[ebay 55]

26th CONGRESS, 1st Session.

[SENATE.]

[256]

MEMORIAL OF EDMUND P. GAINES,

PROPOSING

A system of national defence, and praying its adoption by Congress.

MARCH 6, 1840.

Referred to the Committee on Military Affairs, and ordered to be printed.

To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled:

The memorial of Edmund Pendleton Gaines, a Major General in the army of the United States, commanding the Western Division,

RESPECTFULLY SHOWETH:

That, believing the Federal and State Constitutions guaranty and conse- crate to every free citizen, capable of bearing arms, the right and duty of participating alike in the civil and military trusts of the republic; solemn- ly requiring the soldier to exert 'his every faculty " in peace to prepare for war," so that on the recurrence of war he may be well qualified to fight the battles of his country in the greatest possible triumph, and at the least possible cost of blood and treasure; requiring him, moreover, to study and respect her political and social institutions; and requiring the statesman to discipline his mind for the state and national defence, by adapting his civil acts and occasional military studies to the purposes of the national defence and protection, as well against foreign enemies in war, as against the home incendiary and other criminal offenders in peace; thus rendering the statesman and soldier equally familiarized with their common kindred du- ties of self-government and self-defence: by a knowledge of which our in- dependence was achieved, and without which this inestimable blessing can- not be preserved; your memorialist, a native Virginian, a citizen of Tennes- see, schooled in her cabins and her camps to the profession of arms, has, within the last seventeen years, matured a system of national defence, to which he now respectfully solicits your attention and support: a system of national defence which the late giant strides of invention and improvement in the arts have rendered indispensable to the preservation of the Union : a system of national defence which recommends itself peculiarly to the cen- tral, southern and Atlantic States, as well as to those of the north and west; as it assures to our isolated central States of Tennessee and Kentucky, and to all the western States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Ar-