Fellow-Citizens:--In early youth, almost in boyhood I may say, I
attached myself to the Whig party. It was a conservative, rather than a
progressive party, but it was one of noble principles and aims, and it
had noble leaders, the greatest of whom now sleep in death. It was, and
therefore I loved it, eminently a party for the Union and Constitution.
It was a _national_, not a _sectional_ party.
With the death of Webster and Clay, the Whig party, like a headless
army, was broken and dispersed. Its victories and defeats are alike
things of the past. Its history is written in the annals of the nation.
The question of its patriotism is enrolled in the Capitol. Posterity
will do it justice.
Bound by no party ties, I appear before you neither as a partisan nor a
politician, but as an American citizen, to state freely my views upon
the great political question that agitates our country and threatens its
national existence, and to give you the reasons which constrain me to
sustain Stephen A. Douglas and the National Democratic party, which he
leads, in the presidential election near at hand, and I trust I will
have your patient and candid attention.
The Federal government, under the existing Constitution of the United
States, went into operation on the 4th of March, 1789, under the
administration of George Washington as first President. It is
seventy-one years since that event. During that period the number of the
States has increased from thirteen to thirty-three, and another will
soon be added to the number when Kansas, now waiting at the door of the
Union with a republican and a free Constitution, shall come in "on an
equal footing with the original States in all respects whatsoever."
When the Constitution was adopted, the area of the United States was
820,680 square miles. At the present time that area has been increased
to 2,963,666 square miles, or, I may say 3,000,000 of square miles--a
territory ten times as large as that of France and Great Britain
combined, and equal in extent to the empire of the Romans, or of
Alexander.
At equal pace with the expansion of our territory has moved on and
spread out the tide of human life, bearing on its bosom the religious
faith of the christian, and the laws and institutions of the Celtic and
German races purified by christianity and the love of freedom.
At the first census in 1790, the population of the United States
amounted to within a fraction of 4,000,000 of people. In 1860 it will
reach, if not exceed 30,000,000, and it is no vain boast to say, that in
no other nation of equal population, is there so much of individual
freedom, or so large an aggregate of rational, substantial, human
happiness.
Such are the fruits of over seventy years trial and experience of the
Federal Union and Constitution, and the heart of every true American
patriot swells with a just and noble pride as he contemplates them, and
more than this, it swells with an earnest longing--an ardent
desire--that prompts him as he looks into the future, to breathe to the
Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, the prayer--"God save the Union and the
Constitution!"
No American heart that honors God, and truly loves America and the human
race, has ever yet dared to think, much less to say, of the Constitution
of the United States, as William Lloyd Garrison has said, "_It is a
covenant with death and an agreement with hell._"
The United States embrace a territory not touching either extreme of
torrid heat or artic cold, but within those extremes--various in soil,
in climate, in productions--a land we may say in the oriental style of
Scripture language, "flowing with milk and honey," "a land of corn, and
wine and oil," fitted by Providence for the home of races of differing
constitutions, habits, capacities and pursuits; and practically we know,
that within our borders we have alike the European, the Asiatic, the
aboriginal American and the African races, with all their strongly
marked constitutional peculiarities; but our system of State and Federal
Government can give to each race the measure of power and protection due
to each.
The admirer of natural scenery, who from some commanding point of view,
surveys an expanse of mountain and valley, and plain and lake and river,
clothed in the summer sunlight, does not pause and check his pleasing
and elevated emotions, to note with cynical eye, each stagnant pool, or
noxious weed, or unsightly decaying tree that may lie within the limits
of the noble vision. He rather admires the harmony and beauty of the
whole, though he may know that there are within the scene before him
imperfect, unbeautiful and unwholesome things. Such is the feeling of
the patriot of well-balanced mind, when he contemplates the Union and
the Constitution as they are. While he knows the imperfection of all
work of human hands, he accepts and admires in the political work of our
fathers, the grandeur and symmetry of the whole, and will not condemn or
destroy it because it is not in all its parts a perfect work.
But such is not the feeling of every American mind. There are men
assuming to be philosophical and practical statesmen--men who rank with
a great political party as their representative men, who in all their
views and studies of the American Union, see only or chief of all, "_the
mean and miserable rivulet of black African slavery, stealing along
turbid and muddy, as it is drawn from its stagnant sources in the Slave
States_." I quote the language of William H. Seward, in his speech at
Chicago on Oct. 2d, 1860.
This Republican statesman, familiar with the pages of history, which
teaches him that the rivulet of domestic servitude has run among the
nations almost coeval with the stream of time; familiar by personal
observation with the aspect and condition of the civilization of
Europe, where constitutional freedom is almost unknown; familiar also
with the history, the institutions and the society of every portion of
the American Union, and with the blessings which that Union, above all
other systems of government the world has ever known, confers upon its
people; sees all the glories of the Union dimmed, all its harmony
destroyed, all its substantial benefits turned like Dead sea fruit to
ashes and bitterness, when he beholds "the mean and miserable rivulet of
black African slavery, stealing along turbid and muddy from its stagnant
sources in the Slave States."
With this _one idea_ ruling his mind, Mr. Seward labors in the Senate
and before the people with all the learning and ability he possesses to
rouse one half of the nation against the other to dam up, dry up or blot
out "this mean and miserable rivulet." From Boston to Kansas, like
another Peter the Hermit, he preaches a crusade against the institutions
and people of the Southern States. He proclaims an irrepressible
conflict between free labor and slave labor, between Free States and
Slave States, between white suffrage and equality and black suffrage and
equality, and he utters as he goes the atrocious sentiment, not of the
statesman, but of the demagogue, "_Henceforth I put my trust not in my
native countrymen, but I put it in the exile from foreign lands_." I,
the oracle of the Republican party, in effect says Mr. Seward, will not
trust as the conservators of the American principle of freedom and the
American system of free government, the sons of the men who fought the
battles of American Independence, but I and they will trust the exiles
from foreign lands--from Europe, from Asia and from Africa, to establish
here upon the battle fields, rich with the blood of our fathers, the
principles of universal suffrage and universal equality.
Mr. Seward hangs out the signal of uncompromising conflict. This, in
effect, if not in words, says he, is the Holy Land of freedom and
universal equality. Infidels and barbarians possess it in all its
Southern borders, and hold there black christians their coequals in all
the rights of men in an inhuman bondage. Let us then by the aid of the
exiles from foreign lands overcome the infidels and barbarians, and
plant in all that fair domain the standard of the higher law, of
universal suffrage and universal equality; and forthwith all through the
North, Republican _Wide-Awakes_ muster their forces for this great
political crusade. I am drawing no fancy picture. What I say is but a
legitimate comment upon the language of Mr. Seward in his Chicago
speech, already referred to, and in other speeches he has made during
his recent pilgrimage through the North-west. Mr. Seward is the
self-constituted exponent of the _higher law_ in its application to
political parties and measures, and to Constitutions and systems of
government, but in his pursuit of one idea, he seems to forget that the
sacred volume to which we all look as the source of our best and truest
knowledge of the will and purposes of Providence concerning man, if it
clearly reveals to us any thing, clearly reveals this fact, which all
human history confirms: that man is not a perfect being; that this earth
is not a perfect state; that disorder, and imperfection, and inequality,
and change must ever pervade it, and mark all human institutions. This
earth and its mortal life is but the threshhold--the vestibule of human
destiny--that reaches far into the eternal ages. Believe, as he may, in
human equality or in the perfectibility of humanity, no such theory has
ever yet been realized, nor will it ever be realized in this
probationary state of man. Philosophy may teach--political constitutions
may declare, and political parties may attempt to enforce as a practical
truth, that all men are equal. No such theory will ever find a perfect
realization in any system of human government.
In his speech at Chicago, before referred to, Mr. Seward vauntingly
asserts, as the idea or creed of the Republican party, as if to that
party alone were committed the oracles of freedom--"That civilization is
to be maintained and carried on upon this continent by Federal States,
based upon the principles of free soil, free labor, free speech, equal
rights and universal suffrage." I pause but a moment here to note the
pregnant meaning of this authoritative declaration of the representative
man of the Northern sectional party. It means no less than that there
shall be no Federal States on this continent where free soil, free
labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage shall not
prevail. In other words it means that domestic servitude as now known in
the Southern States of the American Union, _shall be abolished_, and
that there shall be equal rights and universal suffrage among all the
races who may inhabit the American continent. Herein is the end or
ultimate goal of the higher law of Mr. Seward, and its coadjutor, "the
irrepressible conflict."
Conceding that all these ends shall have been attained and African
slavery forever blotted out, still will the doctrine of human equality,
which lies at the base of the whole abolition movement in this country,
be as far from its perfect realization as now, for the reason that it is
not the will of Providence that such a doctrine can ever support a
permanent system of human society; and yet, because of its supposed
conflict with this utopian theory of equality, it is, that the Federal
Constitution, which has been called by George Washington "the palladium
of American liberty," has been pronounced by the radical apostle of
abolition, "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."
In pursuit of this delusive theory of equality and universal suffrage,
the masses of the Republican party, who would deem it an insult to be
charged with entertaining the traitorous sentiments of Garrison, are
inaugurating and sustaining a political movement, the inevitable result
of which will be to destroy the Union and Constitution as they are. That
the abolition of slavery is the necessary logical result and end of the
political doctrines of Mr. Seward, no man who understands the force of
language can deny, and until it shall have been fully explained how this
end is to be attained consistently with the peace, the safety and
constitutional rights of the slaveholding States, and how we are to deal
with the millions of the African race, who by the establishment of free
labor, free speech, free soil, equal rights and universal suffrage, are
to become the peers of their masters and of each and every one of us, I
shall fail to believe that the abolition of slavery by any Federal
action can coexist with the American Union under its present Federal
Constitution.
I shall not pause now to speak in detail as to what are to be the fruits
of the irrepressible conflict, nor shall I stop to inquire as to the
purity or sincerity of the motives of Mr. Seward and his compeers in
their crusade. When the christian crusaders of the middle ages
precipitated the hosts of Europe upon Asia, the weary, wayworn soldiers
of those countless hosts, as they traversed the burning sands of Syria,
doubtless thought they were doing God service--their cause in their
minds, was the cause of christianity and of humanity, and as Godfrey of
Bouillon set the standard of the cross upon the walls of Jerusalem,
recovered from the power of the infidel Moslem, he was ready like Mr.
Seward, when he contemplates the results of the repeal of the Missouri
compromise in the victories of the Republican party, to take up and
exult in the song of Miriam, the prophetess. But as history proves in
the case of the old crusades, so will it prove in the case of the
crusade of abolition, that any premature attempt by material or
political armaments to forestall and hurry on the great purposes and
movements of Providence, cannot succeed. History tells us the result of
the crusades.
"Every road leading to Palestine was drenched with blood, and along its
dreary track lay scattered at no distant intervals the skeletons and the
wrecks of nations. After four years of toil and misery and victory,
Jerusalem was conquered by the crusaders; but as their conquests were
not the work of wisdom and prudence, but the fruit of a blind enthusiasm
and an ill-directed heroism, they laid the foundation of no permanent
settlements, and in fact soon melted away like frost-work in the sun."
For seven hundred years since the crusades to free the christian people
of Asia from Moslem rule, that rule has been maintained in all its
despotic power.
When will men learn by severe experience that political and religions
ideas have conquered more in defence than in offence and aggression, and
that reason is the true leader of ideas, and the paths of peace their
certain way to victory?
In this one idea then of "black African slavery," as Mr. Seward calls
it, we have reached the central fact, or as Abraham Lincoln would say,
"_the particular spot_" upon which sectional parties are staking the
destiny of the American Union. All other political questions have sunk
to insignificance when compared with this. It would seem as if reckless
men were determined that from "this mean and miserable rivulet," are to
go out the poisonous waters that shall blast the fair face of this
promised land of freedom.
"Slavery agitation, in my opinion," says Abraham Lincoln, "will not
cease until a crisis has been reached and passed. 'A house divided
against itself cannot stand.'" We are now in the midst of that crisis.
It is the pendency of that crisis which has prompted me to address you
to-night. For the first time in the history of the government, we have
the spectacle of purely sectional parties struggling for the control of
the Federal government, each determined to warp and bend to its own
sectional end, the Constitution and power of the Federal Union. Never
before could patriotic citizens so earnestly lay to heart the counsel of
Washington to avoid the formation of sectional parties.
On the 17th of September, 1796, exactly nine years after he, as
President of the Convention and Deputy from Virginia, had signed his
name to the Federal Constitution, Washington thus addressed his
fellow-citizens:
"The unity of government which constitutes you one people is now dear to
you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your
real independence, the support of your tranquillity at home, your peace
abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which
you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that from different
causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many
artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this
truth--as this is the point in your political fortress against which the
batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and
actively (though often covertly and insidiously), directed, it is of
infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of
your National Union to your collective and individual happiness; that
you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to
it,--accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium
of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation
with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a
suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly
frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion
of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now
link together the various parts."
_Fellow-Citizens, the portentous evil which Washington thus deprecated
in his Farewell Address to the people of the United States is now upon
us. I repeat we are in the midst of the crisis of sectional parties. How
shall it be passed, so that the Union shall not fall?_
It seems to me that no man who knows our history, who understands truly
the genius of our people, and who understands also the principles upon
which the Union and the Constitution are based, can fail to believe that
it is not by the conflict of sectional parties and their triumph, but by
the defeat of sectional parties by a stronger and more patriotic
national party, that the divided house can be reconciled and the house
itself made to stand in safety. The safety of the Union depends upon
maintaining the Federal government in the hands of a national party,
which shall carry out the spirit of the Federal Constitution. A solemn
responsibility rests upon every citizen in this regard.