to decide upon the management of public affairs for a great state have
seldom been combined. It is the glory of white men to know that they
have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this
continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for
more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all
similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved by known
facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be
acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less
capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent
government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the
contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have
shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. In the Southern
States, however, Congress has undertaken to confer upon them the
privilege of the ballot. Just released from slavery, it may be doubted
whether as a class they know more than their ancestors how to organize
and regulate civil society. Indeed, it is admitted that the blacks of
the South are not only regardless of the rights of property, but so
utterly ignorant of public affairs that their voting can consist in
nothing more than carrying a ballot to the place where they are
directed to deposit it. I need not remind you that the exercise of the
elective franchise is the highest attribute of an American citizen, and
that when guided by virtue, intelligence, patriotism, and a proper
appreciation of our free institutions it constitutes the true basis of
a democratic form of government, in which the sovereign power is lodged
in the body of the people. A trust artificially created, not for its
own sake, but solely as a means of promoting the general welfare, its
influence for good must necessarily depend upon the elevated character
and true allegiance of the elector. It ought, therefore, to be reposed
in none except those who are fitted morally and mentally to administer
it well; for if conferred upon persons who do not justly estimate its
value and who are indifferent as to its results, it will only serve as
a means of placing power in the hands of the unprincipled and
ambitious, and must eventuate in the complete destruction of that
liberty of which it should be the most powerful conservator. I have
therefore heretofore urged upon your attention the great danger--to be
apprehended from an untimely extension of the elective franchise to any
new class in our country, especially when the large majority of that
class, in wielding the power thus placed in their hands, can not be
expected correctly to comprehend the duties and responsibilities which
pertain to suffrage. Yesterday, as it were, 4,000,000 persons were held
in a condition of slavery that had existed for generations; to-day they
are freemen and are assumed by law to be citizens. It can not be
presumed, from their previous condition of servitude, that as a class
they are as well informed as to the nature of our Government as the
intelligent foreigner who makes our land the home of his choice. In the
case of the latter neither a residence of five years and the knowledge
of our institutions which it gives nor attachment to the principles of
the Constitution are the only conditions upon which he can be admitted
to citizenship; he must prove in addition a good moral character, and
thus give reasonable ground for the belief that he will be faithful to
the obligations which he assumes as a citizen of the Republic. Where a
people--the source of all political power--speak by their suffrages
through the instrumentality of the ballot box, it must be carefully
guarded against the control of those who are corrupt in principle and
enemies of free institutions, for it can only become to our political
and social system a safe conductor of healthy popular sentiment when
kept free from demoralizing influences. Controlled through fraud and
usurpation by the designing, anarchy and despotism must inevitably
follow. In the hands of the patriotic and worthy our Government will be
preserved upon the principles of the Constitution inherited from our
fathers. It follows, therefore, that in admitting to the ballot box a
new class of voters not qualified for the exercise of the elective
franchise we weaken our system of government instead of adding to its
strength and durability.
I yield to no one in attachment to that rule of general suffrage which
distinguishes our policy as a nation. But there is a limit, wisely
observed hitherto, which makes the ballot a privilege and a trust, and
which requires of some classes a time suitable for probation and
preparation. To give it indiscriminately to a new class, wholly
unprepared by previous habits and opportunities to perform the trust
which it demands, is to degrade it, and finally to destroy its power,
for it may be safely assumed that no political truth is better
established than that such indiscriminate and all-embracing extension
of popular suffrage must end at last in its destruction. I repeat the
expression of my willingness to join in any plan within the scope of
our constitutional authority which promises to better the condition of
the Negroes in the South, by encouraging them in industry, enlightening
their minds, improving their morals, and giving protection to all their
just rights as freedmen. But the transfer of our political inheritance
to them would, in my opinion, be an abandonment of a duty which we owe
alike to the memory of our fathers and the rights of our children.
The plan of putting the Southern States wholly and the General
Government partially into the hands of Negroes is proposed at a time
peculiarly unpropitious. The foundations of society have been broken up
by civil war. Industry must be reorganized, justice reestablished,
public credit maintained, and order brought out of confusion. To
accomplish these ends would require all the wisdom and virtue of the
great men who formed our institutions originally. I confidently believe
that their descendants will be equal to the arduous task before them,
but it is worse than madness to expect that Negroes will perform it for
us. Certainly we ought not to ask their assistance till we despair of
our own competency.
The great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and
moral characteristics will prevent an amalgamation or fusion of them
together in one homogeneous mass. If the inferior obtains the
ascendency over the other, it will govern with reference only to its
own interests for it will recognize no common interest--and create such
a tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed. Already the
Negroes are influenced by promises of confiscation and plunder. They
are taught to regard as an enemy every white man who has any respect
for the rights of his own race. If this continues it must become worse
and worse, until all order will be subverted, all industry cease, and
the fertile fields of the South grow up into a wilderness. Of all the
dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those
which must result from the success of the effort now making to
Africanize the half of our country.
I would not put considerations of money in competition with justice and
right; but the expenses incident to "reconstruction" under the system
adopted by Congress aggravate what I regard as the intrinsic wrong of
the measure itself. It has cost uncounted millions already, and if
persisted in will add largely to the weight of taxation, already too
oppressive to be borne without just complaint, and may finally reduce
the Treasury of the nation to a condition of bankruptcy. We must not
delude ourselves. It will require a strong standing army and probably
more than $200,000,000 per annum to maintain the supremacy of Negro
governments after they are established. The sum thus thrown away would,
if properly used, form a sinking fund large enough to pay the whole
national debt in less than fifteen years. It is vain to hope that
Negroes will maintain their ascendency themselves. Without military
power they are wholly incapable of holding in subjection the white
people of the South.
I submit to the judgment of Congress whether the public credit may not
be injuriously affected by a system of measures like this. With our
debt and the vast private interests which are complicated with it, we
can not be too cautious of a policy which might by possibility impair
the confidence of the world in our Government. That confidence can only
be retained by carefully inculcating the principles of justice and
honor on the popular mind and by the most scrupulous fidelity to all
our engagements of every sort. Any serious breach of the organic law,
persisted in for a considerable time, can not but create fears for the
stability of our institutions. Habitual violation of prescribed rules,
which we bind ourselves to observe, must demoralize the people. Our
only standard of civil duty being set at naught, the sheet anchor of
our political morality is lost, the public conscience swings from its
moorings and yields to every impulse of passion and interest. If we
repudiate the Constitution, we will not be expected to care much for
mere pecuniary obligations. The violation of such a pledge as we made
on the 22d day of July, 1861, will assuredly diminish the market value
of our other promises. Besides, if we acknowledge that the national
debt was created, not to hold the States in the Union, as the taxpayers
were led to suppose, but to expel them from it and hand them over to be
governed by Negroes, the moral duty to pay it may seem much less clear.
I say it may seem so, for I do not admit that this or any other
argument in favor of repudiation can be entertained as sound; but its
influence on some classes of minds may well be apprehended. The
financial honor of a great commercial nation, largely indebted and with
a republican form of government administered by agents of the popular
choice, is a thing of such delicate texture and the destruction of it
would be followed by such unspeakable calamity that every true patriot
must desire to avoid whatever might expose it to the slightest danger.
The great interests of the country require immediate relief from these
enactments. Business in the South is paralyzed by a sense of general
insecurity, by the terror of confiscation, and the dread of Negro
supremacy. The Southern trade, from which the North would have derived
so great a profit under a government of law, still languishes, and can
never be revived until it ceases to be fettered by the arbitrary power
which makes all its operations unsafe. That rich country--the richest
in natural resources the world ever saw--is worse than lost if it be
not soon placed under the protection of a free constitution. Instead of
being, as it ought to be, a source of wealth and power, it will become
an intolerable burden upon the rest of the nation.
Another reason for retracing our steps will doubtless be seen by
Congress in the late manifestations of public opinion upon this
subject. We live in a country where the popular will always enforces
obedience to itself, sooner or later. It is vain to think of opposing
it with anything short of legal authority backed by overwhelming force.
It can not have escaped your attention that from the day on which
Congress fairly and formally presented the proposition to govern the
Southern States by military force, with a view to the ultimate
establishment of Negro supremacy, every expression of the general
sentiment has been more or less adverse to it. The affections of this
generation can not be detached from the institutions of their
ancestors. Their determination to preserve the inheritance of free
government in their own hands and transmit it undivided and unimpaired
to their own posterity is too strong to be successfully opposed. Every
weaker passion will disappear before that love of liberty and law for
which the American people are distinguished above all others in the
world.
How far the duty of the President "to preserve, protect, and defend the
Constitution" requires him to go in opposing an unconstitutional act of
Congress is a very serious and important question, on which I have
deliberated much and felt extremely anxious to reach a proper
conclusion. Where an act has been passed according to the forms of the
Constitution by the supreme legislative authority, and is regularly
enrolled among the public statutes of the country, Executive resistance
to it, especially in times of high party excitement, would be likely to
produce violent collision between the respective adherents of the two
branches of the Government. This would be simply civil war, and civil
war must be resorted to only as the last remedy for the worst of evils.
Whatever might tend to provoke it should be most carefully avoided. A
faithful and conscientious magistrate will concede very much to honest
error, and something even to perverse malice, before he will endanger
the public peace; and he will not adopt forcible measures, or such as
might lead to force, as long as those which are peaceable remain open
to him or to his constituents. It is true that cases may occur in which
the Executive would be compelled to stand on its rights, and maintain
them regardless of all consequences. If Congress should pass an act
which is not only in palpable conflict with the Constitution, but will
certainly, if carried out, produce immediate and irreparable injury to
the organic structure of the Government, and if there be neither
judicial remedy for the wrongs it inflicts nor power in the people to
protect themselves without the official aid of their elected
defender--if, for instance, the legislative department should pass an
act even through all the forms of law to abolish a coordinate
department of the Government--in such a case the President must take
the high responsibilities of his office and save the life of the nation
at all hazards. The so-called reconstruction acts, though as plainly
unconstitutional as any that can be imagined, were not believed to be
within the class last mentioned. The people were not wholly disarmed of
the power of self-defense. In all the Northern States they still held
in their hands the sacred right of the ballot, and it was safe to
believe that in due time they would come to the rescue of their own
institutions. It gives me pleasure to add that the appeal to our common
constituents was not taken in vain, and that my confidence in their
wisdom and virtue seems not to have been misplaced.
It is well and publicly known that enormous frauds have been
perpetrated on the Treasury and that colossal fortunes have been made
at the public expense. This species of corruption has increased, is
increasing, and if not diminished will soon bring us into total ruin
and disgrace. The public creditors and the taxpayers are alike
interested in an honest administration of the finances, and neither
class will long endure the large-handed robberies of the recent past.
For this discreditable state of things there are several causes. Some
of the taxes are so laid as to present an irresistible temptation to
evade payment. The great sums which officers may win by connivance at
fraud create a pressure which is more than the virtue of many can
withstand, and there can be no doubt that the open disregard of
constitutional obligations avowed by some of the highest and most
influential men in the country has greatly weakened the moral sense of
those who serve in subordinate places. The expenses of the United
States, including interest on the public debt, are more than six times
as much as they were seven years ago. To collect and disburse this vast
amount requires careful supervision as well as systematic vigilance.
The system, never perfected, was much disorganized by the
"tenure-of-office bill," which has almost destroyed official
accountability. The President may be thoroughly convinced that an
officer is incapable, dishonest, or unfaithful to the Constitution, but
under the law which I have named the utmost he can do is to complain to
the Senate and ask the privilege of supplying his place with a better
man. If the Senate be regarded as personally or politically hostile to
the President, it is natural, and not altogether unreasonable, for the
officer to expect that it will take his part as far as possible,
restore him to his place, and give him a triumph over his Executive
superior. The officer has other chances of impunity arising from
accidental defects of evidence, the mode of investigating it, and the
secrecy of the hearing. It is not wonderful that official malfeasance
should become bold in proportion as the delinquents learn to think
themselves safe. I am entirely persuaded that under such a rule the
President can not perform the great duty assigned to him of seeing the
laws faithfully executed, and that it disables him most especially from
enforcing that rigid accountability which is necessary to the due
execution of the revenue laws.
The Constitution invests the President with authority to decide whether
a removal should be made in any given case; the act of Congress
declares in substance that he shall only accuse such as he supposes to
be unworthy of their trust. The Constitution makes him sole judge in
the premises, but the statute takes away his jurisdiction, transfers it
to the Senate, and leaves him nothing but the odious and sometimes
impracticable duty of becoming a prosecutor. The prosecution is to be
conducted before a tribunal whose members are not, like him,
responsible to the whole people, but to separate constituent bodies,
and who may hear his accusation with great disfavor. The Senate is
absolutely without any known standard of decision applicable to such a
case. Its judgment can not be anticipated, for it is not governed by
any rule. The law does not define what shall be deemed good cause for
removal. It is impossible even to conjecture what may or may not be so
considered by the Senate. The nature of the subject forbids clear
proof. If the charge be incapacity, what evidence will support it?
Fidelity to the Constitution may be understood or misunderstood in a
thousand different ways, and by violent party men, in violent party
times, unfaithfulness to the Constitution may even come to be
considered meritorious. If the officer be accused of dishonesty, how
shall it be made out? Will it be inferred from acts unconnected with
public duty, from private history, or from general reputation, or must
the President await the commission of an actual misdemeanor in office?
Shall he in the meantime risk the character and interest of the nation
in the hands of men to whom he can not give his confidence? Must he
forbear his complaint until the mischief is done and can not be
prevented? If his zeal in the public service should impel him to
anticipate the overt act, must he move at the peril of being tried
himself for the offense of slandering his subordinate? In the present
circumstances of the country someone must be held responsible for
official delinquency of every kind. It is extremely difficult to say
where that responsibility should be thrown if it be not left where it
has been placed by the Constitution. But all just men will admit that
the President ought to be entirely relieved from such responsibility if
he can not meet it by reason of restrictions placed by law upon his
action.
The unrestricted power of removal from office is a very great one to be
trusted even to a magistrate chosen by the general suffrage of the
whole people and accountable directly to them for his acts. It is
undoubtedly liable to abuse, and at some periods of our history perhaps
has been abused. If it be thought desirable and constitutional that it
should be so limited as to make the President merely a common informer
against other public agents, he should at least be permitted to act in
that capacity before some open tribunal, independent of party politics,
ready to investigate the merits of every case, furnished with the means
of taking evidence, and bound to decide according to established rules.
This would guarantee the safety of the accuser when he acts in good
faith, and at the same time secure the rights of the other party. I
speak, of course, with all proper respect for the present Senate, but
it does not seem to me that any legislative body can be so constituted
as to insure its fitness for these functions.
It is not the theory of this Government that public offices are the
property of those who hold them. They are given merely as a trust for
the public benefit, sometimes for a fixed period, sometimes during good
behavior, but generally they are liable to be terminated at the
pleasure of the appointing power, which represents the collective
majesty and speaks the will of the people. The forced retention in
office of a single dishonest person may work great injury to the public
interests. The danger to the public service comes not from the power to
remove, but from the power to appoint. Therefore it was that the
framers of the Constitution left the power of removal unrestricted,
while they gave the Senate a fight to reject all appointments which in
its opinion were not fit to be made. A little reflection on this
subject will probably satisfy all who have the good of the country at
heart that our best course is to take the Constitution for our guide,
walk in the path marked out by the founders of the Republic, and obey
the rules made sacred by the observance of our great predecessors.
The present condition of our finances and circulating medium is one to
which your early consideration is invited.
The proportion which the currency of any country should bear to the
whole value of the annual produce circulated by its means is a question
upon which political economists have not agreed. Nor can it be
controlled by legislation, but must be left to the irrevocable laws
which everywhere regulate commerce and trade. The circulating medium
will ever irresistibly flow to those points where it is in greatest
demand. The law of demand and supply is as unerring as that which
regulates the tides of the ocean; and, indeed, currency, like the
tides, has its ebbs and flows throughout the commercial world.
At the beginning of the rebellion the bank-note circulation of the
country amounted to not much more than $200,000,000; now the
circulation of national-bank notes and those known as "legal-tenders"
is nearly seven hundred millions. While it is urged by some that this
amount should be increased, others contend that a decided reduction is
absolutely essential to the best interests of the country. In view of
these diverse opinions, it may be well to ascertain the real value of
our paper issues when compared with a metallic or convertible currency.
For this purpose let us inquire how much gold and silver could be
purchased by the seven hundred millions of paper money now in
circulation. Probably not more than half the amount of the latter,
showing that when our paper currency is compared with gold and silver
its commercial value is compressed into three hundred and fifty
millions. This striking fact makes it the obvious duty of the
Government, as early as may be consistent with the principles of sound
political economy, to take such measures as will enable the holder of
its notes and those of the national banks to convert them without loss
into specie or its equivalent. A reduction of our paper circulating
medium need not necessarily follow. This, however, would depend upon
the law of demand and supply, though it should be borne in mind that by
making legal-tender and bank notes convertible into coin or its
equivalent their present specie value in the hands of their holders
would be enhanced 100 per cent.
Legislation for the accomplishment of a result so desirable is demanded
by the highest public considerations. The Constitution contemplates
that the circulating medium of the country shall be uniform in quality
and value. At the time of the formation of that instrument the country
had just emerged from the War of the Revolution, and was suffering from
the effects of a redundant and worthless paper currency. The sages of
that period were anxious to protect their posterity from the evils that
they themselves had experienced. Hence in providing a circulating
medium they conferred upon Congress the power to coin money and
regulate the value thereof, at the same time prohibiting the States
from making anything but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts.