California, Utah, New Mexico and Texas all embraced territory on both
sides of the Missouri Compromise line. California was the first State
south of that line that had ever asked for admission to the Union with a
Constitution excluding slavery.
The cardinal feature of the Compromise of 1850 was the abandonment of a
geographical line to separate free and slave territory, and the distinct
recognition of the principle of non-intervention by Congress with
slavery. The compromise in terms recognized the right of the people of
the territories to be admitted to the Union with or without slavery as
they might desire--that was its very essence as distinguished from the
Compromise of 1820.
The principle of non-intervention in the territories had been logically
involved, in the national platforms of the democratic party since 1840,
but it had never until 1850 received the direct sanction of the
Congress.
The legislation of 1850 must be regarded as one of the most memorable
events in our constitutional and political history. It received the aid
and sanction of some of the ablest and wisest statesmen the nation has
ever known.--There were men in the Senate taking part in the controversy
that resulted in the compromise, whose political lives had commenced
when the fathers of the Republic were ruling its affairs. Clay, Benton,
Webster and Calhoun were there, and the South and the North alike were
represented by their ablest men. It had become their high duty to settle
by an enduring principle the future policy of the nation as to the
organization of territorial government for the national domain, and as
to the admission of new States. The antagonisms of the North and South,
fostered on the one hand by the spirit of abolition, and on the other by
the spirit of slavery extension; and still more fostered by the long
continued and unconstitutional attempts of Congress to deal with the
question, by splitting the difference between the contending sections,
could no longer be reconciled by a boundary line. With every fresh
acquisition of national territory, the zeal of the contending power
overleaped the congressional boundary, and demanded more for its own
sectional policy.
In the Congress of 1850 the Northern or Free soil party insisted on the
absolute prohibition of slavery in all the new territory acquired from
Mexico. They were able as they had been before when Mr. Douglas
proposed, and the South voted for it, to vote down the project of
extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific. The South with
such Northern men as were opposed to the Wilmot proviso, were able to
defeat that. Neither the Missouri Compromise nor the Wilmot proviso
could be carried.--The "irrepressible conflict," long encouraged by
selfish political schemers or over-zealous, if not fanatical theorists,
had reached a crisis, and the nation looked on in fear.
Then it was that the great and patriotic men who carried the compromise
of 1850, said to the South and to the North, we will henceforth make no
line over the national domain to mark out the boundary between Free
States and Slave States. Before the law of the Constitution, both Free
States and Slave States are equal. The territory of which we are the
trustees belongs neither to Northern institutions, nor to Southern
institutions. We will not interfere, for we have no right to interfere,
to give it exclusively to either. It is now free territory by the
Mexican law. We will not extend slavery over it, nor will we exclude
slavery from it; but we open the territory to citizens of all the States
alike. It is their common property. The land is all before them where to
choose; let them go in with their wives and their children, their men
servants and their maid servants, their goods and their cattle, and the
stranger that is within their gates, and form such domestic institutions
as may suit their wants and desires, consistent with republican
government and the Federal Constitution, which is for them, as for us,
the supreme law. Let _the people_, who are to constitute States in all
that wide domain, decide for themselves, for they will best know, what
fundamental or temporary laws they want, and the Federal government will
protect them in their free choice. When they come to us matured, as
California now is, into republican States, we will admit them to our
common Union on an equal footing with the original States in all
respects whatsoever, "with or without slavery, as their Constitution may
prescribe at the time of their admission."
Here at last was found the true solution of the question of slavery in
its relations to the Federal government, and it was adopted by the
Congress and accepted by the nation; for both the Democratic and Whig
parties, then the great dividing political parties, united upon it as
common ground in the presidential canvass of 1852. One party, however,
styling itself the _Free Soil Democracy_, the remnant of the party that
had in 1848 supported Martin Van Buren for the presidency upon the
Buffalo platform of "_no more Slave States--no more Slave Territory_,"
did meet in convention, at Pittsburgh, on 11th August, 1852, to denounce
in no measured language the compromise of 1850 and slavery in general. I
notice this party now only to refer you at your leisure to its platform,
and to ask you to note that the President of the Convention was Henry
Wilson of Massachusetts, and its nominees for President and
Vice-President were John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and George W. Julian
of Indiana. Two of these gentlemen are now Republican Senators in
Congress, and the third, Mr. Julian, a member elect from Indiana to the
House of Representatives in Congress. These gentlemen were known in 1852
as _Free Soil Abolitionists_, in 1860 they are known by the more
fashionable and pleasant-sounding name of Republicans.
The principle of non-intervention, on which the compromise of 1850 was
based, was in itself so simple, so just, so consistent with the
Constitution and the democratic theory of our institutions, that it
could not but prevail. Out of 3,143,679 votes cast for President in
1852, Mr. Hale received 155,825, leaving 2,987,854 as the popular vote
in favor of the compromise of 1850.
I rejoice to know that in that great struggle to establish sound and
enduring constitutional principle, to rule the Federal government on the
question of slavery, the Whig party and its noble old leaders, were as
they had ever been, on the side of the Union and the Constitution. The
compromise of 1850 was with Webster and Clay the crowning achievement of
illustrious lives, and having accomplished this great work, they soon--
"Sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust,
Drew around them the drapery of the couch of death,
And laid down to pleasant dreams,"
full of years and full of honors.
The compromise of 1850 touched the true principle of dealing with
slavery, but it was not a perfect work. It left upon the statute book of
the nation, legislation still operating over United States territory,
directly opposed to the principle of non-intervention, which the nation
had almost unanimously approved. The principle of the compromise of
1850, and the principle of permission or prohibition involved in a
geographical line to divide Free and Slave States, were directly
inconsistent with each other, and sooner or later this inconsistency had
to be met and removed. For the Congress to say, as they did in the
compromise of 1850, that the people of Texas, Utah and New Mexico,
should be admitted to the Union as Free States or as Slave States, as
they might choose, and at the same time to affirm as they did by
retaining, or at least not formally erasing, the Missouri compromise
line and the Oregon prohibition, that the people of Kansas, Nebraska and
Oregon, and all the north-west territories should come into the Union as
Free States or not at all, was a glaring inconsistency, and
discrimination, not in favor of the North, but in favor of the South.
Men in Oregon wanting domestic slaves could not have them. Men in Utah
and New Mexico wanting slaves could have them or not, as they pleased.
One man in the nation was found able enough, and brave enough, and
patriotic enough to grapple with this question and bring it to the test,
and carry out to its logical results the doctrine of the compromise of
1850; and that he bore himself bravely and well through the trying
ordeal, and against fearful odds, even his bitterest foes must admit.
Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, was but 37 years of age when he stood
in the United States Senate, one of the ablest of the supporters of the
compromise of 1850. His own hand had drawn the bills to admit California
as a Free State, and to organize Utah and New Mexico. Among the
venerable princes of the Senate, he was their equal, and Henry Clay, the
noblest Roman of them all, moved by Mr. Douglas' magnanimity on that
occasion, pronounced him to be "the most generous man living."
In 1854 Mr. Douglas carried through the Congress of the United States
and through a parliamentary warfare, in which no other man than he could
have triumphed, the bill to organize the territories of Kansas and
Nebraska, declaring inoperative and void the Missouri geographical
compromise line, and affirming the true intent and meaning of the Kansas
and Nebraska act to be, "_to leave the people of any State or territory
perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their
own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States_."
In this short "_stump speech in the belly of the bill_," as Thomas H.
Benton and Republican orators after him have, by way of ridicule, been
pleased to call it, is the key to the law which must ever govern its
true interpretation, and it puts to the rout all the arguments that have
been made to prove that non-intervention and popular or territorial
sovereignty are not in the Kansas and Nebraska bill, except in small
fractions.
A measure so radical and far-reaching as the formal annulling of the
Missouri compromise line, could not fail to meet at first with terrific
opposition. It broke in on old habits and ways of thinking--it stirred
up men's opinions to the roots--it took thought from the surface and
forms of things to their substance--it brought democracy to the test. It
put to the nation the pregnant questions: Are the rights of white men
and black men, the claims of freedom and humanity to be trusted to the
white men of the American territories, as well as American States, or
are they not? Are free white American citizens in American territories,
as well as American States, competent to decide the question of African
slavery or not? Are they competent to govern themselves or not? It did
more than this; it laid the ax of Anglo-Saxon democracy at the root of
the tree of African slavery.
No man was more sincerely opposed to the annulling of the Missouri
compromise line than myself; but I am free to say, that with my
prejudices in favor of freedom and Free States, and the reputed
sacredness of the Missouri line, I did not look on both sides of the
question. I condemned Mr. Douglas and I condemned him unheard. I have
endeavored to retrieve that error by a more thorough examination, and I
am now convinced that he was in the right and his opponents were in the
wrong, and to that conviction will the nation come at last.
The defeat of Fremont and the condemnation of the Republican or
Philadelphia platform of 1856 by a majority upon the popular vote of
1,371,430 votes, was an unequivocal endorsement by the people, not only
of the compromise of 1850, but of the Kansas and Nebraska bill in its
erasure of the Missouri line. Had James Buchanan been a wise statesman
and a patriot, as I fear he is not; had he carried in his veins "a
single drop of democratic blood," Kansas under the operation of the
principle of non-intervention by Congress, and intervention by its own
people with the question of slavery, would now have been a Free State
within the American Union, the first trophy of legitimate popular
sovereignty, and a great national party with Stephen A. Douglas at its
head would have been existing and triumphant, standing upon firm
constitutional ground, knowing no North and no South, but regarding and
protecting equally the constitutional rights of all the States.
But it was not at once so to be. Mr. Buchanan and Southern statesmen of
ultra views, aided by a few Northern politicians, were infatuated enough
to suppose that the two-edged sword of popular sovereignty that was
sheathed in the Kansas bill, was to be wielded by the Federal
administration, and not by the people of Kansas, and made to cut but one
way and that way in favor of slavery. And they were equally infatuated
when they found that they could not force upon the people of Kansas the
fraudulent Lecompton Constitution, to suppose that the power of
self-government, which had been conceded to the people of the
territories, could be nullified by the dogma of the sovereignty of the
Supreme Court.
Mr. Buchanan and his compeers should have known before they passed the
Kansas bill, that when the people of an American State or territory once
laid their hands upon the power to form and regulate their domestic
institutions in their own way, they held the power upon which free
institutions and slave institutions alike rested in the American States,
and that that power and its free exercise could never be taken from the
people by any Supreme Court or the dogma of any political party, and any
systematized attempt to take it away would be met by resistance that
would shiver the Union to fragments. The sovereignty of the people or
true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a
genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly
upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of
the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up
fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves
over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular
will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful
sovereignty of the States, either in the Union or in the territories,
has taken root and settled into a well-defined opinion in the popular
mind, the courts must let it alone; it is for them then to follow the
popular will, not to lead it. Law is the voice of the people. Let the
courts that assume to be the oracles of the law, see to it that they
mistake not the people's voice, especially on those great political
questions that touch the fountains of a nation's life.
The attempt of Mr. Buchanan's administration to force slavery upon
Kansas by means of the Lecompton Constitution, against the real
sentiment of the people, and against the true intent and meaning of the
organic law of Kansas, and failing in that, the attempt to override the
principle of popular sovereignty, by means of a false construction of
the Dred Scott decision, roused to renewed zeal and combined all the
Northern elements of opposition to slavery, and in the excitement of
angry passion that has followed, the great compromise of 1850, and the
true character of that measure, and its legitimate consequent, the
erasure of the Missouri compromise line, have been obscured in the
public mind, and both have lost their hold upon the calm judgments of
the people. Why is this? Are not the laws that now stand upon the
statute book of the nation, as the compromise measures of 1850, the same
as they were in 1852, when they were endorsed by nearly 3,000,000 of
votes--almost the unanimous vote of the nation? Is the law of the Kansas
and Nebraska act, annulling the Missouri compromise line, a different
law from what it was in 1856, when it was triumphantly sustained against
Fremont and the Philadelphia platform? No man can say the laws are not
the same. As they were then, so are they now. If right in principle and
good then, they are equally right and good now. Were the people
senseless or did they mean nothing when they endorsed those laws? No man
dare say that. Why is it then that the Democratic party, which triumphed
in 1852 and in 1856 on these very measures, is now a divided and broken
army and almost panic-stricken, and its opponents, the advocates of
Congressional prohibition of slavery, with a man at their head without a
record as a statesman and almost unknown to the nation, carrying in
their train all the fiercest elements of anti-slavery agitation, are
already boasting of sure success? No satisfactory answer can be given to
these questions, except the fact that the administration of James
Buchanan, false to the principles on which it was placed in power, has
attempted by intervention in favor of slavery, to destroy the very
principle which is the life of the compromise of 1850 and of the Kansas
and Nebraska law of 1854. Those great measures and their ablest and most
consistent champion, have alike been stabbed in the house of their
friends. By the course of the Buchanan administration, the people of the
North have been made to believe that the principle of non-intervention
is a sham; that the compromise of 1850 and the erasure of the Missouri
line in 1852 were fraudulent schemes to cheat the people into a consent
to extend slavery all over the national territory; and the cry is echoed
all through the North: the nation's plighted faith is broken, the
landmarks of freedom are removed, the barbarism of slavery will spread
over the land! Is there reason in this cry, for argument it cannot be
called? There is none. Why the very fact that the acts of the Federal
executive have had power to produce this strange delusion and wild
commotion of the public mind, is itself a potent argument for holding
fast to the principle of the compromise of 1850, and rallying the people
again to its support, so that the President and the Congress may no
longer disturb the people by tampering with the local question of
slavery. Again I say, there is nothing in this cry of the extension of
the barbarism of slavery; it is as senseless as it is dangerous to the
nation's peace. All that is is done by the legislation of 1850 and 1854,
is to establish a governing principle in regard to slavery in the
territories, which is exactly the same as the principle which governs
slavery in the States under the Constitution. The laws of 1850 and 1854
plant slavery no where, nor do they extend it any where into the
national domain. They leave the national territory _free_.
What better authority can we have on this point than that of Henry Clay,
whose influence perhaps as much as that of any other man, helped to
carry the compromise of 1850? Did he mean in voting for that compromise,
by which the principle of non-intervention was adopted as to territory
both North and South of the Missouri compromise line of 36 deg. 30 min.,
to extend slavery into such territory? Hear what he said on the question
in the Senate of the United States. He said in answer to a demand of
Jefferson Davis for a positive provision for the admission of slavery
south of the Missouri compromise line:--"Coming as I do from a Slave
State, it is my solemn, deliberate and well-matured determination that
no power--no earthly power--shall compel me to vote for the positive
introduction of slavery either south or north of that line. Sir, while
you reproach, and justly too, our British ancestors for the introduction
of this institution upon the continent of America, I am, for one,
unwilling that the posterity of the present inhabitants of California
and New Mexico shall reproach us for doing just what we reproach Great
Britain for doing to us. If the citizens of those territories choose to
establish slavery, I am for admitting them with such provisions in their
constitutions; but then it will be their own work and not ours, and
their posterity will have to reproach them and not us, for forming
constitutions allowing the institution of slavery to exist among them."
In the same paragraph, Mr. Clay further says, "I believe that slavery no
where exists within any portion of the territory acquired by us from
Mexico." So much for the testimony of Henry Clay! Now, who shall say
that the compromise of 1850 was a law to extend slavery over the free
territory covered by it? and if not, then for the same reason, the
Kansas and Nebraska act was not a law for extending slavery over the
free territory north of the Missouri line. What the law of 1850 did for
the territory acquired from Mexico, the same did the law of 1854 do for
the Louisiana territory acquired from France. No man can show a
substantial difference, except that the Kansas and Nebraska law more
clearly recognizes the right of the people to decide the question of
slavery. Again, I would ask of the men who make this cry of the
extension of slavery, to answer in candor: If the Missouri line was a
landmark for freedom, was it not also a landmark for slavery? Was not
the country south of 36 deg. 30 min., under the law of March 6th 1820,
as impliedly devoted to slavery as the country north of it was to
freedom? Up to 1848, when California, to which northern men had been
led, not more by the love of freedom than by the lust of gold, had
declared herself a Free State, had a Free State ever been made south of
the Missouri line? Was it not the almost sure result of that line to
prevent men who favor Free States from going south of it to demonstrate
by experience that Free States could grow and prosper even in a southern
clime? Had free labor a fair chance to raise its standard in the south,
and try its strength beneath a burning sun, so long as Congress had
virtually doomed the land of the south to slave labor, by declaring that
the region of free land and free labor was north of the Missouri line?
Is it not slavery rather than freedom that needs the protection of
positive law? Does the north, guarded as it is by nature's irrepealable
law, and by the self-poised and self-reliant strength of its freeborn
sons, need the Federal power to guard its soil from the feet of slaves?
Is slavery more progressive and expansive than freedom? and are the men
who form Free States afraid to meet the men who form Slave States on
common ground and take an even chance for control? In a word, do the men
who build up free institutions need any thing more from the Federal
government than that it should place in their hands the ax and the sword
of democracy, and let them alone?
It is astonishing to me that men who profess the sentiments expressed by
conservative men of the Republican party, if they are sincere in their
desire that slavery should die out, should fail to see that the
compromise of 1850 and the Kansas and Nebraska law are alike based upon
the only principle by which the ultimate extinction of slavery on this
continent must take place. All that freedom needed, and all that it
could constitutionally claim, was the withdrawal of the national
intervention in favor of slavery, which intervention existed so long as
a geographical line marked out by Congress existed over the national
domain to separate Free and Slave States; and the leaving of the
question of slavery to the local legislatures; by them only had it been
or could it be created, and by them only had it been or could it be
abolished. When the national territory was made free by the law of
non-intervention, slavery was left entirely to the local law, and as
freedom is the rule and slavery the exception, the chances were three to
one in favor of free institutions in every new State.
And yet it is for bringing the slavery agitation to this result--a
result of which the men of the South upon their own principles cannot
complain, and of which their best men do not complain, and of which the
North has no reason to complain, but rather to rejoice, that Stephen A.
Douglas, the ablest statesman of whom this nation can boast since
the mighty intellect of Webster ceased to speak in words of
power, has been covered all over with the vilest and bitterest
denunciation--denunciation that would seem to be more the outpouring of
personal malignity than the voice of mere partisan hostility. It is for
this result that Douglas has been outlawed by a professedly Democratic
administration, and the Democratic party itself broken up by Southern
disunionists, aided by that same administration. BUT A NATION'S
RETURNING JUSTICE WILL YET LIFT ALOFT HER SCALE, AND STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
CAN AFFORD TO ABIDE HIS TIME.
I have thus, I fear tediously to you, brought you to the last act of the
great national drama of slavery agitation.
Let us now briefly review the ground, sum up the points, and see how we
stand for the final struggle near at hand.
These are the propositions I have aimed to establish:
1. Slavery existed in all the States of the Union when it was formed,
and no power was conceded to Congress, under the Confederation to
interfere with it.
2. The Jefferson ordinance of 1784, the first act of Congress relating
to the territory of the United States, conceded to the people of the
territories as inchoate States, full power of internal legislation, and
did not prohibit slavery.
3. The Dane ordinance of 1787, applied only to territory not adapted to
negro slave labor; it was adopted under an implied power, if any, in the
Congress of the Confederation. Viewed on strict constitutional grounds,
it was a usurpation, like many other powers exercised by the old
Congress, but it was in terms a compact more than a legislative act,
and as such by consent of all the States concerned, became binding on
the government and the States under the Constitution. It is, therefore,
no precedent for mere legislative acts of Congress, prohibiting or
permitting slavery in any territory.
4. The Constitution, like the Union itself, is the result, as declared
by its framers, of "a spirit of amity and of mutual deference and
concession." It recognizes slavery as a lawful institution under local
law, in the basis of representation and taxation--in the right to
continue the African slave trade until 1808, and in the right to reclaim
fugitive slaves; but it concedes to Congress no express power to
establish, or to prohibit, or abolish slavery in the States.
5. The territory acquired by the Federal government, has been acquired
under the power to admit new States. The end of acquisition was to make
new States, not colonies nor provinces. Hence, whether the power in
Congress to govern such territory is derived from the power to make
needful rules and regulations concerning the territory or other property
of the United States, or the power to admit new States, or any other
express power, the power must be exercised with reference to its only
legitimate end, the formation and admission of new States, in all
respects of internal sovereignty equal to the original States; and the
Constitution rightfully interpreted therefore, requires Congress to do
no more as to legislation for the territories than to provide for
territorial governments, through which the people may form and regulate
their own internal affairs, subject only to the Constitution of the
United States, and to admit them as States whenever ripe for that event.
The object of providing territorial governments is to enable the
territorial people to exercise self-government, and if fit for it as to
one class of domestic institutions, they are fit for it as to another;
if fit to define the relations and rights of husband and wife, of parent
and child, of guardian and ward, they are equally fit to define them as
to master and servant.
6. If there be precedents in the action of Congress for prohibiting
slavery, there are equal precedents for permitting it or extending it.
Slavery was extended by acquiring Louisiana and Florida; it was extended
by admitting Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and Texas as Slave States; and the history
of the Federal government in regard to slavery shows that the power of
Congress to prohibit slavery has been exercised as to territory not
adapted to slave labor, and the power to permit it has been exercised as
to territory adapted to negro slave labor, and the criterion by which
the question of prohibition or permission has been determined, has been
the wants and consequent wishes of the white people of the territories.
The whole question, therefore, resolves itself into the consent or
non-consent of the local authority; and herein lies the absurdity of
both extreme sectional dogmas of Congressional power to prohibit and
Congressional power to permit, both conceding ultimate power in the
State legislatures to establish or prohibit slavery, and denying it to
the territorial legislatures, in the face of the admitted fact that it
is not the Congress, but the local authority that must ultimately
decide.
7. Assuming that there is in Congress a discretionary or sovereign power
to govern the territories, sound policy requires such government to be
administered in that "spirit of amity and mutual deference and
concession," in which the Constitution itself was conceived and adopted;
and the absolute prohibition of slavery in all the national territory in
which Free States and Slave States have a common right and common
interest, is in direct conflict with the spirit of the Constitution.
Lastly--Compromise is demonstrated to be the principle of the
Constitution and the policy of the Federal government in regard to
slavery. A Congressional geographical line is not the true mode of
compromise, as such a line implies the right of slavery to exclusive
possession on one side of the geographical line, and is therefore in
favor of slavery and against freedom. The question as a constitutional
one, is not a question between freedom and slavery, but a question of
constitutional authority, growing out of the clear and fundamental
distinction in the Constitution, between the powers of legislation for
local or domestic purposes and the like powers for national or Federal
purposes. The true principle of compromise on the part of the Federal
government is neutrality, non-interference, non-intervention, or the
leaving of the question to be fairly determined in the local
jurisdiction where it arises. A geographical line is arbitrary and not
adapted to varying circumstances or events; the principle of local
sovereignty involved in that of national non-intervention, is
self-adjusting and of universal application; it applies to all cases and
all times, and is in itself, the only principle consistent with the
theory of the government, which is that the people of each State and
community have the right and capacity to regulate their own internal
affairs, subject only to their respective fundamental laws or
Constitutions of government and to the nation's organic law. This
principle was the basis of the compromise laws of 1850, and of the
erasure of the Missouri line in 1854, and has been endorsed by large
majorities of the people both North and South.
Now, how do the parties and candidates seeking from the people the power
to control the Federal government, stand on this great subject that
divides the nation?
I shall not presume to weary your patience by dwelling on this question.
Men who read and think with calm unbiased minds, cannot fail to see how
they stand.