the Government goes with them.  He proposed to employ adequate physical force to maintain existing constitutional rights.  He did not want any additional constitutional rights.  He offered a resolution to inquire into the propriety of providing by law for establishing an armed police force, upon all necessary points along the line separating the slave-holding States from the non-slave-holding States, for the purpose of maintaining the general peace between those States; of preventing the invasion of one State by the citizens of another, and also for the efficient execution of the fugitive-slave law.

  [Sidenote] Ibid., pp. 28-30.

Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, denounced this proposition as a quack nostrum.  He feared it was to rear a monster which would break the feeble chain provided, and destroy the rights it was intended to guard.  Establishing military posts along the borders of States conferred a power upon this Federal Government, which it does not now possess, to coerce a State; it was providing, under the name of Union, to carry on war against States.  From the history and nature of our government no power of coercion exists in it.

  [Sidenote] Ibid., p. 33.

Senator Brown, also of Mississippi, was no less emphatic in his condemnation of the scheme.  He said, that a Southern Senator representing a State as much exposed as Missouri should deliberately, in times like these, propose to arm the Federal Government for the purpose of protecting the frontier, to establish military posts all along the line, struck him with astonishment.  He saw in this proposition the germ of a military despotism.  He did not know what was to become of these armies, or what was to be done with these military posts.  He feared in the hands of the enemy they might be turned against the South; they would hardly ever be turned against the North.

  [Sidenote] “Globe,” Dec. 10, 1860, pp. 30, 31.

Senator Green, in his reply, justly exposed the whole animus and thinly concealed import of these rough criticisms, by retorting that, to call that a military despotism amounts to just this:  we are going out of the Union, right or wrong, and we will misrepresent every proposition made to save the Union.  Who has fought the battles of the South for the last twenty-five years, and borne the brunt of the difficulty upon the border?  Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, and Maryland, while Mississippi and Louisiana have been secure; and while you have lost but one boxed-up negro, sent on board a vessel, that I remember, we have lost thousands and thousands.  He knew it was unpopular in some sections to say a word for the Union.  He hoped that feeling would react.  Means to enforce and carry out the Constitution ought not to be ridiculed by calling it a quack remedy.

It is more likely that we may find in the response of Senator Iverson, of Georgia, the true reason which actuated the Cotton-State leaders in driving their people into revolution, regardless of the remonstrances of the border States.