THE FIRST SPEECH IN CONGRESS.
The backwoods-boy is now in Congress. He is one of the law-makers of the
nation, and is an equal associate of eminent statesmen gathered from all
parts of the country.
Let us look about us as we enter the old Hall of Representatives, and
see into what company the backwoods-boy has come.
In the Speaker’s chair sits a dignified-looking man, an accomplished
parliamentarian, whom friends and opponents alike concede to be amply
competent to discharge the duties of his high place--this is Robert C.
Winthrop, of Massachusetts, living still in a dignified and honored old
age. Among the notable members of this Congress were John Quincy Adams,
who had already been President, but who was willing notwithstanding to
serve his country in an humble place; George Ashmun, also representing
Massachusetts; Jacob Collamer; Alexander H. Stephens, afterward
Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy; Robert Toombs; Andrew
Johnson, afterward associated with Mr. Lincoln as Vice-President, and
upon whose shoulders fell the mantle of his lamented chief; Marsh,
Truman Smith, Wilmot, Rhett, Giddings, and others, whose names were
already conspicuous. This will give some idea of the personnel of the
House; while in the Senate chamber, at the other end of the Capitol,
Webster, Calhoun, Dix, Dickinson, Hale, Crittenden, and Corwin lent
weight and dignity to that co-ordinate legislative branch of the
Government.
Such were the men with whom the young Western member was to share the
labors of legislation. Time has given to some of them a fame which they
did not then possess. Their successors of our day may, after the lapse
of a generation, bear names as weighty; but I am afraid we shall look in
vain for successors of Webster, Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, A. H.
Stephens, and Crittenden.
The question will occur to my young readers, What part did Abraham
Lincoln take in the national councils? Was he a cipher, an obscure
member, simply filling his seat and drawing his pay, or did he take an
active part in the business of the session? I will say in answer, that
he was by no means a cipher. Though he did not aspire to be a
leader--for in a new member that would have been in bad taste--he was
always ready to take part when he felt called upon to do so, and his
vote and words were such as he would not in after years have felt it
necessary to recall or apologize for.
It is interesting to know that he arrayed himself with Mr. Giddings in
favor of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. Mr. Giddings
little suspected that the plain member from Illinois, whose co-operation
he had secured, was to be the instrument under Providence of abolishing
slavery, not only in the District of Columbia, but throughout the land.
But slavery was not at that time the leading political question of the
day. Parties were divided upon the subject of the Mexican war. While
opposed to the war, Mr. Lincoln was in favor of voting for the necessary
supplies and appropriations, and he took care, in an elaborate speech,
to explain his position. He felt that it was his duty as a citizen and
a patriot to see that the army which had been sent to Mexico should be
properly sustained; but he did not for a moment concede that the war was
just or necessary. As President Polk saw fit to construe such a vote as
a formal approval of his action and of the war, Mr. Lincoln made an
elaborate speech in arraignment of his interpretation. As this was Mr.
Lincoln’s first speech in Congress, I shall make considerable quotations
from it, partly to show where he stood on this important question, and
partly to prove to my readers that he was no novice, but well qualified
for the high position to which he had been elected by the suffrages of
his fellow-citizens. I am quite aware that many of my young readers will
skip this portion as uninteresting; but I hope that if in after years
they are led to read this biography once more, they will count it worth
while to read it.
After reviewing and controverting the reasons assigned by the President
for the statement that Mexico had invaded our soil, and that therefore
“by the act of the Republic of Mexico a state of war exists between that
Government and the United States,” Mr. Lincoln proceeds:
“I am now through the whole of the President’s evidence; and it is a
singular fact, that if any one should declare the President sent the
army into the midst of a settlement of Mexican people who had never
submitted, by consent or by force, to the authority of Texas or of the
United States, and that _there_ and _thereby_ the first blood of the war
was shed, there is not one word in all the President has said which
would either admit or deny the declaration. In this strange omission
chiefly consists the deception of the President’s evidence--an omission
which it does seem to me could scarcely have occurred but by design. My
way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there I
have sometimes seen a good lawyer struggling for his client’s neck, in a
desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover
up with many words some position pressed upon him by the prosecution,
which he _dared_ not admit and yet _could_ not deny. Party bias may help
to make it appear so; but, with all the allowance I can make for such
bias, it still does appear to me that just such, and from such
necessity, are the President’s struggles in this case.
“Some time after my colleague (Mr. Richardson) introduced the
resolutions I have mentioned, I introduced a preamble, resolution, and
interrogatories, intended to draw the President out, if possible, on
this hitherto untrodden ground. To show their relevancy, I propose to
state my understanding of the true rule for ascertaining the boundary
between Texas and Mexico. It is that _wherever_ Texas was _exercising_
jurisdiction was hers; and wherever Mexico was exercising jurisdiction
was hers; and that whatever separated the actual exercise of
jurisdiction of the one from that of the other, was the true boundary
between them. If, as is probably true, Texas was exercising jurisdiction
along the western bank of the Nueces, and Mexico was exercising it along
the eastern bank of the Rio Grande; then neither river was the boundary,
but the uninhabited country between the two was. The extent of our
territory in that region depended not on any treaty-fixed boundary (for
no treaty had attempted it), but on revolution. Any people anywhere,
being inclined and having the power, have the _right_ to rise up and
shake off the existing Government, and form a new one that suits them
better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right--a right which, we
hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined
to cases in which the whole people of an existing Government may choose
to exercise it. Any portion of such people that _can_ may revolutionize
and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More
than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize,
putting down a minority, intermingled, or near about them, who may
oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the
Tories of our own Revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go
by old lines or old laws, but to break up both and make new ones. As to
the country now in question, we bought it of France in 1803 and sold it
to Spain in 1819, according to the President’s statement. After this,
all Mexico, including Texas, revolutionized against Spain; and still
later, Texas revolutionized against Mexico. In my view, just so far as
she carried her revolution by obtaining the _actual_, willing or
unwilling, submission of the people, _so far_ the country was hers and
no further.
“Now, sir, for the purpose of obtaining the very best evidence as to
whether Texas had actually carried her revolution to the place where the
hostilities of the present war commenced, let the President answer the
interrogatories I proposed, as before mentioned, or some other similar
ones. Let him answer fully, fairly, and candidly; let him answer with
_facts_, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where
Washington sat; and, so remembering, let him answer as Washington would
answer. As a nation _should_ not, and the Almighty _will_ not be evaded,
so let him attempt no evasion, no equivocation; and if, so answering, he
can show that the soil was ours where the first blood of the war was
shed--that it was not within an inhabited country, or, if within such,
that the inhabitants had submitted themselves to the civil authority of
Texas or of the United States, and that the same is true of the site of
Fort Brown--then I am with him for his justification. In that case, I
shall be most happy to reverse the vote I gave the other day. I have a
selfish notion for desiring that the President may do this; I expect to
give some votes in connection with the war, which, without his so doing,
will be of doubtful propriety, in my own judgment, but which will be
free from the doubt, if he does so.
“But if he _can not_ or _will not_ do this--if on any pretense, or no
pretense, he shall refuse or omit it--then I shall be fully convinced of
what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being
in the wrong; that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of
Abel, is crying to heaven against him; that he ordered General Taylor
into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, purposely to bring on
war; that originally having some strong motive--what I will not stop now
to give my opinion concerning--to involve the two countries in a war,
and trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the
exceeding brightness of military glory--that attractive rainbow that
rises in showers of blood--that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy--he
plunged into it, and has swept _on_ and _on_, till, disappointed in his
calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds
himself he knows not where. How like the half-insane mumbling of a fever
dream is the whole war part of the last message! At one time telling us
that Mexico has nothing whatever that we can get but territory; at
another showing us how we can support the war by levying contributions
on Mexico; at one time urging the national honor, the security of the
future, the prevention of foreign interference, and even the good of
Mexico herself, as among the objects of the war; at another, telling us
that ‘to reject indemnity by refusing to accept a cession of territory
would be to abandon all our just demands, and to wage the war, bearing
all its expenses, _without a purpose or definite object_.’
“So then, the national honor, security of the future, and everything but
territorial indemnity, may be considered _no purposes_ and _indefinite_
objects of the war! But having it now settled that territorial indemnity
is the only object, we are urged to seize, by legislation here, all that
he was content to take a few months ago, and the whole province of Lower
California to boot, and to still carry on the war--to take _all_ we are
fighting for, and _still_ fight on. Again the President is resolved,
under all circumstances, to have full territorial indemnity for the
expenses of the war; but he forgets to tell us how we are to get the
_excess_ after those expenses shall have surpassed the value
[Illustration: THE YOUNG RAIL SPLITTER. Page 57.]
of the _whole_ of the Mexican territory. So, again, he insists that the
separate national existence of Mexico shall be maintained; but he does
not tell us _how_ this can be done after we shall have taken _all_ her
territory. Lest the questions I here suggest be considered speculative
merely, let me be indulged a moment in trying to show they are not.
“The war has gone on some twenty months, for the expenses of which,
together with an inconsiderable old score, the President now claims
about one-half of the Mexican territory, and that by far the better
half, so far as concerns our ability to make anything out of it. It is
comparatively uninhabited, so that we could establish land offices in
it, and raise money in that way. But the other half is already
inhabited, as I understand it, tolerably densely for the nature of the
country; and all its lands, or all that are valuable, already
appropriated as private property. How, then, are we to make anything out
of these lands with this incumbrance on them, or how remove the
incumbrance? I suppose no one will say we should kill the people, or
drive them out, or make slaves of them, or even confiscate their
property? How, then, can we make much out of this part of the territory?
If the prosecution of the war has, in expenses, already equalled the
_better_ half of the country, how long its future prosecution will be in
equalling the less valuable half is not a _speculative_ but a
_practical_ question, pressing closely upon us, and yet it is a question
which the President seems never to have thought of.
“As to the mode of terminating the war and securing peace, the President
is equally wandering and indefinite. First, it is to be done by a more
vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemy’s
country; and, after apparently talking himself tired on this point, the
President drops down into a half-despairing tone, and tells us ‘that,
with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a
government subject to constant changes, by successive revolutions, _the
continued success of our arms may fail to obtain a satisfactory peace_.’
Then he suggests the propriety of wheedling the Mexican people to desert
the counsels of their own leaders, and, trusting in our protection, to
set up a government from which we can obtain a satisfactory peace,
telling us that ‘_this may become the only mode of obtaining such a
peace_.’ But soon he falls into doubt of this too, and then drops back
on to the already abandoned ground of ‘more vigorous prosecution.’ All
this shows that the President is in no wise satisfied with his own
positions. First, he takes up one, and, in attempting to argue us into
it, he argues himself _out_ of it; then seizes another, and goes through
the same process; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing
new, he snatches up the old one again, which he has some time before
cast off. His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and
thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no
position on which it can settle down and be at ease.
“Again, it a singular omission in the message, that it nowhere intimates
_when_ the President expects the war to terminate. At its beginning,
General Scott was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not
disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than
three or four months. But now, at the end of about twenty months, during
which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes--every
department and every part, land and water, officers and privateers,
regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of
things which it had ever before been thought that men could not do;
after all this, this same President gives us a long message without
showing us that, _as to the end_, he has himself even an imaginary
conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a
bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be
able to show that there is not something about his conscience more
painful than all his mental perplexity?”
It will be seen that, new as he is to the halls of Congress, Mr. Lincoln
speaks with the freedom, and in the assured tone, of a veteran member. I
have nothing to say as to the sentiments contained in these extracts. I
wished my readers to see what sort of a speech the Illinois Congressman,
trained in the backwoods, and almost absolutely without educational
advantages, was able to make. It will be conceded that the result, all
things considered, is remarkable. When, twelve years later, he was
nominated for the post of Chief Magistrate, it was a fashion among many,
in both political parties, to speak of him as an obscure member of
Congress, who had never attracted any attention during his service in
the House. This was not correct. He took a prominent part in legislation
of all kinds, and made himself acquainted with whatever subjects came up
for consideration.
It has often been said that fact is stranger than fiction, and I am
tempted to remark that the new Congressman who so boldly criticised
President Polk for his management of the war, was far from dreaming that
he himself would be subject to similar attacks when, as President, the
management of a far more important war devolved upon him.