Produced by David Widger
AMERICAN ELOQUENCE
STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY
Edited with Introduction by Alexander Johnston
Reedited by James Albert Woodburn
Volume II. (of 4)
CONTENTS:
V.-THE ANTI-SLAVERY STRUGGLE.
RUFUS KING
On The Missouri Struggle--United States Senate,
February 11 And 14, 1820.
WILLIAM PINKNEY
On The Missouri Struggle--United States Senate,
February 15, 1820.
WENDELL PHILLIPS
On The Murder Of Lovejoy--Faneuil Hall, Boston,
December 8, 1837.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
On The Constitutional War Power Over Slavery
--House Of Representatives, May 25, 1836.
JOHN C. CALHOUN
On The Slavery Question--United States Senate,
March 4, 1850.
DANIEL WEBSTER
On The Constitution And The Union--United States
Senate, March 7, 1850.
HENRY CLAY
On The Compromise Of 1850--United States Senate,
July 22, 1850.
WENDELL PHILLIPS
On The Philosophy Of The Abolition Movement--Before
The Massachusetts, Anti-Slavery Society, Boston,
January 27, 1853.
CHARLES SUMNER
On The Repeal Of The Fugitive Slave Law--United
States Senate, August 26, 1852.
LIST OF PORTRAITS--VOLUME II.
RUFUS KING -- From a steel engraving.
JOHN Q. ADAMS -- From a painting by MARCHANT.
JOHN C. CALHOUN -- From a daguerreotype by BRADY.
DANIEL WEBSTER -- From a painting by R. M. STAIGG.
HENRY CLAY -- From a crayon portrait.
INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED VOLUME II.
The second volume of the American Eloquence is devoted exclusively
to the Slavery controversy. The new material of the revised edition
includes Rufus King and William Pinkney on the Missouri Question; John
Quincy Adams on the War Power of the Constitution over Slavery; Sumner
on the Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. The addition of the new
material makes necessary the reservation of the orations on the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and on the related subjects, for the third volume.
In the anti-slavery struggle the Missouri question occupied a prominent
place. In the voluminous Congressional material which the long
debates called forth, the speeches of King and Pinkney are the best
representatives of the two sides to the controversy, and they are of
historical interest and importance. John Quincy Adams' leadership in
the dramatic struggle over the right of petition in the House of
Representatives, and his opinion on the constitutional power of the
national government over the institution of slavery within the States,
will always excite the attention of the historical student.
In the decade before the war no subject was a greater cause of
irritation and antagonism between the States than the Fugitive Slave
Law. Sumner's speech on this subject is the most valuable of his
speeches from the historical point of view; and it is not only a worthy
American oration, but it is a valuable contribution to the history of
the slavery struggle itself. It has been thought desirable to include in
a volume of this character orations of permanent value on these themes
of historic interest. A study of the speeches of a radical innovator
like Phillips with those of compromising conservatives like Webster and
Clay, will lead the student into a comparison, or contrast, of these
diverse characters. The volume retains the two orations of Phillips, the
two greatest of all his contributions to the anti-slavery struggle. It
is believed that the list of orations, on the whole, presents to the
reader a series of subjects of first importance in the great slavery
controversy.
The valuable introduction of Professor Johnston, on "The Anti-Slavery
Struggle," is re-printed entire.
J. A. W.
V. -- THE ANTI-SLAVERY STRUGGLE
Negro slavery was introduced into all the English colonies of North
America as a custom, and not under any warrant of law. The enslavement
of the negro race was simply a matter against which no white person
chose to enter a protest, or make resistance, while the negroes
themselves were powerless to resist or even protest. In due course of
time laws were passed by the Colonial Assemblies to protect property in
negroes, while the home government, to the very last, actively protected
and encouraged the slave trade to the colonies. Negro slavery in all
the colonies had thus passed from custom to law before the American
Revolution broke out; and the course of the Revolution itself had little
or no effect on the system.
From the beginning, it was evident that the course of slavery in the two
sections, North and South, was to be altogether divergent. In the colder
North, the dominant race found it easier to work than to compel negroes
to work: in the warmer South, the case was exactly reversed. At the
close of the Revolution, Massachusetts led the way in an abolition
of slavery, which was followed gradually by the other States north of
Virginia; and in 1787 the ordinance of Congress organizing the Northwest
Territory made all the future States north of the Ohio free States.
"Mason and Dixon's line" and the Ohio River thus seemed, in 1790, to be
the natural boundary between the free and the slave States.
Up to this point the white race in the two sections had dealt with
slavery by methods which were simply divergent, not antagonistic. It was
true that the percentage of slaves in the total population had been
very rapidly decreasing in the North and not in the South, and that the
gradual abolition of slavery was proceeding in the North alone, and that
with increasing rapidity. But there was no positive evidence that the
South was bulwarked in favor of slavery; there was no certainty but that
the South would in its turn and in due time come to the point which the
North had already reached, and begin its own abolition of slavery. The
language of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and Mason, in regard
to the evils or the wickedness of the system of slavery, was too strong
to be heard with patience in the South of after years; and in this
section it seems to have been true, that those who thought at all upon
the subject hoped sincerely for the gradual abolition of slavery in
the South. The hope, indeed, was rather a sentiment than a purpose, but
there seems to have been no good reason, before 1793, why the sentiment
should not finally develop into a purpose.
All this was permanently changed, and the slavery policy of the South
was made antagonistic to, and not merely divergent from, that of the
North, by the invention of Whitney's saw gin for cleansing cotton
in 1793. It had been known, before that year, that cotton could be
cultivated in the South, but its cultivation was made unprofitable, and
checked by the labor required to separate the seeds from the cotton.
Whitney's invention increased the efficiency of this labor hundreds of
times, and it became evident at once that the South enjoyed a practical
monopoly of the production of cotton. The effect on the slavery policy
of the South was immediate and unhappy. Since 1865, it has been found
that the cotton monopoly of the South is even more complete under a
free than under a slave labor system, but mere theory could never have
convinced the Southern people that such would be the case. Their whole
prosperity hinged on one product; they began its cultivation under slave
labor; and the belief that labor and prosperity were equally dependent
on the enslavement of the laboring race very soon made the dominant race
active defenders of slavery. From that time the system in the South was
one of slowly but steadily increasing rigor, until, just before
1860, its last development took the form of legal enactments for the
re-enslavement of free negroes, in default of their leaving the State
in which they resided. Parallel with this increase of rigor, there was a
steady change in the character of the system. It tended very steadily to
lose its original patriarchal character, and take the aspect of a purely
commercial speculation. After 1850, the commercial aspect began to be
the rule in the black belt of the Gulf States. The plantation knew only
the overseer; so many slaves died to so many bales of cotton; and the
slave population began to lose all human connection with the dominant
race.
The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 more than doubled the area of the
United States, and far more than doubled the area of the slave system.
Slavery had been introduced into Louisiana, as usual, by custom, and had
then been sanctioned by Spanish and French law. It is true that Congress
did not forbid slavery in the new territory of Louisiana; but Congress
did even worse than this; under the guise of forbidding the importation
of slaves into Louisiana, by the act of March 26, 1804, organizing
the territory, the phrase "except by a citizen of the United States,
removing into said territory for actual settlement, and being at the
time of such removal bona fide owner of such slave or slaves," impliedly
legitimated the domestic slave trade to Louisiana, and legalized slavery
wherever population should extend between the Mississippi and the
Rocky Mountains. The Congress of 1803-05, which passed the act, should
rightfully bear the responsibility for all the subsequent growth of
slavery, and for all the difficulties in which it involved the South and
the country.
There were but two centres of population in Louisiana, New Orleans and
St. Louis. When the southern district, around New Orleans, applied for
admission as the slave State of Louisiana, there seems to have been no
surprise or opposition on this score; the Federalist opposition to the
admission is exactly represented by Quincy's speech in the first volume.
When the northern district, around St. Louis, applied for admission as
the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act
of 1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States
united to resist the admission. The North controlled the House
of Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe
parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of 1820.
By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery was
forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of latitude
36° 30' (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri). The instinct
of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have been
much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission to
introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation
of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to
the district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final
conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement
of labor. But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the
balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed worth
while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time. The
topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates on
the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer, opened the real
anti-slavery struggle. Up to this time the anti-slavery sentiment, North
and South, had been content with the notion of "gradual abolition,"
with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner,
be brought to the Northern policy. This had been supplemented, to some
extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the west
coast of Africa; which had two aspects: at the South it was the means of
ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North it was a
means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery. Garrison,
through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for "immediate abolition"
of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into
anti-slavery purpose. This was followed by the organization of his
adherents into the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and the
active dissemination of the immediate abolition principle by tracts,
newspapers, and lecturers.
The anti-slavery struggle thus begun, never ceased until, in 1865, the
Liberator ceased to be published, with the final abolition of slavery.
In its inception and in all its development the movement was a distinct
product of the democratic spirit. It would not have been possible in
1790, or in 1810, or in 1820. The man came with the hour; and every new
mile of railroad or telegraph, every new district open to population,
every new influence toward the growth of democracy, broadened the
power as well as the field of the abolition movement. It was but the
deepening, the application to an enslaved race of laborers, of the work
which Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely less
grievous restraints upon the white laborer thirty year before. It could
never have been begun until individualism at the North had advanced
so far that there was a reserve force of mind--ready to reject all the
influences of heredity and custom upon thought. Outside of religion
there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the
Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well
as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his
work with the declaration that the Constitution itself was "a league
with death and a covenant with hell."
The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered highly
objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively colorless
slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton culture had
advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than a proposal to
destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that section, and it was
received with corresponding indignation. Garrisonian abolitionists were
taken and regarded as public enemies, and rewards were even offered for
their capture. The germ of abolitionism in the Border States found a new
and aggressive public sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt
to introduce gradual abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly
defeated. The new question was even carried into Congress. A bill to
prohibit the transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office
department was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both
parties on the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition
of slavery in the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the
reference of such petitions without reading or action; but this only
increased the number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to
be petitioned against, and in 1842 the "gag rule" was rescinded.
Thence-forth the pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and
could only become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.
Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto
shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were
received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily a
revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which
had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the
Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred
against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the
innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the
Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of
politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were
destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society
and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud,
and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with
efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at
the building or the orators. It was, of course, inevitable that such
a process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians,
at first from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from
sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in
a great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though
it never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to
be necessary. One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the
appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839
was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost
unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism. Lovejoy, a Western
anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to
another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was
there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob. At
a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts,
James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the general sentiment of
the time as to such individual insurrection against pronounced public
opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston "tea-party," and declared
that Lovejoy, "presumptuous and imprudent," had "died as the fool
dieth." Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the stand, and answered in
the speech which opens this volume. A more powerful reinforcement could
hardly have been looked for; the cause which could find such a defender
was henceforth to be feared rather than despised. To the day of
his death he was, fully as much as Garrison, the incarnation of the
anti-slavery spirit. For this reason his address on the Philosophy
of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has been assigned a place as
representing fully the abolition side of the question, just before it
was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican party, which opposed only
the extension of slavery to the territories.
The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in
1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which
have been selected to illustrate it. The admission of Texas to the Union
in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the
acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States.
From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso
(so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in
Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was
persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money
for the purchase of territory from Mexico. It was passed by the House
of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase
was finally made without any proviso. When the territory came to be
organized, the old question came up again: the Wilmot proviso was
offered as an amendment. As the territory was now in the possession of
the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support
had been much more cordial at the South than at the North, the attempt
to add the Wilmot proviso to the territorial organization raised the
Southern opposition to an intensity which it had not known before.
Fuel was added to the flame by the application of California, whose
population had been enormously increased by the discovery of gold within
her limits, for admission as a free State. If New Mexico should do the
same, as was probable, the Wilmot proviso would be practically in force
throughout the best portion of the Mexican acquisition. The two sections
were now so strong and so determined that compromise of any kind was
far more difficult than in 1820; and it was not easy to reconcile or
compromise the southern demand that slavery should be permitted, and
the northern demand that slavery should be forbidden, to enter the new
territories.
In the meantime, the Presidential election of 1848 had come and gone. It
had been marked by the appearance of a new party, the Free Soilers, an
event which was at first extremely embarrassing to the managers of
both the Democratic and Whig parties. On the one hand, the northern and
southern sections of the Whig party had always been very loosely joined
together, and the slender tie was endangered by the least admission
of the slavery issue. On the other hand, while the Democratic national
organization had always been more perfect, its northern section had
always been much more inclined to active anti-slavery work than the
northern Whigs. Its organ, the Democratic Review, habitually spoke of
the slaves as "our black brethren"; and a long catalogue could be
made of leaders like Chase, Hale, Wilmot, Bryant, and Leggett, whose
democracy was broad enough to include the negro. To both parties,
therefore, the situation was extremely hazardous. The Whigs had less
to fear, but were able to resist less pressure. The Democrats were more
united, but were called upon to meet a greater danger. In the end,
the Whigs did nothing; their two sections drew further apart; and the
Presidential election of 1852 only made it evident that the national
Whig party was no longer in existence. The Democratic managers
evolved, as a solution of their problem, the new doctrine of "popular
sovereignty," which Calhoun re-baptized "squatter sovereignty." They
asserted as the true Democratic doctrine, that the question of slavery
or freedom was to be left for decision of the people of the territory
itself. To the mass of northern Democrats, this doctrine was taking
enough to cover over the essential nature of the struggle; the more
democratic leaders of the northern Democracy were driven off into the
Free-Soil party; and Douglas, the champion of "popular sovereignty,"
became the leading Democrat of the North.
Clay had re-entered the Senate in 1849, for the purpose of compromising
the sectional difficulties as he had compromised those of 1820 and of
1833. His speech, as given, will show something of his motives; his
success resulted in the "compromise of 1850." By its terms, California
was admitted as a free State; the slave trade, but not slavery, was
prohibited in the District of Columbia; a more stringent fugitive slave
law was enacted; Texas was paid $10,000,000 for certain claims to the
Territory of New Mexico; and the Territories of Utah and New Mexico,
covering the Mexican acquisition outside of California, were organized
without mentioning slavery. The last-named feature was carefully
designed to please all important factions. It could be represented to
the Webster Whigs that slavery was excluded from the Territories named
by the operation of natural laws; to the Clay Whigs that slavery had
already been excluded by Mexican law which survived the cession; to the
northern Democrats, that the compromise was a formal endorsement of the
great principle of popular sovereignty; and to the southern Democrats
that it was a repudiation of the Wilmot proviso. In the end, the essence
of the success went to the last-named party, for the legislatures of the
two territories established slavery, and no bill to veto their action
could pass both Houses of Congress until after 1861.
The Supreme Court had already decided that Congress had exclusive power
to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, though the
fugitive slave law of 1793 had given a concurrent authority of execution
to State officers. The law of 1850, carrying the Supreme Court's
decision further, gave the execution of the law to United States
officers, and refused the accused a hearing. Its execution at the North
was therefore the occasion of a profound excitement and horror. Cases
of inhuman cruelty, and of false accusation to which no defence was
permitted, were multiplied until a practical nullification of the law,
in the form of "personal liberty laws," securing a hearing for the
accused before State magistrates, was forced by public opinion upon the
legislature of the exposed northern States. Before the excitement
had come to a head, the Whig convention of 1852 met and endorsed the
compromise of 1850 "in all its parts." Overwhelmed in the election which
followed, the Whig party was popularly said to have "died of an attempt
to swallow the fugitive-slave law"; it would have been more correct to
have said that the southern section of the party had deserted in a body
and gone over to the Democratic party. National politics were thus left
in an entirely anomalous condition. The Democratic party was omnipotent
at the South, though it was afterward opposed feebly by the American
(or "Know Nothing ") organization, and was generally successful at
the North, though it was still met by the Northern Whigs with vigorous
opposition. Such a state of affairs was not calculated to satisfy
thinking men; and this period seems to have been one in which very
few thinking men of any party were at all satisfied with their party
positions.
This was the hazardous situation into which the Democratic managers
chose to thrust one of the most momentous pieces of legislation in our
political history-the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The responsibility for it is
clearly on the shoulders of Stephen A. Douglas. The over-land travel to
the Pacific coast had made it necessary to remove the Indian title to
Kansas and Nebraska, and to organize them as Territories, in order to
afford protection to emigrants; and Douglas, chairman of the Senate
committee on Territories, introduced a bill for such organization in
January, 1854. Both these prospective Territories had been made free
soil forever by the compromise of 1820; the question of slavery had been
settled, so far as they were concerned; but Douglas consented, after a
show of opposition, to reopen Pandora's box. His original bill did
not abrogate the Missouri compromise, and there seems to have been no
general Southern demand that it should do so. But Douglas had become
intoxicated by the unexpected success of his "popular sovereignty"
make-shift in regard to the Territories of 1850; and a notice of an
amendment to be offered by a southern senator, abrogating the Missouri
compromise, was threat or excuse sufficient to bring him to withdraw the
bill. A week later, it was re-introduced with the addition of "popular
sovereignty": all questions pertaining to slavery in these Territories,
and in the States to be formed from them, were to be left to the
decision of the people, through their representatives; and the Missouri
compromise of 1820 was declared "inoperative and void," as inconsistent
with the principles of the territorial legislation of 1850. It must
be remembered that the "non-intervention" of 1850 had been confessedly
based on no constitutional principle whatever, but was purely a matter
of expediency; and that "non-intervention" in Utah and New Mexico was no
more inconsistent with the prohibition of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska
than "non-intervention" in the Southwest Territory, sixty years before,
had been inconsistent with the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest
Territory. Whether Douglas is to be considered as too scrupulous, or too
timid, or too willing to be terrified, it is certain that his action was
unnecessary.
After a struggle of some months, the Kansas-Nebraska bill became law.
The Missouri compromise was abrogated, and the question of the extension
of slavery to the territories was adrift again, never to be got rid of
except through the abolition of slavery itself by war. The demands of
the South had now come fully abreast with the proposal of Douglas:
that slavery should have permission to enter all the Territories, if
it could. The opponents of the extension of slavery, at first under the
name of "Anti-Nebraska men," then of the Republican party, carried the
elections for representatives in Congress in 1854-'55, and narrowly
missed carrying the Presidential election of 1856. The percentage
of Democratic losses in the congressional districts of the North was
sufficient to leave Douglas with hardly any supporters in Congress from
his own section. The Democratic party was converted at once into a
solid South, with a northern attachment of popular votes which was not
sufficient to control very many Congressmen or electoral votes.
Immigration into Kansas was organized at once by leading men of the two
sections, with the common design of securing a majority of the voters of
the territory and applying "popular sovereignty" for or against slavery.
The first sudden inroad of Missouri intruders was successful in securing
a pro-slavery legislature and laws; but within two years the stream
of free-State immigration had become so powerful,in spite of murder,
outrage, and open civil war, that it was very evident that Kansas was
to be a free-State. Its expiring territorial legislature endeavored
to outwit its constituents by applying for admission as a slave State,
under the Lecompton constitution; but the Douglas Democrats could not
support the attempt, and it was defeated. Kansas, however, remained a
territory until 1861.
The cruelties of this Kansas episode could not but be reflected in the
feelings of the two sections and in Congress. In the former it showed
too plainly that the divergence of the two sections, indicated in
Calhoun's speech of 1850, had widened to an absolute separation in
thought, feeling, and purpose. In the latter the debates assumed a
virulence which is illustrated by the speeches on the Sumner assault.
The current of events had at least carried the sections far enough apart
to give striking distance; and the excuse for action was supplied by the
Dred Scott decision in 1857.
Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, claiming to be a free man under the
Missouri compromise of 1820, had sued his master, and the case had
reached the Supreme Court. A majority of the justices agreed in
dismissing the suit; but, as nearly every justice filed an opinion, and
as nearly every opinion disagreed with the other opinions on one or
more points, it is not easy to see what else is covered by the decision.
Nevertheless, the opinion of the Chief justice, Roger B. Taney,
attracted general attention by the strength of its argument and the
character of its views. It asserted, in brief, that no slave could
become a citizen of the United States, even by enfranchisement or State
law; that the prohibition of slavery by the Missouri compromise of 1820
was unconstitutional and void; that the Constitution recognized property
in slaves, and was framed for the protection of property; that Congress
had no rights or duties in the territories but such as were granted or
imposed by the Constitution; and that, therefore, Congress was bound
not merely not to forbid slavery, but to actively protect slavery in
the Territories. This was just the ground which had always been held by
Calhoun, though the South had not supported him in it. Now the South,
rejecting Douglas and his "popular sovereignty," was united in its
devotion to the decision of the Supreme Court, and called upon the North
to yield unhesitating obedience to that body which Webster in 1830 had
styled the ultimate arbiter of constitutional questions. This, it was
evident, could never be. No respectable authority at the North pretended
to uphold the keystone of Taney's argument, that slaves were regarded as
property by the Constitution. On the contrary, it was agreed everywhere
by those whose opinions were looked to with respect, that slaves were
regarded by the Constitution as "persons held to service or labor" under
the laws of the State alone; and that the laws of the State could not
give such persons a fictitious legal character outside of the State's
jurisdiction. Even the Douglas Democrats, who expressed a willingness to
yield to the Supreme Court's decision, did not profess to uphold Taney's
share in it.
As the Presidential election of 1860 drew near, the evidences of
separation became more manifest. The absorption of northern Democrats
into the Republican party increased until Douglas, in 1858, narrowly
escaped defeat in his contest with Lincoln for a re-election to the
Senate from Illinois. In 1860 the Republicans nominated Lincoln for
the Presidency on a platform demanding prohibition of slavery in
the Territories. The southern delegates seceded from the Democratic
convention, and nominated Breckenridge, on a platform demanding
congressional protection of slavery in the Territories. The remainder of
the Democratic convention nominated Douglas, with a declaration of its
willingness to submit to the decision of the Supreme Court on questions
of constitutional law. The remnants of the former Whig and American
parties, under the name of the Constitutional Union party, nominated
Bell without any declaration of principles. Lincoln received a majority
of the electoral votes, and became President. His popular vote was a
plurality.
Seward's address on the "Irrepressible Conflict," which closes this
volume, is representative of the division between the two sections, as
it stood just before the actual shock of conflict. Labor systems are
delicate things; and that which the South had adopted, of enslaving the
laboring class, was one whose influence could not help being universal
and aggressive. Every form of energy and prosperity which tended to
advance a citizen into the class of representative rulers tended also to
make him a slave owner, and to shackle his official policy and purposes
with considerations inseparable from his heavy personal interests. Men
might divide on other questions at the South; but on this question of
slavery the action of the individual had to follow the decisions of a
majority which, by the influence of ambitious aspirants for the lead,
was continually becoming more aggressive. In constitutional countries,
defections to the minority are a steady check upon an aggressive
majority; but the southern majority was a steam engine without a safety
valve.
In this sense Seward and Lincoln, in 1858, were correct; the labor
system of the South was not only a menace to the whole country, but one
which could neither decrease nor stand still. It was intolerable by
the laws of its being; and it could be got rid of only by allowing
a peaceable secession, or by abolishing it through war. The material
prosperity which has followed the adoption of the latter alternative,
apart from the moral aspects of the case, is enough to show that the
South has gained more than all that slavery lost.
[Illustration: Rufus King]
RUFUS KING,
OF NEW YORK. (BORN 1755, DIED 1827.)
ON THE MISSOURI BILL--UNITED STATES SENATE,
FEBRUARY 11 AND 14, 1820.
The Constitution declares "that Congress shall have power to dispose of,
and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and
other property of the United States." Under this power Congress have
passed laws for the survey and sale of the public lands; for the
division of the same into separate territories; and have ordained for
each of them a constitution, a plan of temporary government, whereby
the civil and political rights of the inhabitants are regulated, and the
rights of conscience and other natural rights are protected.
The power to make all needful regulations, includes the power to
determine what regulations are needful; and if a regulation prohibiting
slavery within any territory of the United States be, as it has been,
deemed needful, Congress possess the power to make the same, and,
moreover, to pass all laws necessary to carry this power into execution.
The territory of Missouri is a portion of Louisiana, which was purchased
of France, and belongs to the United States in full dominion; in the
language of the Constitution, Missouri is their territory or property,
and is subject like other territories of the United States, to the
regulations and temporary government, which has been, or shall be
prescribed by Congress. The clause of the Constitution which grants this
power to Congress, is so comprehensive and unambiguous, and its purpose
so manifest, that commentary will not render the power, or the object of
its establishment, more explicit or plain.
The Constitution further provides that "new States may be admitted
by Congress into this Union." As this power is conferred without
limitation, the time, terms, and circumstances of the admission of new
States, are referred to the discretion of Congress; which may admit new
States, but are not obliged to do so--of right no new State can demand
admission into the Union, unless such demand be founded upon some
previous engagement of the United States.
When admitted by Congress into the Union, whether by compact or
otherwise, the new State becomes entitled to the enjoyment of the same
rights, and bound to perform the like duties as the other States;
and its citizens will be entitled to all privileges and immunities of
citizens in the several States.
The citizens of each State possess rights, and owe duties that are
peculiar to, and arise out of the Constitution and laws of the several
States. These rights and duties differ from each other in the different
States, and among these differences none is so remarkable or important
as that which proceeds from the Constitution and laws of the several
States respecting slavery; the same being permitted in some States and
forbidden in others.
The question respecting slavery in the old thirteen States had been
decided and settled before the adoption of the Constitution, which
grants no power to Congress to interfere with, or to change what had
been so previously settled. The slave States, therefore, are free
to continue or to abolish slavery. Since the year 1808 Congress have
possessed power to prohibit and have prohibited the further migration
or importation of slaves into any of the old thirteen States, and at all
times, under the Constitution, have had power to prohibit such migration
or importation into any of the new States or territories of the United
States. The Constitution contains no express provision respecting
slavery in a new State that may be admitted into the Union; every
regulation upon this subject belongs to the power whose consent is
necessary to the formation and admission of new States into the Union.
Congress may, therefore, make it a condition of the admission of a new
State, that slavery shall be forever prohibited within the same. We may,
with the more confidence, pronounce this to be the true construction
of the Constitution, as it has been so amply confirmed by the past
decisions of Congress.
Although the articles of confederation were drawn up and approved by
the old Congress, in the year 1777, and soon afterwards were ratified by
some of the States, their complete ratification did not take place until
the year 1781. The States which possessed small and already settled
territory, withheld their ratification, in order to obtain from the
large States a cession to the United States of a portion of their vacant
territory. Without entering into the reasons on which this demand was
urged, it is well known that they had an influence on Massachusetts,
Connecticut, New York, and Virginia, which States ceded to the United
States their respective claims to the territory lying northwest of the
river Ohio. This cession was made on the express condition, that the
ceded territory should be sold for the common benefit of the United
States; that it should be laid out into States, and that the States
so laid out should form distinct republican States, and be admitted as
members of the Federal Union, having the same rights of sovereignty,
freedom, and independence as the other States. Of the four States which
made this cession, two permitted, and the other two prohibited slavery.
The United States having in this manner become proprietors of
the extensive territory northwest of the river Ohio, although the
confederation contained no express provision upon the subject, Congress,
the only representatives of the United States, assumed as incident
to their office, the power to dispose of this territory; and for this
purpose, to divide the same into distinct States, to provide for the
temporary government of the inhabitants thereof, and for their ultimate
admission as new States into the Federal Union.
The ordinance for those purposes, which was passed by Congress in 1787,
contains certain articles, which are called "Articles of compact between
the original States and the people and States within the said territory,
for ever to remain unalterable, unless by common consent." The sixth
of those unalterable articles provides, "that there shall be neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory."
The Constitution of the United States supplies the defect that existed
in the articles of confederation, and has vested Congress, as has been
stated, with ample powers on this important subject. Accordingly,
the ordinance of 1787, passed by the old Congress, was ratified and
confirmed by an act of the new Congress during their first session under
the Constitution.
The State of Virginia, which ceded to the United States her claims to
this territory, consented by her delegates in the old Congress to this
ordinance--not only Virginia, but North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia, by the unanimous votes of their delegates in the old Congress,
approved of the ordinance of 1787, by which slavery is forever abolished
in the territory northwest of the river Ohio.
Without the votes of these States, the ordinance could not have passed;
and there is no recollection of an opposition from any of these States
to the act of confirmation, passed under the actual Constitution.
Slavery had long been established in these States--the evil was felt in
their institutions, laws, and habits, and could not easily or at once be
abolished. But these votes so honorable to these States, satisfactorily
demonstrate their unwillingness to permit the extension of slavery into
the new States which might be admitted by Congress into the Union.
The States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, on the northwest of the river
Ohio, have been admitted by Congress into the Union, on the condition
and conformably to the article of compact, contained in the ordinance
of 1787, and by which it is declared that there shall be neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States.
Although Congress possess the power of making the exclusion of slavery a
part or condition of the act admitting a new State into the Union, they
may, in special cases, and for sufficient reasons, forbear to exercise
this power. Thus Kentucky and Vermont were admitted as new States into
the Union, without making the abolition of slavery the condition of
their admission. In Vermont, slavery never existed; her laws excluding
the same. Kentucky was formed out of, and settled by, Virginia, and
the inhabitants of Kentucky, equally with those of Virginia, by
fair interpretation of the Constitution, were exempt from all such
interference of Congress, as might disturb or impair the security of
their property in slaves. The western territory of North Carolina and
Georgia, having been partially granted and settled under the authority
of these States, before the cession thereof to the United States, and
these States being original parties to the Constitution which recognizes
the existence of slavery, no measure restraining slavery could be
applied by Congress to this territory. But to remove all doubt on this
head, it was made a condition of the cession of this territory to the
United States, that the ordinance of 1787, except the sixth article
thereof, respecting slavery, should be applied to the same; and that
the sixth article should not be so applied. Accordingly, the States of
Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, comprehending the territory ceded
to the United States by North Carolina and Georgia, have been admitted
as new States into the Union, without a provision, by which slavery
shall be excluded from the same. According to this abstract of the
proceedings of Congress in the admission of new States into the Union,
of the eight new States within the original limits of the United States,
four have been admitted without an article excluding slavery; three have
been admitted on the condition that slavery should be excluded; and one
admitted without such condition. In the few first cases, Congress were
restrained from exercising the power to exclude slavery; in the next
three, they exercised this power; and in the last, it was unnecessary to
do so, slavery being excluded by the State Constitution.
The province of Louisiana, soon after its cession to the United States,
was divided into two territories, comprehending such parts thereof as
were contiguous to the river Mississippi, being the only parts of the
province that were inhabited. The foreign language, laws, customs,
and manners of the inhabitants, required the immediate and cautious
attention of Congress, which, instead of extending, in the first
instance, to these territories the ordinance of 1787, ordained special
regulations for the government of the same. These regulations were from
time to time revised and altered, as observation and experience showed
to be expedient, and as was deemed most likely to encourage and
promote those changes which would soonest qualify the inhabitants for
self-government and admission into the Union. When the United States
took possession of the province of Louisiana in 1804, it was estimated
to contain 50,000 white inhabitants, 40,000 slaves, and 2,000 free
persons of color.
More than four-fifths of the whites, and all the slaves, except about
thirteen hundred, inhabited New Orleans and the adjacent territory; the
residue, consisting of less than ten thousand whites, and about thirteen
hundred slaves, were dispersed throughout the country now included in
the Arkansas and Missouri territories. The greater part of the thirteen
hundred slaves were in the Missouri territory, some of them having been
removed thither from the old French settlements on the east side of
the Mississippi, after the passing of the ordinance of 1787, by which
slavery in those settlements was abolished.
In 1812, the territory of New Orleans, to which the ordinance of
1787, with the exception of certain parts thereof, had been previously
extended, was permitted by Congress to form a Constitution and State
Government, and admitted as a new State into the Union, by the name
of Louisiana. The acts of Congress for these purposes, in addition to
sundry important provisions respecting rivers and public lands, which
are declared to be irrevocable unless by common consent, annex other
terms and conditions, whereby it is established, not only that the
Constitution of Louisiana should be republican, but that it should
contain the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty,
that it should secure to the citizens the trial by jury in all criminal
cases, and the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus according to the
Constitution of the United States; and after its admission into the
Union, that the laws which Louisiana might pass, should be promulgated;
its records of every description preserved; and its judicial and
legislative proceedings conducted in the language in which the laws and
judicial proceedings of the United States are published and conducted.
* * * * *
Having annexed these new and extraordinary conditions to the act for the
admission of Louisiana into the Union, Congress may, if they shall deem
it expedient, annex the like conditions to the act for the admission of
Missouri; and, moreover, as in the case of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois,
provide by an article for that purpose, that slavery shall not exist
within the same.
Admitting this construction of the Constitution, it is alleged that the
power by which Congress excluded slavery from the States north-west of
the river Ohio, is suspended in respect to the States that may be formed
in the province of Louisiana. The article of the treaty referred to
declares: "That the inhabitants of the territory shall be incorporated
in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible;
according to the principles of the Federal Constitution, to the
enjoyment of all rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of
the United States; and in the meantime, they shall be maintained and
protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the
religion which they profess."