NEW ERA IN SECRET POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS--PLEDGE TO "TAKE UP ARMS" FOR JEFF. DAVIS--TRUE DEMOCRACY STRUCK DOWN--NATIONAL AND STATE LEADERS--INVINCIBLE CLUB LEADERS--VALLANDIGHAM'S RETURN TO THE STATES IN HIS CAPACITY OF SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE SONS OF LIBERTY.
A new era in the history of secret political orders was opened by the Sons of Liberty.
As the Presidential election of 1864 approached, the party in the minority began to appreciate the awkwardness of its attitude upon the political issues of the day, and appeared determined in its conclusion to obtain the ascendency in the coming administration, by means of fraud and force.
The great mass of the party had now become conversant and familiar with every species of political crime, through secret organization, and it only remained for the leaders to decide upon a programme, to have it executed with despatch and fidelity.
Languishing under the lash of chastisement inflicted upon those infamous enough to aid and abet the cause of dismemberment, mutual hate and slaughter, National extinction and death, they swore in this Order an eternal and most dreadful oath of vengeance upon their offenders, and pledged themselves, under fearful penalties of death, "ever to take up arms in the cause of the oppressed in their own country, first of all, against any monarch, prince, potentate, power or government usurped, and found in arms and waging war against a people or peoples, who had of their own _free choice_, inaugurated a government for themselves, in accordance with and founded upon the eternal principles of truth."
Thus, the liveliest form of ancient or modern civilization, in a republic just rising to the glories of empire, was to be sacrificed to the mad notion of petty "State Sovereignty," by a sworn band of desperadoes. How sad when other generations would ask, where is the Federal Government, to be answered only by poets, who would sing her elegy, as in the past they have sang that of the lamented Hellas:
"Ask the Paynim slave, Who treads all tearless on her hallowed grave; Invoke the spirits of the past, and shed The voice of your strong bidding on the dead! Lo! from a thousand crumbling tombs they rise-- The great of old, the powerful and the wise! And a sad tale which none but they can tell, Falls on the mournful silence like a knell. Then mark yon lonely pilgrim bend and weep Above the mound where genius lies in sleep. And is this all? Alas! we turn in vain, And, turning, meet the self-same waste again-- The same drear wilderness of stern decay; Its former pride, the phantom of a day; A song of summer-birds within a bower; A dream of beauty traced upon a flower; A lute whose master-chord has ceased to sound; A morning-star struck darkling to the ground."