many sacrifices, both of rights and of honor, to avoid of dire necessity of resistance to Federal encroachments and Northern insults and injuries. This pacific and yielding policy of her people has been received at the North as merely increasing evidence of our weakness and utter dependence upon the Federal Union for protection and happiness.

It cannot be denied that for more than thirty years the Northern people have been waging a violent, inflammatory, and wholly unjustifiable war upon the institution of domestic slavery as it exists in the Southern States-an institution which underlies our whole social system, and upon the perpetuity of which depends in a large degree the wealth, prosperity, and general welfare of the entire South.

First commencing their attacks upon slavery in the States, they continued their assaults until the united South, assisted by a large and respectable portion of the people of the non-slave-holding States, with common intent, met at the ballot boxes of the country and overwhelmed them with defeat and shame. The old Abolitionist party proper never commanded the respect nor received the support of any considerable number of the Northern people; and hence their attacks, although highly insulting and highly aggravating in their character, and clearly violative of their constitutional obligations, were harmless, except so far as they tended to inflame the passions, arouse the jealousies, and excite the hatred of the Southern mind.

The people of Georgia, while they have ever abhorred the canting philanthropy and the religious intolerance and treasonable machinations of the Abolitionists, have heretofore cherished a kindly and fraternal regard, and on all suitable occasions have manifested a warm and cordial appreciation, of the intelligence, virtue, and patriotism of the great body of the Northern people who have in the past so nobly breasted the popular clamor and blind fanaticism of their own section in defense of the constitutional rights of the South.

The increase of our public domain acquired by our contest with Mexico-a contest in which, without disparagement to any, it may be said that the South contributed as much of men and of means, and shared as much of the common glory won upon those ensanguined battle-fields, as any other portion of the Confederacy-gave birth to new organization, which sprang from the dead body of Abolitionism, having for its avowed object the preservation of this acquisition from what they were pleased to term the "blasting effects of involuntary servitude. "

Disappointed office hunters, ambitious politicians, and corrupt demagogues found here a common ground from which to make their assaults upon the Constitution and the Union, and by which they were borne into importance and power. The results of the recent Presidential election has shown but too well the sagacity of their movement and the success of their organization, had we not been already convinced of their power-and their power for harm-by their absolute control of the State governments of the entire antislavery portion of the Confederacy. Contemporaneous with the success of this corrupt and treasonable organization has been the melting away of the old conservative element there, until it has ceased to be able to make itself potent for the preservation of our constitutional rights.

It is hardly necessary that I should attempt to enumerate the several acts of this new organization, for "they are read and known of all men," which have impelled the people of Georgia to the extreme