representatives to a 
 Confederate Congress, we should be reminded in every debate 
 and in every statute of our inferiority. Some few of our leaders 
 might be allowed, contemptuously, some share of plunder to 
 keep them faithful to their masters, but we, the people, solitary 
 in our degradation, Avould know only the whip and the heel of 
 the despot. We could not hope to carry with us Ohio, who re- 
 jected, by a hundred thousand majority, the traitor Vallandig- 
 ham. The foul corruption of New York City might be willing 
 to emulate our infatuated infamy, but the masses of her interior 
 population would reject with disdain our miserable example. 
 New England has always one resource — union with the British 
 Provinces — which, separated from the parent country, would 
 form with her a powerful Federal Republic, with an illimitable 
 future. To such a republic, New York would probably unite 
 herself, and together with the other States around the great 
 lakes, w^ould constitute a nation containing all the elements of 
 prosperity, if only peace could be secured. 
 
 Such would be the position of Pennsylvania in a simple 
 division of the Nation into two parts. This, however, would be 
 
12 
 
 most unlikely. The great Federal bond, once loosened, becomes 
 a rope of sand, and tlie process of disintegration once commenced 
 would be impossible to arrest. The establishment of a Southern 
 Confederacy would be followed by that of a Pacific republic, 
 while the North-West, the Middle States, and New England 
 would probably be organized in three separate federations. The 
 South, held together by the common bond of slavery, would be 
 stronger than either of the rest. Perennial causes of quarrel 
 would arise between them all. War would become the normal 
 condition. Foreign intervention would complicate domestic 
 politics, and by skilful alliances the preponderance of the South 
 would subjugate one by one the remainder of the States, and, 
 after half a century of ceaseless and desolating strife, our once 
 happy Union would be a consolidated military tyranny, with 
 its industrial civilization crushed out beneath the iron heel of 
 war. 
 
 This fearful future, Citizens of Pennsylvania, is the legitimate 
 result of the principles insidiously presented for your acceptance 
 by the modern Democracy. It seems almost an insult to your 
 intelligence and to your manhood for us thus to warn you against 
 them, but the Opposition rely upon finding among the people a 
 craven fear of the sacrifices entailed by a prolongation of the 
 war, which may lead the unthinking to purchase a momentary 
 respite with an indefinite future of tumult and disorder. In this 
 we trust that they have miscalculated your clear-sightedness and 
 your patriotism. 
 
 It matters little that their candidate has been ashamed to 
 avow his adoption of their odious platform. It matters little 
 that the one proclaims the war to be a failure, while the other 
 declares that he could not look a soldier in the face and tell him 
 that the sacrifice had been in vain ; that the one pronounces in 
 favor of an immediate cessation of hostilities, while the other 
 insists that the Union must be preserved at all hazards ; that 
 the State Ptights doctrine of the platform becomes the promise 
 of a "more vigorous nationality" of the candidate; that the 
 arraignment of the administration in the platform, for alleged 
 
13 
 
 perversions of the war power, is passed discreetly over by the 
 candidate whose brightest record is connected with his exercise 
 of that same power under the plea of military necessity. All 
 this, we repeat, matters nothing. The candidate may be ashamed 
 of the platform on which he stands, and yet he stands on that 
 platform and no other. The fact that he has the grace to be 
 ashamed of it only deepens the disgrace of his acceptance of 
 such a position, and destroys any lingering hope which we may 
 have entertained that in his character there might ultimately be 
 found an antidote for the poison of his party. A man with so 
 little independence as to accept a nomination tendered to him on 
 principles which he dare not avow, is not a man to be trusted in 
 the dread crisis before us. He soothes his conscience with a few 
 meaningless phrases in his letter of acceptance, and then casts 
 himself in the arms of those who promise him a seat in the 
 White House. They know their man. Vallandigham and Sey- 
 mour, Fernando Wood and William B. Reed are of a diiferent 
 calibre from the weak and vacillating candidate whom they have 
 selected as their tool, and they will hold him to their bidding. 
 
 The choice is before you. The re-election of Abraham Lincoln 
 by an overwhelming majority will declare to the world the un- 
 alterable purpose of the American people to "preserve the Union 
 at all hazards," and to maintain the supremacy of the Constitution 
 and the Government. It will not only give perpetuity to our 
 institutions in the future, but it will prove to the South that its 
 last lingering hope of success has failed, and the people, already 
 staggering under the blows of Grant and Sherman and Farragut 
 will recognize the futility of further resistance. In this way we 
 may reasonably look for an early and enduring Union peace. If, 
 misled by your own fears and the false teachings of double-faced 
 political leaders, you make the fatal error of elevating to power 
 the men who have framed the Chicago platform, you may, indeed, 
 purchase within the coming twelvemonth a Disunion peace, but 
 it will be at the cost of every interest which men hold dear, and 
 your children, to the latest generations, will have cause to rue 
 the weakness and pusillaminity of their fathers. 
 
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