i860] at cooper union
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had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress enforcing the pro- hibition of slavery in the Northwestern Terri- tory, which act embodied the pohcy of the gov- ernment upon that subject up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it, he wrote Lafayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should at some time have a confederacy of free States.
Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectional- ism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washing- ton himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you, who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it.*
But you say you are conservative — eminently conservative — while we are revolutionary, de- structive, or something of the sort. What is con- servatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick
- The passage in Washington's Farewell Address which
most explicitly warns against sectionalism is as follows :
"It is of infinite moment that you should properly esti- mate the immense value of your National Union to your collective and individual happiness, that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it ; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity ; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety ; and in'dignantly frowning upon the first dawning of any at- tempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts."
