This is the remedy, sir. I am glad to hear it. The remedy is that a majority of these United States must surrender, give up their convictions, forbear, in the exercise of the highest functions with which God ever endowed freemen, to let their ballots speak the sentiments of their understandings and of their hearts; stifle everything that is manly in them, if by chance they ever got anything of that sort there, and go to the polls next fall to go through the idle ceremony of voting when it is already a foregone conclusion, and if they do not register your decrees, the Union is to be dissolved. Sir, it is dissolved now, if that is the state of the case; it is not a Union; we are not co-States; we are not here the representatives of sovereign States, or of States having any political rights; we are here simply to register your decrees - no, sir, not that, but our people are to come together in the fall of 1860 and register the solemn decrees that shall be made for them by the fifteen slaveholding States of the Union.
Well, sir, I am glad, if this be the case, to know it. It has not been proclaimed too soon. But I want to put this matter a little more in detail, for the benefit of the Senator from California. He says that when there is an aggression on southern rights, then they will dissolve the Union; and he goes on to say that if a majority of these United States shall exercise their rights by electing a man to represent their views, then the South will dissolve it. Would that be an infringement of southern rights? Will it be an infringement of southern rights for the majority of the people of these United States to elect a man to carry out their sentiments and their principles, and to refuse to receive, what may be dictated to them by anybody else?
The Congressional Globe, The Official Proceedings of Congress, Published by John C. Rives, Washington, D. C.
Thirty-Sixth Congress, 1st Session, New Series...No. 8, Wednesday, December 14, 1859, page 126