The Victim - Jr. Thomas Dixon

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the certainty of an uprising of your slaves at home?"

      Jennie laughed.

      "Our slaves would fight for us if we'd let them—"

      A curious smile twitched the lips of the Italian.

      "You speak with great confidence, Miss Barton!"

      "Yes. I know what I'm talking about."

      The keen eyes watched her from the shadows of the straight thick brows.

      "And your Senators who took a solemn oath in entering this Chamber to support the Constitution will leave their seats in violation of that oath?"

      The Southern girl flushed, turned with quick purpose to answer, laughed and said with winning frankness:

      "You don't mind if I give you my father's answer in his own words? I know them by heart—"

      "By all means."

      "An oath to support the Constitution of the United States does not bind the man who takes it to support an administration elected by a mob whose purpose is to subvert the Constitution!"

      "Oh—I see," was the quiet response.

      "You speak English with perfection, Signor!" Jennie said with a smile.

      "Yes, Mad'moiselle, I've spent my life in the Diplomatic service."

      He bowed gravely, lifted his head and caught the smile on the lips of the Secretary of War standing in the shadows of the doorway of the Diplomatic gallery.

      The stately figure of John C. Breckinridge, the Vice-President, suddenly mounted the dais and his piercing eyes swept the assembly. He rapped for order and the silence which followed was as the hush of death.

      "The curtain rises on our drama, Mad'moiselle," the smooth even voice said.

      "Sh!" the girl whispered.

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       Table of Contents

      The breathless galleries leaned forward to catch the slightest sound from the arena below.

      One by one the Senators from the seceding Southern States rose and renounced their allegiance to the United States in obedience to the voice of their people.

      With each solemn exit the women of the galleries grew hysterical, waved their perfumed handkerchiefs and shouted their approval with cries of sympathy and admiration.

      David Yulee, Stephen K. Mallory and Benjamin Fitzpatrick had each closed his portfolio and with slow measured tread marched down the crowded aisle and out of the Chamber never again to enter its doors.

      All eyes were focused now on the brilliant young Senator from Alabama, Clement C. Clay, Jr. It was understood that he had prepared an eloquent defense of his action and would voice the passionate feeling of the masses of the Southern people in this his last utterance in the crumbling temple of the old Republic.

      He rose in his place, lifted his strong head with its leonine locks and broad, high forehead, paused a moment and began his speech in the clear steady tones of the trained orator, master of himself, his theme and his audience. The Northern Senators met his gaze with scorn and he answered with a look of bold defiance.

      The formal announcement of the secession of his State he made in brief sharp sentences and plunged at once into the reasons for their solemn act.

      "Forty-two years ago, Alabama was admitted into the Union," he declared in ringing tones. "She entered it as she goes out, with the Republic convulsed by the hostility of the North to her domestic institutions. Not a decade has passed, not a year has elapsed since her birth as a State that has not been marked by the steady and insolent growth of the mob violence of the North which has demanded the confiscation of her property and the destruction of the foundations of her civilization.

      "Who are the leaders of these mobs who seek thus to overthrow the Constitution? Who are these hypocrites who claim the championship of freedom and the moral leadership of the world?

      "The men who sold their own slaves to us because they could not use them with profit in a northern climate; the men who built and manned every American slave ship that ever sailed the seas; the sons of old Peter Faneuil of Boston who built Faneuil Hall, their cradle of liberty, out of the profits of slave ships whose trade the Southern people had forbidden by law; the men who have flooded Congress for two generations with petitions to dissolve the Union; the men who threatened to secede with the addition of every foot of territory we have added to our Republic!

      "These are the men who have denied to the manhood of the South Christian Communion because they could not endure what they have been pleased to style the moral leprosy of Slavery! These are the men who refuse us permission to sojourn or even pass through the sacred precincts of a Northern State and dare to carry our servants with us. These are the men who deny to the South equal rights in the lands of the West bought by Southern blood and brains and added to our inheritance against their furious protests. These are the men who burn the sacred charters of American Liberty in their public squares, and inscribe on their banners the foul motto:

      "'The Constitution is an agreement with Death, a covenant with Hell.'

      "These are the men who dare to call us traitors! These are the men who have deliberately passed laws in fourteen Northern States nullifying the provisions of the Constitution of the Union which they have sworn to defend and enforce—"

      The speaker paused and lifted high above his head a little morocco bound volume.

      "Here in the presence of Almighty God—the God of our fathers, and these witnesses, I read its solemn provisions which the laws of fourteen Northern States have brazenly and openly defied!"

      He opened the little book and slowly read:

      "'Article 4, Section 2.

      "'No person held to service of labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor—but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.'"

      He turned suddenly to the Northern Senators:

      "Your States have not only repudiated the Constitution you have sworn to uphold, but your emissaries have invaded the peaceful South and sought to lay it waste with fire and sword and servile insurrection. You have murdered Southern men who have dared demand their rights on Northern soil. You have invaded the borders of Southern States, burned their dwellings and murdered their people. You have proclaimed John Brown, the criminal maniac who sought to murder innocent and helpless men, women and children in Virginia, a hero and martyr and then denounced us in your popular meetings, your religious and legislative assemblies as habitual violators of the laws of God and the rights of humanity! You have exerted all the moral and physical agencies that human ingenuity can devise or a devil's malice employ to heap odium and infamy upon us and make the very name of the South a by-word of hissing and of scorn throughout the civilized world—"

      He paused overcome with emotion and lifted his hand to stay the burst of applause from the galleries.

      "We have borne all this for long years and might have borne it many more under the assurance of our Northern friends that such fanaticism does not represent the true heart of the Northern people. But the fallacy of these promises and the folly of our hopes have been too clearly proven in the late election. The platform of the political party on which you have swept every Northern State and elected a sectional President is a foul libel upon our character and a declaration of open war on the lives and property of the

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