He would have no compromise; but rejected all overtures of the enemy short of unconditional surrender.
John Creswell
The Public Record
John Andrew Jackson Creswell was an American politician and abolitionist from Maryland, who served as United States Representative, United States Senator, and as Postmaster General of the United States appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant. Creswell is considered to be one of the ablest, if not the best, Postmaster General in United States history. Creswell modernized the U.S. postal system to adapt to an expanding demand for increased postal routes throughout the Western states and remain competitive worldwide. Creswell also integrated the U.S. postal system, appointing both male and female African American postmasters throughout the United States, giving them significant positions of federal authority. Sweeping and constructive reforms of the U.S. postal system took place during Creswell's tenure, including securing fair competition among Star Route carriages, and the abolition of the franking system. Creswell developed a codified classification system of offenses against postal laws. Creswell streamlined and reduced postal costs, making the United States postal system run efficiently creating a fair pricing system domestically, and reducing international mailing prices. Creswell developed and implemented the United States first penny postcard.
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We do not doubt the result, and expect, freed from the trammels which now bind her, to see Maryland, at no distant day, rapidly advancing in a course of unexampled prosperity with her sister free States of the undivided and indivisible…
We resolved to break that last tie, and to take position unalterably on the side of the Union and freedom, and thus to deal the final blow to the cause and support of rebellion.
It is for us life and liberty; it is for you greatness, strength, and prosperity.
You can survive the integrity of the nation; we in Maryland would live on the side of a gulf, perpetually tending to plunge into its depths.
You see the conflagration from a distance; it blisters me at my side.
With us it was a struggle for homes, hearths, and lives.
If we now act promptly the day is ours and the State is safe.
We must show the secessionists that we are not frightened, but are resolved to maintain the government in the exercise of all its functions in Maryland.
Poor Maryland! cursed with slavery, doubly cursed with traitors!
The appeal was spurned; and, in the face of its almost godlike gentleness, they who already gloried in their anticipated saturnalia of blood inhumanly and falsely stigmatized it as a declaration of war.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living hearth and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by…
Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.
You can have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend' it.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
We do not recognize the right to make a revolution by a vote.
Speaker, I am here this day to speak, and I say that I do speak, for the people of Maryland, who are loyal to the United States; and that when my judgment is contested, I appeal to the people for its accuracy, and I am ready to maintain it…
Before the expiration of three months events had demonstrated his wisdom and our folly, and other paragraphs from that same speech became the fighting creed of the Union men of Maryland.
They were on their knees praying for peace, ignorant that bloody war had already girded on his sword.
DAVIS sustained the majority report in an able speech, in which, after urging every argument in favor of the report, he boldly proclaimed his own views, and the duties of his State and country.
He was the best scholar I ever met for his years and active life, and was surpassed by very few, excepting mere book-worms.
He had collected the purest ore of truth and the richest gems of thought, until he was able to crown himself with knowledge.
He had conned his books as jealously as a miner peering for gold, and had not left a panful of earth unwashed.
Called from this life at an age when most men are just beginning to command the respect and confidence of their fellows, he has left, nevertheless, a fame as wide as our vast country.
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