no remedy for any evils in our Government, real or imaginary, past, present, or to come.

I will go further, if you please, and affirm that the Constitution has, in the clearest terms, recognized the right of property in slaves. That sacred instrument prohibits any State into which a slave may have fled, from passing any law to discharge him from bondage, and declares that he shall be surrendered to his lawful owner by the authorities of any State within whose limits he may be found. More than this, sir, the Constitution makes the existence of slavery our foundation of political power, by giving to the Slave States representatives in Congress not only in proportion to the whole number of free negroes, but also in proportion to the three-fifths of the number of slaves. The Northern States, by their "Personal Liberty Laws," have placed themselves in a state of revolution, and unless they repeal these laws, the revolution-a thing that never goes backward-must go on, until these rebellious States are declared out of the Union, and the truly conservative States take the Union in charge!

I have, my dear sir, defined my position, and in such terms as not to be misunderstood. I have already extended my remarks beyond what I intended in the outset. I will therefore close with brief extracts from the pens of three distinguished men, and I ask your attention to what they have said. The two first

assisted in framing the Constitution. Mr. JEFFERSON remarked, in a letter to John Taylor, dated June 1, 1798,

'If on the temporary superiority of the one party the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no Federal Government can ever exist.

"Who can say what would be the evils of a scission, and when and where they would end? Better keep together as we are; haul off from Europe as soon as we can, and from attachments to all portions; and, if they show their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game were sometimes against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have opportunity to win back the principles we have lost."

Mr. MADISON, in a paper he drew up a short time before his death, gives us this advice:

"The advice nearest my heart and deepest in my conviction is, that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened, and the disguised one as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.'

Gen. JACKSON, in his message to Congress, January 7, 1833, thus disposes of the question of Secession:

"The right of the people of a single State to absolve themselves at will, and without the consent of the other States, from their most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and happiness of the millions composing this Union, cannot be acknowledged. Such authority is believed utterly repugnant both to the principles upon which the General Government is constituted, and to the objects which it was expressly formed to attain."

To these sentiments I subscribe as heartily and as unswervingly as I do to those I have preceded them with. Very respectfully, &c.,

Knoxville Whig, December 8, 1860.

W. G. BROWNLOW.

To the People of East Tennessee.

The Governor has issued a call for the meeting of the Legislature on Monday, the 7th of January, and that body will call a Convention of the State, to act upon the great and only issue of the day, the breaking up of this Union by the secession of certain States from the Confederacy. We shall then be called upon to elect men from all of our Legislative districts, Representative and Senatorial, to represent us in that Convention; and this election will be upon us in a very short time, say two or three months. The single issue will then be, secession or no secession; or, in other words, Shall Tennessee follow the Cotton States out of the Union, or remain in the Union, true to the Constitution and the laws? Let those who dare to favor disunion become candidates, and show their hands. They will not be allowed to dodge the issue: they must declare either for or against secession. The people will force every man to define his position. We desire to see a candidate in every county on each side of the question, so as fully to test it; and we hope to see the ablest men in the State in the field, on both

tickets. It will not be Whig and Democrat, Bell and Breckinridge, or Douglas, but Union or Disunion.

The Cotton States have spurned the offer of certain border States to meet them in a friendly conference,declare they are going rashly and headlong out of the Union, and that these border States may either follow them or remain where they are. They allege our unity of interests, but refuse us harmony of action. Five refractory States claim the right to dictate to TEN conservative States, and to involve them in all the horrors of civil war, extending along a border of fifteen hundred miles; but they indignantly refuse to confer with these TEN States. If these border States were their enemies, then there would be some propriety in refusing their counsels. The border States have been their friends, through evil and good report; they have been their companions in arms, and side by side they have fought many a battle and triumphed over the British and Indians. But now, in matters in which we are as deeply interested as they are, they give us the cold shoulder, and refuse to meet us in counsel, to see if some course of procedure cannot be agreed upon by which all who are identified in interest should unite forces against our enemies.

We are, in fact, "in the midst of a revolution,"— a phrase whose dreadful meaning, as interpreted in the history of nations, none of us now realize the force of. The honest yeomanry of these border States,

whose families live by their hard licks, four-fifths of whom own no negroes and never expect to own any, are to be drafted,-forced to leave their wives and children to toil and suffer, while they fight for the purse-proud aristocrats of the Cotton States, whose pecuniary abilities will enable them to hire substitutes! Revolution, or civil war, is no holiday affair; and those who expect to carry it on by the bright and shining light of pleasure and prosperity are to experience the saddest of disappointments.

Let us be calm, fellow-countrymen of the border States, and weigh well every step we take towards meeting these avowed enemies of the Union in counsel. That great teacher-history-shows a multitude of cases in which whole communities, and sometimes nations, have been led into disastrous and wholesale. calamities, under excitements not so terrific as that which now agitates these States. In proof of this, we could refer to the South-Carolina-like insanity which seized upon whole nations of Europe, and led them to inhospitable graves on the bloody fields of battle. The most impressive and notable of these is furnished by the terrific French Revolution, which began with a Convention, culminated in the decapitation of a king, and ended in the worst form of a military despotism. Tennesseans! let us not disregard these stern teachings of history. Human nature and man are essentially the same in all ages. The demagogues who denied to