Sent Ellie to the opera in charge of her brother Jem and sallied out for a debilitated stroll. Found a great Wide-Awake demonstration in progress; inspected them in Fourteenth Street. Seward was making a speech in “Palace Gardens,’’ and the crowd there was dense, the Gardens packed full and impenetrable. The show in the street was brilliant—rockets, Roman candles with many colored fire balls, Bengal lights, the Wide-Awakes with their lanterns and torches, and “I wish I was in Dixie.” I adjourned to Broadway in front of the New York Hotel to see the procession pass. The Southerners of the hotel groaned and hissed, and the Republican mob in and about the Lincoln and Hamlin headquarters across the street cheered and roared, and the din was deafening. But there was no breach of peace. . . .
Think I will vote the Republican ticket next Tuesday. One vote is insignificant, but I want to be able to remember that I voted right at this grave crisis. The North must assert its rights, now, and take the consequences.
Think of James J. Roosevelt, United States District Attorney, bringing up certain persons under indictment for piracy as slave-traders to be arraigned the other day, and talking to the Court about the plea the defendants should put in, and saying that “there had been a great change in public sentiment about the slave trade,” and that “of course the President would pardon the defendants if they were capitally convicted.”!!! Is Judge Roosevelt more deficient in common sense or in moral sense? If we accede to Southern exactions, we must re-open the slave trade with all its horrors, establish a Slave Code for the territories, and acquiesce in a decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Lemmon case that will entitle every Southerner to bring his slaves into New York and Massachusetts and keep them there. We must confess that our federal government exists chiefly for the sake of nigger-owners. I can’t do that. Rather let South Carolina and Georgia secede. We will coerce and punish the traitorous seceders if we can; but if we can’t, we are well rid of them.
If I looked remarkably like Kossuth or Mazzini, I could nevertheless travel through Austria with no danger beyond that of a few days' detention, at the end of which, my identity being proven, I should be dismissed with apologies and an indemnity. But I happen to be mistaken for John Jay at least once a week, and it would therefore be utter madness for me to visit that section of our free and happy republic that lies south of Mason and Dixon’s line. Before I had traveled half a day’s journey through that sunny and chivalric region, some gent who had visited New York would spot me as a damned abolitionist emissary. I should be haled forth from my railroad car and hanged on the nearest palmetto tree.
SOURCE: Allan Nevins and Milton Halset Thomas, Editors, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 3, pp. 56-7
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