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448 "Never," said he to me, "did I make a speech on behalf of a client, in jeopardy of his life, with such earnest solemnity and endeavor." "And," he added, "there was no simulated emotions for when he perceived from Lincoln's hints, and from the workings of his crafty and saturnine countenance, the truculence of his purpose, his own soul was filled with such a sense of the coming miseries of the country, and of the irreparable ruin of the Constitution, that he felt he would willingly lay down his life to avert them." He endeavored to make the President feel that Providence had placed the destiny of the country in his hands, so that he might be forever blessed and venerated as the second Washington—the savior of his country—or execrated as its destroyer. What policy, then, did the Union men of Virginia advise? We believe, answered Colonel Baldwin, that one single step will be sufficient to paralyze the secession movement, and to make the true friends of the Union masters of the situation. This was a simple proclamation, firmly pledging the new administration to respect the Constitution and laws, and the rights of the States; to repudiate the power of coercing seceded States by force of arms; to rely upon conciliation and enlightened self-interest in the latter to bring them back into the Union, and meantime to leave all questions at issue to be adjudicated by the constitutional tribunals. The obvious ground of this policy was in the fact that it was not the question of free-soil which threatened to rend the country in twain, but a well grounded alarm at the attempted overthrow of the Constitution and liberty, by the usurpation of a power to crush States. The question of free-soil had no such importance in the eyes of the people of the border States, nor even of the seceded States, as to become at once a casus belli. But, in the view of all parties in the border States, the claim of coercion had infinite importance. If, as Mr. Lincoln had argued, secession was unconstitutional, coercion was more clearly so. When attempted, it must necessarily take the form of a war of some States against other States. It was thus the death-knell of constitutional Union, and so a thorough revolution of the Federal Government. It was the overthrow of the reserved rights of the States, and these were the only bulwark of the liberty of the people. This, then, was the real cause of alarm at the South, and not the claim of free-soil, unjust as was the latter; hence, all that was necessary to reduce the free-soil controversy to harmless and manageable dimensions, was to reassure the South against the dreaded usurpation of which free-soil threatened to be