the South sees, that the greatest calamity that could have befallen the South would have been the ascendency of this ill-starred Confederacy. [Applause.] Because that Confederacy carried to the utmost extreme, to the reductio ad absurdum, the right of secession, carried in its bosom the seed of its own destruction, and even in the progress of war, welded together as we were under pressure, some were so recalcitrant, that the president of the Confederacy recommended the suspension of the habeas corpus act for the suppression of disaffection, and let me say, rebels as we were, so true were we to the traditions of Anglo-Saxon liberty that we never would suspend for a moment that sacred sanction of personal freedom. [Applause.] And, moreover, we see now, you will be surprised at what I say, I voice the sentiment of every reflecting man in Virginia, and woman too.  We see now that slavery was a material and a moral evil, and we exult that the black man is emancipated and stands as our equal under the law.

Why didn’t we see it before?  You know the story of the view of the opposite sides of the shield.  We had been educated under slavery, our preachers had taught us that it had the sanction of the Divine Scripture, we never saw any other aspect of the question, but now since it is changed, we look at it and we perceive that slavery is not only incompatible with the moral principles of government, but is hostile to the material interests of the country, and I repeat that to-day, if the people of the South were permitted to vote upon the question to re-establish African slavery, there would not be a hundred votes in the entire South, in favor of reshackling the limbs of the liberated negro.

Gentlemen, that is the attitude of old Virginia, the Old Dominion, as we proudly call her, and as such I am sure you will pardon her, because when she was in the Union she never failed you in any emergency; when you were menaced by the invasion of the British, it was Winfield Scott and the Cockade Corps of Virginia that repelled the enemy from your shores.  Old Virginia has always been true to the Union, if you blot from her history that recent episode which I say you have blotted generously from your memory, and she from hers; we stand now with you, and I have personal testimony of the fact, because coming among you, not only an utter stranger, and having against me natural prejudices as a rebel, nevertheless, I have been received in the State of New York with nothing but courtesy and kindness.  Mr. Benjamin, in England, is no parallel instance, because he went among a people who sympathized with the Rebellion, and who, if they had dared to strike would have taken sides with the Rebellion, but I came here to those who naturally would have repelled me, but instead of rejecting me, they have kindly taken me to the bosom of their hospitalities and have rewarded me infinitely beyond my merits; and to them, and especially to my brother lawyers of the State of New York, I feel the profoundest gratitude, in attestation of which I trust that when I go, my bones may rest under the green sod of the Imperial State. [Applause.]