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.
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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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…
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
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.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.
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…
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.
Poor Maryland! cursed with slavery, doubly cursed with traitors!
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.
If we now act promptly the day is ours and the State is safe.
With us it was a struggle for homes, hearths, and lives.
You see the conflagration from a distance; it blisters me at my side.
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.
It is for us life and liberty; it is for you greatness, strength, and prosperity.
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.
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…
He would have no compromise; but rejected all overtures of the enemy short of unconditional surrender.
I never heard him deliver a speech that was not worthy of being printed and preserved.
His heart and mind were both nourished into their full dimensions under the fostering influences of our free institutions; so that, being reared a freeman, he thought and spake as became a freeman.
No other land could have produced such dauntless courage and such heroic devotion to honest conviction in a public man; and even our land has produced but few men of his stamp and ability.
His implicit faith in God's eternal justice, and his grand moral courage, imparted to him his proselyting zeal, and gave him that amazing, kindling power which enabled him to light the fires of enthusiasm wherever he touched the public…
It is by such a resolve that the American people, coercing a reluctant government to draw the sword and stake the national existence on the integrity of the Republic, are now anything but the fragments of a nation before the world, the…
It is only by the earnest and abiding resolution of the people that, whatever shall be our fate, it shall be grand as the American nation, worthy of that Republic which first trod the path of empire and made no peace but under the banners…
I have an abiding confidence in the firmness, the patience, the endurance of the American people; and, having vowed to stand in history on the great resolve to accept of nothing but victory or ruin, victory is ours.
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