the platform!"]--I say, that while I was at Danville Court, some of our
friends of Anti-Nebraska got together in Springfield and elected me as one
delegate to represent old Sangamon with them in this convention, and I
am here certainly as a sympathizer in this movement and by virtue of that
meeting and selection. But we can hardly be called delegates strictly,
inasmuch as, properly speaking, we represent nobody but ourselves. I think
it altogether fair to say that we have no Anti-Nebraska party in Sangamon,
although there is a good deal of Anti-Nebraska feeling there; but I say
for myself, and I think I may speak also for my colleagues, that we who
are here fully approve of the platform and of all that has been done [A
voice, "Yes!"], and even if we are not regularly delegates, it will be
right for me to answer your call to speak. I suppose we truly stand for
the public sentiment of Sangamon on the great question of the repeal,
although we do not yet represent many numbers who have taken a distinct
position on the question.
We are in a trying time--it ranges above mere party--and this movement
to call a halt and turn our steps backward needs all the help and good
counsels it can get; for unless popular opinion makes itself very strongly
felt, and a change is made in our present course, blood will flow on
account of Nebraska, and brother's hands will be raised against brother!
[The last sentence was uttered in such an earnest, impressive, if not,
indeed, tragic, manner, as to make a cold chill creep over me. Others gave
a similar experience.]
I have listened with great interest to the earnest appeal made to Illinois
men by the gentleman from Lawrence [James S. Emery] who has just addressed
us so eloquently and forcibly. I was deeply moved by his statement of the
wrongs done to free-State men out there. I think it just to say that all
true men North should sympathize with them, and ought to be willing to
do any possible and needful thing to right their wrongs. But we must not
promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot;
we must be calm and moderate, and consider the whole difficulty, and
determine what is possible and just. We must not be led by excitement
and passion to do that which our sober judgments would not approve in our
cooler moments. We have higher aims; we will have more serious business
than to dally with temporary measures.
We are here to stand firmly for a principle--to stand firmly for a right.
We know that great political and moral wrongs are done, and outrages
committed, and we denounce those wrongs and outrages, although we cannot,
at present, do much more. But we desire to reach out beyond those personal
outrages and establish a rule that will apply to all, and so prevent any
future outrages.
We have seen to-day that every shade of popular opinion is represented
here, with Freedom, or rather Free Soil, as the basis. We have come
together as in some sort representatives of popular opinion against the
extension of slavery into territory now free in fact as well as by law,
and the pledged word of the statesmen of the nation who are now no more.
We come--we are here assembled together--to protest as well as we can
against a great wrong, and to take measures, as well as we now can, to
make that wrong right; to place the nation, as far as it may be possible
now, as it was before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; and the plain
way to do this is to restore the Compromise, and to demand and determine
that Kansas shall be free! [Immense applause.] While we affirm, and
reaffirm, if necessary, our devotion to the principles of the Declaration
of Independence, let our practical work here be limited to the above. We
know that there is not a perfect agreement of sentiment here on the public
questions which might be rightfully considered in this convention, and
that the indignation which we all must feel cannot be helped; but all of
us must give up something for the good of the cause. There is one desire
which is uppermost in the mind, one wish common to us all, to which no
dissent will be made; and I counsel you earnestly to bury all resentment,
to sink all personal feeling, make all things work to a common purpose in
which we are united and agreed about, and which all present will agree is
absolutely necessary--which must be done by any rightful mode if there
be such: Slavery must be kept out of Kansas! [Applause.] The test--the
pinch--is right there. If we lose Kansas to freedom, an example will be
set which will prove fatal to freedom in the end. We, therefore, in
the language of the Bible, must "lay the axe to the root of the tree."
Temporizing will not do longer; now is the time for decision--for firm,
persistent, resolute action. [Applause.]
The Nebraska Bill, or rather Nebraska law, is not one of wholesome
legislation, but was and is an act of legislative usurpation, whose
result, if not indeed intention, is to make slavery national; and unless
headed off in some effective way, we are in a fair way to see this land
of boasted freedom converted into a land of slavery in fact. [Sensation.]
Just open your two eyes, and see if this be not so. I need do no more than
state, to command universal approval, that almost the entire North, as
well as a large following in the border States, is radically opposed to
the planting of slavery in free territory. Probably in a popular vote
throughout the nation nine tenths of the voters in the free States, and
at least one-half in the border States, if they could express their
sentiments freely, would vote NO on such an issue; and it is safe to say
that two thirds of the votes of the entire nation would be opposed to it.
And yet, in spite of this overbalancing of sentiment in this free country,
we are in a fair way to see Kansas present itself for admission as a slave
State. Indeed, it is a felony, by the local law of Kansas, to deny that
slavery exists there even now. By every principle of law, a negro in
Kansas is free; yet the bogus Legislature makes it an infamous crime to
tell him that he is free!
Statutes of Kansas, 1555, chapter 151, Sec. 12: If any free person, by
speaking or by writing, assert or maintain that persons have not the right
to hold slaves in this Territory, or shall introduce into this Territory,
print, publish, write, circulate . . . any book, paper, magazine,
pamphlet, or circular containing any denial of the right of persons
to hold slaves in this Territory such person shall be deemed guilty of
felony, and punished by imprisonment at hard labor for a term of not
less than two years. Sec. 13. No person who is conscientiously opposed
to holding slaves, or who does not admit the right to hold slaves in this
Territory, shall sit as a juror on the trial of any prosecution for any
violation of any Sections of this Act.
The party lash and the fear of ridicule will overawe justice and liberty;
for it is a singular fact, but none the less a fact, and well known by the
most common experience, that men will do things under the terror of the
party lash that they would not on any account or for any consideration
do otherwise; while men who will march up to the mouth of a loaded cannon
without shrinking will run from the terrible name of "Abolitionist,"
even when pronounced by a worthless creature whom they, with good reason,
despise. For instance--to press this point a little--Judge Douglas
introduced his Nebraska Bill in January; and we had an extra session of
our Legislature in the succeeding February, in which were seventy-five
Democrats; and at a party caucus, fully attended, there were just three
votes, out of the whole seventy-five, for the measure. But in a few days
orders came on from Washington, commanding them to approve the measure;
the party lash was applied, and it was brought up again in caucus,
and passed by a large majority. The masses were against it, but party
necessity carried it; and it was passed through the lower house of
Congress against the will of the people, for the same reason. Here is
where the greatest danger lies that, while we profess to be a government
of law and reason, law will give way to violence on demand of this
awful and crushing power. Like the great Juggernaut--I think that is the
name--the great idol, it crushes everything that comes in its way, and
makes a [?]--or, as I read once, in a blackletter law book, "a slave is
a human being who is legally not a person but a thing." And if the
safeguards to liberty are broken down, as is now attempted, when they have
made things of all the free negroes, how long, think you, before they
will begin to make things of poor white men? [Applause.] Be not deceived.
Revolutions do not go backward. The founder of the Democratic party
declared that all men were created equal. His successor in the leadership
has written the word "white" before men, making it read "all white men are
created equal." Pray, will or may not the Know-Nothings, if they should
get in power, add the word "Protestant," making it read "all Protestant
white men...?"
Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in other
quarters. John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you will
recollect, calls the immortal Declaration "a self-evident lie"; while at
the birthplace of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the "cradle
of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis--Choate,
from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise
of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a string of glittering
generalities"; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with
proslavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories practical. Thomas
Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery,
solemnly declared that he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God is just; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand,
"don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down." Now, if slavery
is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling
manner. But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom
considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread
and fortify it? [Applause.]
But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a
negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly,
he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their
descendants. As matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is
historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were
and are the superior race. This I admit. But the corner-stone of the
government, so to speak, was the declaration that "all men are created
equal," and all entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
[Applause.]
And not only so, but the framers of the Constitution were particular
to keep out of that instrument the word "slave," the reason being that
slavery would ultimately come to an end, and they did not wish to have any
reminder that in this free country human beings were ever prostituted to
slavery. [Applause.] Nor is it any argument that we are superior and the
negro inferior--that he has but one talent while we have ten. Let the
negro possess the little he has in independence; if he has but one talent,
he should be permitted to keep the little he has. [Applause:] But slavery
will endure no test of reason or logic; and yet its advocates, like
Douglas, use a sort of bastard logic, or noisy assumption it might better
be termed, like the above, in order to prepare the mind for the gradual,
but none the less certain, encroachments of the Moloch of slavery upon the
fair domain of freedom. But however much you may argue upon it, or smother
it in soft phrase, slavery can only be maintained by force--by violence.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was by violence. It was a violation
of both law and the sacred obligations of honor, to overthrow and trample
under foot a solemn compromise, obtained by the fearful loss to freedom of
one of the fairest of our Western domains. Congress violated the will and
confidence of its constituents in voting for the bill; and while public
sentiment, as shown by the elections of 1854, demanded the restoration of
this compromise, Congress violated its trust by refusing simply because it
had the force of numbers to hold on to it. And murderous violence is being
used now, in order to force slavery on to Kansas; for it cannot be done in
any other way. [Sensation.]
The necessary result was to establish the rule of violence--force, instead
of the rule of law and reason; to perpetuate and spread slavery, and
in time to make it general. We see it at both ends of the line. In
Washington, on the very spot where the outrage was started, the fearless
Sumner is beaten to insensibility, and is now slowly dying; while senators
who claim to be gentlemen and Christians stood by, countenancing the
act, and even applauding it afterward in their places in the Senate. Even
Douglas, our man, saw it all and was within helping distance, yet let the
murderous blows fall unopposed. Then, at the other end of the line, at the
very time Sumner was being murdered, Lawrence was being destroyed for
the crime of freedom. It was the most prominent stronghold of liberty in
Kansas, and must give way to the all-dominating power of slavery. Only
two days ago, Judge Trumbull found it necessary to propose a bill in the
Senate to prevent a general civil war and to restore peace in Kansas.
We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect
some new disaster with each newspaper we read. Are we in a healthful
political state? Are not the tendencies plain? Do not the signs of the
times point plainly the way in which we are going? [Sensation.]
In the early days of the Constitution slavery was recognized, by South and
North alike, as an evil, and the division of sentiment about it was not
controlled by geographical lines or considerations of climate, but by
moral and philanthropic views. Petitions for the abolition of slavery were
presented to the very first Congress by Virginia and Massachusetts alike.
To show the harmony which prevailed, I will state that a fugitive slave
law was passed in 1793, with no dissenting voice in the Senate, and
but seven dissenting votes in the House. It was, however, a wise law,
moderate, and, under the Constitution, a just one. Twenty-five years
later, a more stringent law was proposed and defeated; and thirty-five
years after that, the present law, drafted by Mason of Virginia, was
passed by Northern votes. I am not, just now, complaining of this law, but
I am trying to show how the current sets; for the proposed law of 1817 was
far less offensive than the present one. In 1774 the Continental Congress
pledged itself, without a dissenting vote, to wholly discontinue the slave
trade, and to neither purchase nor import any slave; and less than three
months before the passage of the Declaration of Independence, the same
Congress which adopted that declaration unanimously resolved "that no
slave be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies." [Great
applause.]
On the second day of July, 1776, the draft of a Declaration of
Independence was reported to Congress by the committee, and in it the
slave trade was characterized as "an execrable commerce," as "a piratical
warfare," as the "opprobrium of infidel powers," and as "a cruel war
against human nature." [Applause.] All agreed on this except South
Carolina and Georgia, and in order to preserve harmony, and from the
necessity of the case, these expressions were omitted. Indeed, abolition
societies existed as far south as Virginia; and it is a well-known fact
that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lee, Henry, Mason, and Pendleton were
qualified abolitionists, and much more radical on that subject than we
of the Whig and Democratic parties claim to be to-day. On March 1, 1784,
Virginia ceded to the confederation all its lands lying northwest of the
Ohio River. Jefferson, Chase of Maryland, and Howell of Rhode Island, as
a committee on that and territory thereafter to be ceded, reported that
no slavery should exist after the year 1800. Had this report been adopted,
not only the Northwest, but Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi
also would have been free; but it required the assent of nine States to
ratify it. North Carolina was divided, and thus its vote was lost; and
Delaware, Georgia, and New Jersey refused to vote. In point of fact, as it
was, it was assented to by six States. Three years later on a square vote
to exclude slavery from the Northwest, only one vote, and that from New
York, was against it. And yet, thirty-seven years later, five thousand
citizens of Illinois, out of a voting mass of less than twelve thousand,
deliberately, after a long and heated contest, voted to introduce slavery
in Illinois; and, to-day, a large party in the free State of Illinois are
willing to vote to fasten the shackles of slavery on the fair domain of
Kansas, notwithstanding it received the dowry of freedom long before its
birth as a political community. I repeat, therefore, the question: Is it
not plain in what direction we are tending? [Sensation.] In the colonial
time, Mason, Pendleton, and Jefferson were as hostile to slavery in
Virginia as Otis, Ames, and the Adamses were in Massachusetts; and
Virginia made as earnest an effort to get rid of it as old Massachusetts
did. But circumstances were against them and they failed; but not that the
good will of its leading men was lacking. Yet within less than fifty years
Virginia changed its tune, and made negro-breeding for the cotton and
sugar States one of its leading industries. [Laughter and applause.]
In the Constitutional Convention, George Mason of Virginia made a more
violent abolition speech than my friends Lovejoy or Codding would desire
to make here to-day--a speech which could not be safely repeated anywhere
on Southern soil in this enlightened year. But, while there were some
differences of opinion on this subject even then, discussion was allowed;
but as you see by the Kansas slave code, which, as you know, is the
Missouri slave code, merely ferried across the river, it is a felony
to even express an opinion hostile to that foul blot in the land of
Washington and the Declaration of Independence. [Sensation.]
In Kentucky--my State--in 1849, on a test vote, the mighty influence
of Henry Clay and many other good then there could not get a symptom of
expression in favor of gradual emancipation on a plain issue of marching
toward the light of civilization with Ohio and Illinois; but the State of
Boone and Hardin and Henry Clay, with a nigger under each arm, took the
black trail toward the deadly swamps of barbarism. Is there--can there
be--any doubt about this thing? And is there any doubt that we must all
lay aside our prejudices and march, shoulder to shoulder, in the great
army of Freedom? [Applause.]
Every Fourth of July our young orators all proclaim this to be "the land
of the free and the home of the brave!" Well, now, when you orators get
that off next year, and, may be, this very year, how would you like some
old grizzled farmer to get up in the grove and deny it? [Laughter.] How
would you like that? But suppose Kansas comes in as a slave State, and
all the "border ruffians" have barbecues about it, and free-State men come
trailing back to the dishonored North, like whipped dogs with their tails
between their legs, it is--ain't it?--evident that this is no more the
"land of the free"; and if we let it go so, we won't dare to say "home of
the brave" out loud. [Sensation and confusion.]
Can any man doubt that, even in spite of the people's will, slavery will
triumph through violence, unless that will be made manifest and enforced?
Even Governor Reeder claimed at the outset that the contest in Kansas was
to be fair, but he got his eyes open at last; and I believe that, as a
result of this moral and physical violence, Kansas will soon apply for
admission as a slave State. And yet we can't mistake that the people
don't want it so, and that it is a land which is free both by natural
and political law. No law, is free law! Such is the understanding of all
Christendom. In the Somerset case, decided nearly a century ago, the great
Lord Mansfield held that slavery was of such a nature that it must take
its rise in positive (as distinguished from natural) law; and that in no
country or age could it be traced back to any other source. Will some
one please tell me where is the positive law that establishes slavery in
Kansas? [A voice: "The bogus laws."] Aye, the bogus laws! And, on the same
principle, a gang of Missouri horse-thieves could come into Illinois and
declare horse-stealing to be legal [Laughter], and it would be just as
legal as slavery is in Kansas. But by express statute, in the land of
Washington and Jefferson, we may soon be brought face to face with the
discreditable fact of showing to the world by our acts that we prefer
slavery to freedom--darkness to light! [Sensation.]
It is, I believe, a principle in law that when one party to a contract
violates it so grossly as to chiefly destroy the object for which it is
made, the other party may rescind it. I will ask Browning if that ain't
good law. [Voices: "Yes!"] Well, now if that be right, I go for rescinding
the whole, entire Missouri Compromise and thus turning Missouri into a
free State; and I should like to know the difference--should like for
any one to point out the difference--between our making a free State of
Missouri and their making a slave State of Kansas. [Great applause.] There
ain't one bit of difference, except that our way would be a great mercy
to humanity. But I have never said, and the Whig party has never said, and
those who oppose the Nebraska Bill do not as a body say, that they
have any intention of interfering with slavery in the slave States. Our
platform says just the contrary. We allow slavery to exist in the slave
States, not because slavery is right or good, but from the necessities of
our Union. We grant a fugitive slave law because it is so "nominated in
the bond"; because our fathers so stipulated--had to--and we are bound to
carry out this agreement. But they did not agree to introduce slavery in
regions where it did not previously exist. On the contrary, they said by
their example and teachings that they did not deem it expedient--did n't
consider it right--to do so; and it is wise and right to do just as
they did about it. [Voices: "Good!"] And that it what we propose--not to
interfere with slavery where it exists (we have never tried to do it),
and to give them a reasonable and efficient fugitive slave law. [A voice:
"No!"] I say YES! [Applause.] It was part of the bargain, and I 'm for
living up to it; but I go no further; I'm not bound to do more, and I
won't agree any further. [Great applause.]