That these accused would enter upon the commission of so heinous a crime, I can scarcely permit myself to believe. They have made a strong appeal to your sympathies. Each counsel has advocated the cause of his client with an earnestness and an eloquence that does him honor; I shall always respect them, and bear them in kindly recollection.
But there seems to have been something, during these four years of the nation's trial, that has appeared to paralyze the native instincts of the American heart. This phantom, this siren of secession, with her enticing song, seems to have lulled to sleep the better part of human nature. At the sound of her voice, and the flash of her eye, men have sprung to arms, to grapple with the life of the nation, because it was free! They have followed, at the beck of the siren, over desolated homes; they have trampled over the dead corpses of murdered brothers, and innocent women and children. They have blackened the land with desolation, and made it the abode of moaning and woe. She has blinded, while she has demoralized them. Old men, forgetting their white hairs, have joined in the conspiracy at the beck of this phantom, who has taken out of the human heart its heaven-born instincts, to plant there those of vengeance, and the thirst for blood.
My tongue falters as I look over this country and see bereaved widows and orphans, the white-haired patriots that mourn for the first-born, that shall ne'er greet them, and those who sit at the desolate hearth, with hands upraised, waiting for the knock that will be but the death-knell of all their hopes; and think that the phantom of secession has caused all this!
Men who were kind fathers, kind husbands and noble patriots, have forgotten it all in a day, and have become traitors, and inculcated doctrines that have, by the hands of fiends, stricken down that patriotic and noble leader of the human race. There is something in it which no man can comprehend. The doctrines which they inculcate harden the heart, and nerve the arm to crime, enabling them to commit robbery, arson and murder, for all is in her category; and as they commit those crimes, the appeal to God for the justness of their cause. That is what has deceived these men; it is this accursed phantom of secession that has blinded their eyes; that has cooled their hearts and filled them with vengeance. It is this that has changed and perverted the human instincts, that should have ruled in their breasts.