message.  As he approached the climax, the veins of his neck and forehead were swollen with passion, and the perspiration ran down his face in streams.  At times his clear and resonant voice reverberated through the chamber, until it seemed to shake the building.[994] While he was in the midst of a passionate invective, a man rushed into the hall bearing an American flag.  The trumpet tones of the speaker and the sight of the Stars and Stripes roused the audience to the wildest pitch of excitement.[995] Men and women became hysterical with the divine madness of patriotism.  “When hostile armies,” he exclaimed with amazing force, “When hostile armies are marching under new and odious banners against the government of our country, the shortest way to peace is the most stupendous and unanimous preparation for war.  We in the great valley of the Mississippi have peculiar interests and inducements in the struggle ...  I ask every citizen in the great basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies ... to tell me whether he is ever willing to sanction a line of policy that may isolate us from the markets of the world, and make us dependent provinces upon the powers that thus choose to isolate us?...  Hence, if a war does come, it is a war of self-defense on our part.  It is a war in defense of the Government which we have inherited as a priceless legacy from our patriotic fathers, in defense of those great rights of freedom of trade, commerce, transit and intercourse from the center to the circumference of our great continent."[996]

The voice of the strong man, so little given to weak sentiment, broke, as he said, “I have struggled almost against hope to avert the calamities of war and to effect a reunion and reconciliation with our brethren in the South.  I yet hope it may be done, but I am not able to point out how it may be.  Nothing short of Providence can reveal to us the issues of this great struggle.  Bloody—­calamitous—­I fear it will be.  May we so conduct it, if a collision must come, that we will stand justified in the eyes of Him who knows our hearts, and who will justify our every act.  We must not yield to resentments, nor to the spirit of vengeance, much less to the desire for conquest or ambition.  I see no path of ambition open in a bloody struggle for triumphs over my countrymen.  There is no path of ambition open for me in a divided country....  My friends, I can say no more.  To discuss these topics is the most painful duty of my life.  It is with a sad heart—­with a grief I have never before experienced—­that I have to contemplate this fearful struggle; but I believe in my conscience that it is a duty we owe to ourselves and to our children, and to our God, to protect this Government and that flag from every assailant, be he who he may.”