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These men, many of them far from home, lifted up their voices, and the sounds surged through that church and echoed, surged again and caught even the preacher in their winding waves. He started in to give one sermon and gave another. The audience, the time, the place, acted upon him.

Oratory is essentially a pioneer product, a rustic article. Great sermons and great speeches are given only to people who have come from afar.

Starr King forgot his manuscript and pulpit manners. His deep voice throbbed and pulsed with emotion, and the tensity of the times was upon him. Without once referring directly to Sumter, his address was a call to arms.

He spoke for an hour, and when he sat down he knew that he had won. The next Sunday the place was again packed, and then followed urgent invitations that he should speak during the week in a larger hall.

California was trembling in the balances, and orators were not wanting to give out the arguments of Calhoun. They showed that the right of secession was plainly provided for in the Constitution. Lincoln’s call for troops was coldly received, and from several San Francisco pulpits orthodox clergymen were expressing deep regret that the President was plunging the country into civil war.

The heart of Starr King burned with shame–to him there was but one side to this question–the Union must be preserved.

One man who had known King in Massachusetts wrote back home saying: “You would not know Starr King–he is not the orderly man of genteel culture you once had in Boston. He is a torrent of eloquence, so heartfelt, so convincing, so powerful, that when he speaks on Sunday afternoon out on the sand-hills, he excites the multitude into a whirlwind of applause, with a basso undertone of dissent, which, however, seems to grow gradually less.”

Loyalty to the Union was to him the one vital issue. His fight was not with individuals–he made no personal issues. And in several joint debates his courteous treatment of his adversary won converts for his cause. He took pains to say that personally he had only friendship and pity for the individuals who upheld secession and slavery–“The man in the wrong needs friends as never before, since he has ceased to be his own. Do we blame a blind man whom we see rushing towards a precipice?”

From that first Sunday he preached in San Francisco, his life was an ovation wherever he went. Wherever he was advertised to speak, multitudes were there to hang upon his words. He spoke in all the principal towns of California; and often on the plains, in the mountains, or by the seashore, men would gather from hundreds of miles to hear him.

He gave himself, and before he had been in California a year, the State was safe for the Union, and men and treasure were being sent to Lincoln’s aid. The fame of Starr King reached the President, and he found time to write several letters to the orator, thanking him for what he had done. It was in one of these letters that Lincoln wrote, “The only sermons I have ever been able to read and enjoy are those of John Murray”–a statement which some have attempted to smile away as showing the Rail-Splitter’s astute diplomacy.

Starr King gave his life to the Cause. He as much died for the Union as though he had fallen stricken by flying lead upon the field. And he knew what he was doing, but in answer to his warning friends he said, “I have only one life to live and now is my time to spend it.”

For three years, lacking two months, he spoke and preached several times every week. All he made and all he was he freely gave.

For that frail frame this life of intensity had but one end.

The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, but Lee’s surrender was yet to be.

“May I live to see unity and peace for my country,” was the constant prayer of the devoted preacher.

Starr King died March Fourth, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four, aged forty years. The closing words of his lecture on Socrates might well be applied to himself: “Down the river of Life, by its Athenian banks, he had floated upon his raft of reason serene, in cloudy as in smiling weather. And now the night is rushing down, and he has reached the mouth of the stream, and the great ocean is before him, dim-heaving in the dusk. But he betrays no fear. There is land ahead, he thought; eternal continents there are, that rise in constant light beyond the gloom. He trusted still in the raft his soul had built, and with a brave farewell to the true friends who stood by him on the shore, he put out into the darkness, a moral Columbus, trusting in his haven on the faith of an idea.”