FELLOW CITIZENS: I accepted your invitation to speak to you on the great
question of these days, with very little consideration of what I might
have to offer: for there seems to be no option. The last year has forced
us all into politics, and made it a paramount duty to seek what it is
often a duty to shun. We do not breathe well. There is infamy in the air.
I have a new experience. I wake in the morning with a painful sensation,
which I carry about all day, and which, when traced home, is the odious
remembrance of that ignominy which has fallen on Massachusetts, which
robs the landscape of beauty, and takes the sunshine out of every hour.
I have lived all my life in this state, and never had any experience
of personal inconvenience from the laws, until now. They never came
near me to any discomfort before. I find the like sensibility in my
neighbors; and in that class who take no interest in the ordinary
questions of party politics. There are men who are as sure indexes of
the equity of legislation and of the same state of public feeling, as
the barometer is of the weight of the air, and it is a bad sign when
these are discontented, for though they snuff oppression and dishonor
at a distance, it is because they are more impressionable: the whole
population will in a short time be as painfully affected.
Every hour brings us from distant quarters of the Union the expression of
mortification at the late events in Massachusetts, and at the behavior
of Boston. The tameness was indeed shocking. Boston, of whose fame for
spirit and character we have all been so proud; Boston, whose citizens,
intelligent people in England told me they could always distinguish by
their culture among Americans; the Boston of the American Revolution,
which figures so proudly in John Adams’s Diary, which the whole country
has been reading; Boston, spoiled by prosperity, must bow its ancient
honor in the dust, and make us irretrievably ashamed. In Boston, we have
said with such lofty confidence, no fugitive slave can be arrested, and
now, we must transfer our vaunt to the country, and say, with a little
less confidence, no fugitive man can be arrested here; at least we can
brag thus until to-morrow, when the farmers also may be corrupted.
The tameness is indeed complete. The only haste in Boston, after the
rescue of Shadrach,[128] last February, was, who should first put his
name on the list of volunteers in aid of the marshal. I met the smoothest
of Episcopal Clergymen the other day, and allusion being made to Mr.
Webster’s treachery, he blandly replied, “Why, do you know I think
_that_ the great action of his life.” It looked as if in the city and
the suburbs all were involved in one hot haste of terror,—presidents
of colleges, and professors, saints, and brokers, insurers, lawyers,
importers, manufacturers: not an unpleasing sentiment, not a liberal
recollection, not so much as a snatch of an old song for freedom, dares
intrude on their passive obedience.
The panic has paralyzed the journals, with the fewest exceptions, so that
one cannot open a newspaper without being disgusted by new records of
shame. I cannot read longer even the local good news. When I look down
the columns at the titles of paragraphs, “Education in Massachusetts,”
“Board of Trade,” “Art Union,” “Revival of Religion,” what bitter
mockeries! The very convenience of property, the house and land we
occupy, have lost their best value, and a man looks gloomily at his
children, and thinks, “What have I done that you should begin life in
dishonor?” Every liberal study is discredited,—literature and science
appear effeminate, and the hiding of the head. The college, the churches,
the schools, the very shops and factories are discredited; real estate,
every kind of wealth, every branch of industry, every avenue to power,
suffers injury, and the value of life is reduced. Just now a friend came
into my house and said, “If this law shall be repealed I shall be glad
that I have lived; if not I shall be sorry that I was born.” What kind of
law is that which extorts language like this from the heart of a free and
civilized people?
One intellectual benefit we owe to the late disgraces. The crisis had the
illuminating power of a sheet of lightning at midnight. It showed truth.
It ended a good deal of nonsense we had been wont to hear and to repeat,
on the 19th of April, the 17th of June, the 4th of July. It showed the
slightness and unreliableness of our social fabric, it showed what stuff
reputations are made of, what straws we dignify by office and title,
and how competent we are to give counsel and help in a day of trial. It
showed the shallowness of leaders; the divergence of parties from their
alleged grounds; showed that men would not stick to what they had said,
that the resolutions of public bodies, or the pledges never so often
given and put on record of public men, will not bind them. The fact
comes out more plainly that you cannot rely on any man for the defence
of truth, who is not constitutionally or by blood and temperament on
that side. A man of a greedy and unscrupulous selfishness may maintain
morals when they are in fashion: but he will not stick. However close
Mr. Wolf’s nails have been pared, however neatly he has been shaved, and
tailored, and set up on end, and taught to say, “Virtue and Religion,”
he cannot be relied on at a pinch: he will say, morality means pricking
a vein. The popular assumption that all men loved freedom, and believed
in the Christian religion, was found hollow American brag; only persons
who were known and tried benefactors are found standing for freedom:
the sentimentalists went downstream.[129] I question the value of our
civilization, when I see that the public mind had never less hold of the
strongest of all truths. The sense of injustice is blunted,—a sure sign
of the shallowness of our intellect. I cannot accept the railroad and
telegraph in exchange for reason and charity. It is not skill in iron
locomotives that makes so fine civility, as the jealousy of liberty. I
cannot think the most judicious tubing a compensation for metaphysical
debility. What is the use of admirable law-forms, and political forms, if
a hurricane of party feeling and a combination of monied interests can
beat them to the ground? What is the use of courts, if judges only quote
authorities, and no judge exerts original jurisdiction, or recurs to
first principles? What is the use of a Federal Bench, if its opinions are
the political breath of the hour? And what is the use of constitutions,
if all the guaranties provided by the jealousy of ages for the protection
of liberty are made of no effect, when a bad act of Congress finds a
willing commissioner? The levity of the public mind has been shown in the
past year by the most extravagant actions. Who could have believed it,
if foretold that a hundred guns would be fired in Boston on the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Bill? Nothing proves the want of all thought, the
absence of standard in men’s minds, more than the dominion of party. Here
are humane people who have tears for misery, an open purse for want; who
should have been the defenders of the poor man, are found his embittered
enemies, rejoicing in his rendition,—merely from party ties. I thought
none, that was not ready to go on all fours, would back this law. And
yet here are upright men, _compotes mentis_, husbands, fathers, trustees,
friends, open, generous, brave, who can see nothing in this claim for
bare humanity, and the health and honor of their native State, but
canting fanaticism, sedition and “one idea.” Because of this preoccupied
mind, the whole wealth and power of Boston—two hundred thousand souls,
and one hundred and eighty millions of money—are thrown into the scale of
crime: and the poor black boy, whom the fame of Boston had reached in the
recesses of a vile swamp, or in the alleys of Savannah, on arriving here
finds all this force employed to catch him. The famous town of Boston
is his master’s hound. The learning of the universities, the culture
of elegant society, the acumen of lawyers, the majesty of the Bench,
the eloquence of the Christian pulpit, the stoutness of Democracy, the
respectability of the Whig party are all combined to kidnap him.
The crisis is interesting as it shows the self-protecting nature of
the world and of the Divine laws. It is the law of the world,—as much
immorality as there is, so much misery. The greatest prosperity will in
vain resist the greatest calamity. You borrow the succour of the devil
and he must have his fee. He was never known to abate a penny of his
rents. In every nation all the immorality that exists breeds plagues. But
of the corrupt society that exists we have never been able to combine
any pure prosperity There is always something in the very advantages of
a condition which hurts it. Africa has its malformation; England has its
Ireland; Germany its hatred of classes; France its love of gunpowder;
Italy its Pope; and America, the most prosperous country in the Universe,
has the greatest calamity in the Universe, negro slavery.
Let me remind you a little in detail how the natural retribution acts in
reference to the statute which Congress passed a year ago. For these few
months have shown very conspicuously its nature and impracticability. It
is contravened:
1. By the sentiment of duty. An immoral law makes it a man’s duty to
break it, at every hazard. For virtue is the very self of every man. It
is therefore a principle of law that an immoral contract is void, and
that an immoral statute is void. For, as laws do not make right, and are
simply declaratory of a right which already existed, it is not to be
presumed that they can so stultify themselves as to command injustice.
It is remarkable how rare in the history of tyrants is an immoral law.
Some color, some indirection was always used. If you take up the volumes
of the “Universal History,” you will find it difficult searching. The
precedents are few. It is not easy to parallel the wickedness of this
American law. And that is the head and body of this discontent, that the
law is immoral.
Here is a statute which enacts the crime of kidnapping,—a crime on one
footing with arson and murder. A man’s right to liberty is as inalienable
as his right to life.
Pains seem to have been taken to give us in this statute a wrong pure
from any mixture of right. If our resistance to this law is not right,
there is no right. This is not meddling with other people’s affairs:
this is hindering other people from meddling with us. This is not going
crusading into Virginia and Georgia after slaves, who, it is alleged,
are very comfortable where they are:—that amiable argument falls to the
ground: but this is befriending in our own State, on our own farms, a man
who has taken the risk of being shot, or burned alive, or cast into the
sea, or starved to death, or suffocated in a wooden box, to get away from
his driver: and this man who has run the gauntlet of a thousand miles for
his freedom, the statute says, you men of Massachusetts shall hunt, and
catch, and send back again to the dog-hutch he fled from.
It is contrary to the primal sentiment of duty, and therefore all men
that are born are, in proportion to their power of thought and their
moral sensibility, found to be the natural enemies of this law. The
resistance of all moral beings is secured to it. I had thought, I
confess, what must come at last would come at first, a banding of all
men against the authority of this statute. I thought it a point on which
all sane men were agreed, that the law must respect the public morality.
I thought that all men of all conditions had been made sharers of a
certain experience, that in certain rare and retired moments they had
been made to see how man is man, or what makes the essence of rational
beings, namely, that whilst animals have to do with eating the fruits
of the ground, men have to do with rectitude, with benefit, with truth,
with something which _is_, independent of appearances: and that this tie
makes the substantiality of life, this, and not their ploughing, or
sailing, their trade or the breeding of families. I thought that every
time a man goes back to his own thoughts, these angels receive him, talk
with him, and that, in the best hours, he is uplifted in virtue of this
essence, into a peace and into a power which the material world cannot
give: that these moments counterbalance the years of drudgery, and that
this owning of a law, be it called morals, religion, or godhead, or what
you will, constituted the explanation of life, the excuse and indemnity
for the errors and calamities which sadden it. In long years consumed
in trifles, they remember these moments, and are consoled. I thought it
was this fair mystery, whose foundations are hidden in eternity, which
made the basis of human society, and of law; and that to pretend anything
else, as that the acquisition of property was the end of living, was to
confound all distinctions, to make the world a greasy hotel, and, instead
of noble motives and inspirations, and a heaven of companions and angels
around and before us, to leave us in a grimacing menagerie of monkeys
and idiots. All arts, customs, societies, books, and laws, are good as
they foster and concur with this spiritual element: all men are beloved
as they raise us to it; hateful as they deny or resist it. The laws
especially draw their obligation only from their concurrence with it.
I am surprised that lawyers can be so blind as to suffer the principles
of Law to be discredited. A few months ago, in my dismay at hearing that
the Higher Law was reckoned a good joke in the courts, I took pains to
look into a few law-books. I had often heard that the Bible constituted a
part of every technical law library, and that it was a principle in law
that immoral laws are void.
I found, accordingly, that the great jurists, Cicero, Grotius, Coke,
Blackstone, Burlamaqui, Montesquieu, Vattel, Burke, Mackintosh,
Jefferson, do all affirm this. I have no intention to recite these
passages I had marked:—such citation indeed seems to be something
cowardly (for no reasonable person needs a quotation from Blackstone to
convince him that white cannot be legislated to be black), and shall
content myself with reading a single passage. Blackstone admits the
sovereignty “antecedent to any positive precept, of the law of Nature,”
among whose principles are, “that we should live on, should hurt nobody,
and should render unto every one his due,” etc. “_No human laws are of
any validity, if contrary to this._” “Nay, if any human law should allow
or enjoin us to commit a crime” (his instance is murder), “we are bound
to transgress that human law; or else we must offend both the natural
and divine.” Lord Coke held that where an Act of Parliament is against
common right and reason, the common law shall control it, and adjudge it
to be void. Chief Justice Hobart, Chief Justice Holt, and Chief Justice
Mansfield held the same.
Lord Mansfield, in the case of the slave Somerset, wherein the _dicta_ of
Lords Talbot and Hardwicke had been cited, to the effect of carrying back
the slave to the West Indies, said, “I care not for the supposed _dicta_
of judges, however eminent, if they be contrary to all principle.” Even
the _Canon Law_ says (_in malis promissis non expedit servare fidem_),
“Neither allegiance nor oath can bind to obey that which is wrong.”
No engagement (to a sovereign) can oblige or even authorize a man to
violate the laws of Nature. All authors who have any conscience or
modesty agree that a person ought not to obey such commands as are
evidently contrary to the laws of God. Those governors of places who
bravely refused to execute the barbarous orders of Charles IX. for the
famous “Massacre of St. Bartholomew,” have been universally praised; and
the court did not dare to punish them, at least openly. “Sire,” said the
brave Orte, governor of Bayonne, in his letter, “I have communicated
your majesty’s command to your faithful inhabitants and warriors in the
garrison, and I have found there only good citizens, and brave soldiers;
not one hangman: therefore, both they and I must humbly entreat your
majesty to be pleased to employ your arms and lives in things that are
possible, however hazardous they may be, and we will exert ourselves to
the last drop of our blood.”[130]
The practitioners should guard this dogma well, as the palladium of
the profession, as their anchor in the respect of mankind. Against a
principle like this, all the arguments of Mr. Webster are the spray of a
child’s squirt against a granite wall.
2. It is contravened by all the sentiments. How can a law be enforced
that fines pity, and imprisons charity? As long as men have bowels, they
will disobey. You know that the Act of Congress of September 18, 1850, is
a law which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion. There
is not a manly Whig, or a manly Democrat, of whom, if a slave were hidden
in one of our houses from the hounds, we should not ask with confidence
to lend his wagon in aid of his escape, and he would lend it. The man
would be too strong for the partisan.
And here I may say that it is absurd, what I often hear, to accuse the
friends of freedom in the North with being the occasion of the new
stringency of the Southern slave-laws. If you starve or beat the orphan,
in my presence, and I accuse your cruelty, can I help it? In the words
of Electra in the Greek tragedy, “’Tis you that say it, not I. You do
the deeds, and your ungodly deeds find me the words.” Will you blame the
ball for rebounding from the floor, blame the air for rushing in where a
vacuum is made or the boiler for exploding under pressure of steam? These
facts are after laws of the world, and so is it law, that, when justice
is violated, anger begins. The very defence which the God of Nature has
provided for the innocent against cruelty is the sentiment of indignation
and pity in the bosom of the beholder. Mr. Webster tells the President
that “he has been in the North, and he has found no man, whose opinion
is of any weight, who is opposed to the law.” Oh, Mr. President, trust
not the information! The gravid old Universe goes spawning on; the womb
conceives and the breasts give suck to thousands and millions of hairy
babes formed not in the image of your statute, but in the image of the
Universe; too many to be bought off; too many than they can be rich, and
therefore peaceable; and necessitated to express first or last every
feeling of the heart. You can keep no secret, for whatever is true some
of them will unreasonably say. You can commit no crime, for they are
created in their sentiments conscious of and hostile to it; and unless
you can suppress the newspaper, pass a law against book-shops, gag the
English tongue in America, all short of this is futile. This dreadful
English Speech is saturated with songs, proverbs and speeches that flatly
contradict and defy every line of Mr. Mason’s statute. Nay, unless you
can draw a sponge over those seditious Ten Commandments which are the
root of our European and American civilization; and over that eleventh
commandment, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” your
labor is vain.
3. It is contravened by the written laws themselves, because the
sentiments, of course, write the statutes. Laws are merely declaratory
of the natural sentiments of mankind, and the language of all permanent
laws will be in contradiction to any immoral enactment. And thus it
happens here: Statute fights against Statute. By the law of Congress
March 2, 1807, it is piracy and murder, punishable with death, to enslave
a man on the coast of Africa. By law of Congress September, 1850, it is
a high crime and misdemeanor, punishable with fine and imprisonment, to
resist the reënslaving a man on the coast of America. Off soundings,
it is piracy and murder to enslave him. On soundings, it is fine and
prison not to reënslave. What kind of legislation is this? What kind of
constitution which covers it? And yet the crime which the second law
ordains is greater than the crime which the first law forbids under
penalty of the gibbet. For it is a greater crime to reënslave a man who
has shown himself fit for freedom, than to enslave him at first, when it
might be pretended to be a mitigation of his lot as a captive in war.
4. It is contravened by the mischiefs it operates. A wicked law cannot
be executed by good men, and must be by bad. Flagitious men must be
employed, and every act of theirs is a stab at the public peace. It
cannot be executed at such a cost, and so it brings a bribe in its hand.
This law comes with infamy in it, and out of it. It offers a bribe in
its own clauses for the consummation of the crime. To serve it, low and
mean people are found by the groping of the government. No government
ever found it hard to pick up tools for base actions. If you cannot find
them in the huts of the poor, you shall find them in the palaces of
the rich. Vanity can buy some, ambition others, and money others. The
first execution of the law, as was inevitable, was a little hesitating;
the second was easier; and the glib officials became, in a few weeks,
quite practised and handy at stealing men. But worse, not the officials
alone are bribed, but the whole community is solicited. The scowl of the
community is attempted to be averted by the mischievous whisper, “Tariff
and Southern market, if you will be quiet: no tariff and loss of Southern
market, if you dare to murmur.” I wonder that our acute people who have
learned that the cheapest police is dear schools, should not find out
that an immoral law costs more than the loss of the custom of a Southern
city.
The humiliating scandal of great men warping right into wrong was
followed up very fast by the cities. New York advertised in Southern
markets that it would go for slavery, and posted the names of merchants
who would not. Boston, alarmed, entered into the same design.
Philadelphia, more fortunate, had no conscience at all, and, in this
auction of the rights of mankind, rescinded all its legislation against
slavery. And the Boston “Advertiser,” and the “Courier,” in these weeks,
urge the same course on the people of Massachusetts. Nothing remains in
this race of roguery but to coax Connecticut or Maine to outbid us all by
adopting slavery into its constitution.
Great is the mischief of a legal crime. Every person who touches this
business is contaminated. There has not been in our lifetime another
moment when public men were personally lowered by their political action.
But here are gentlemen whose believed probity was the confidence and
fortification of multitudes, who, by fear of public opinion, or through
the dangerous ascendency of Southern manners, have been drawn into the
support of this foul business. We poor men in the country who might
once have thought it an honor to shake hands with them, or to dine at
their boards, would now shrink from their touch, nor could they enter
our humblest doors. You have a law which no man can obey, or abet the
obeying, without loss of self-respect and forfeiture of the name of
gentleman. What shall we say of the functionary by whom the recent
rendition was made? If he has rightly defined his powers, and has no
authority to try the case, but only to prove the prisoner’s identity,
and remand him, what office is this for a reputable citizen to hold? No
man of honor can sit on that bench. It is the extension of the planter’s
whipping-post; and its incumbents must rank with a class from which the
turnkey, the hangman and the informer are taken, necessary functionaries,
it may be, in a state, but to whom the dislike and the ban of society
universally attaches.
5. These resistances appear in the history of the statute, in the
retributions which speak so loud in every part of this business, that
I think a tragic poet will know how to make it a lesson for all ages.
Mr. Webster’s measure was, he told us, final. It was a pacification, it
was a suppression, a measure of conciliation and adjustment. These were
his words at different times: “there was to be no parleying more;” it
was “irrepealable.” Does it look final now? His final settlement has
dislocated the foundations. The state-house shakes likes a tent. His
pacification has brought all the honesty in every house, all scrupulous
and good-hearted men, all women, and all children, to accuse the law. It
has brought United States swords into the streets, and chains round the
court-house. “A measure of pacification and union.” What is its effect?
To make one sole subject for conversation and painful thought throughout
the continent, namely, slavery. There is not a man of thought or of
feeling but is concentrating his mind on it. There is not a clerk but
recites its statistics; not a politician but is watching its incalculable
energy in the elections; not a jurist but is hunting up precedents;
not a moralist but is prying into its quality; not an economist but is
computing its profit and loss: Mr. Webster can judge whether this sort of
solar microscope brought to bear on his law is likely to make opposition
less. The only benefit that has accrued from the law is its service to
education. It has been like a university to the entire people. It has
turned every dinner-table into a debating-club, and made every citizen a
student of natural law. When a moral quality comes into politics, when
a right is invaded, the discussion draws on deeper sources: general
principles are laid bare, which cast light on the whole frame of society.
And it is cheering to behold what champions the emergency called to this
poor black boy; what subtlety, what logic, what learning, what exposure
of the mischief of the law; and, above all, with what earnestness and
dignity the advocates of freedom were inspired. It was one of the best
compensations of this calamity.
But the Nemesis works underneath again. It is a power that makes noonday
dark, and draws us on to our undoing; and its dismal way is to pillory
the offender in the moment of his triumph. The hands that put the chain
on the slave are in that moment manacled. Who has seen anything like
that which is now done? The words of John Randolph, wiser than he knew,
have been ringing ominously in all echoes for thirty years, words spoken
in the heat of the Missouri debate. “We do not govern the people of the
North by our black slaves, but by their own white slaves. We know what we
are doing. We have conquered you once, and we can and will conquer you
again. Ay, we will drive you to the wall, and when we have you there once
more, we will keep you there and nail you down like base money.” These
words resounding ever since from California to Oregon, from Cape Florida
to Cape Cod, come down now like the cry of Fate, in the moment when they
are fulfilled. By white slaves, by a white slave, are we beaten.[131]
Who looked for such ghastly fulfilment, or to see what we see? Hills and
Halletts, servile editors by the hundred, we could have spared. But him,
our best and proudest, the first man of the North, in the very moment of
mounting the throne, irresistibly taking the bit in his mouth and the
collar on his neck, and harnessing himself to the chariot of the planters.
The fairest American fame ends in this filthy law. Mr. Webster cannot
choose but regret his law. He must learn that those who make fame accuse
him with one voice; that those who have no points to carry that are not
identical with public morals and generous civilization, that the obscure
and private who have no voice and care for none, so long as things go
well, but who feel the disgrace of the new legislation creeping like
miasma into their homes, and blotting the daylight,—those to whom his
name was once dear and honored, as the manly statesman to whom the
choicest gifts of Nature had been accorded, disown him: that he who
was their pride in the woods and mountains of New England is now their
mortification,—they have torn down his picture from the wall, they have
thrust his speeches into the chimney. No roars of New York mobs can drown
this voice in Mr. Webster’s ear. It will outwhisper all the salvos of
the “Union Committees’” cannon. But I have said too much on this painful
topic. I will not pursue that bitter history.[132]
But passing from the ethical to the political view, I wish to place this
statute, and we must use the introducer and substantial author of the
bill as an illustration of the history. I have as much charity for Mr.
Webster, I think, as any one has. I need not say how much I have enjoyed
his fame. Who has not helped to praise him? Simply he was the one eminent
American of our time, whom we could produce as a finished work of Nature.
We delighted in his form and face, in his voice, in his eloquence, in
his power of labor, in his concentration, in his large understanding, in
his daylight statement, simple force; the facts lay like the strata of
a cloud, or like the layers of the crust of the globe. He saw things as
they were, and he stated them so. He has been by his clear perceptions
and statements in all these years the best head in Congress, and the
champion of the interests of the Northern seaboard: but as the activity
and growth of slavery began to be offensively felt by his constituents,
the senator became less sensitive to these evils. They were not for
him to deal with: he was the commercial representative. He indulged
occasionally in excellent expression of the known feeling of the New
England people: but, when expected and when pledged, he omitted to speak,
and he omitted to throw himself into the movement in those critical
moments when his leadership would have turned the scale. At last, at a
fatal hour, this sluggishness accumulated to downright counteraction,
and, very unexpectedly to the whole Union, on the 7th March, 1850,
in opposition to his education, association, and to all his own most
explicit language for thirty years, he crossed the line, and became the
head of the slavery party in this country.
Mr. Webster perhaps is only following the laws of his blood and
constitution. I suppose his pledges were not quite natural to him. Mr.
Webster is a man who lives by his memory, a man of the past, not a man
of faith or of hope. He obeys his powerful animal nature;—and his finely
developed understanding only works truly and with all its force, when
it stands for animal good; that is, for property. He believes, in so
many words, that government exists for the protection of property. He
looks at the Union as an estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the
completeness of his defence of it so far. He adheres to the letter.
Happily he was born late,—after the independence had been declared, the
Union agreed to, and the constitution settled. What he finds already
written, he will defend. Lucky that so much had got well written when he
came. For he has no faith in the power of self-government; none whatever
in extemporizing a government. Not the smallest municipal provision,
if it were new, would receive his sanction. In Massachusetts, in 1776,
he would, beyond all question, have been a refugee. He praises Adams
and Jefferson, but it is a past Adams and Jefferson that his mind can
entertain.[133] A present Adams and Jefferson he would denounce. So
with the eulogies of liberty in his writings,—they are sentimentalism
and youthful rhetoric. He can celebrate it, but it means as much from
him as from Metternich or Talleyrand. This is all inevitable from his
constitution. All the drops of his blood have eyes that look downward.
It is neither praise nor blame to say that he has no moral perception,
no moral sentiment, but in that region—to use the phrase of the
phrenologists—a hole in the head. The scraps of morality to be gleaned
from his speeches are reflections of the mind of others; he says what
he hears said, but often makes signal blunders in their use. In Mr.
Webster’s imagination the American Union was a huge Prince Rupert’s drop,
which, if so much as the smallest end be shivered off, the whole will
snap into atoms. Now the fact is quite different from this. The people
are loyal, law-loving, law-abiding. They prefer order, and have no taste
for misrule and uproar.
The destiny of this country is great and liberal, and is to be greatly
administered. It is to be administered according to what is, and is to
be, and not according to what is dead and gone. The union of this people
is a real thing, an alliance of men of one flock, one language, one
religion, one system of manners and ideas. I hold it to be a real and not
a statute union. The people cleave to the Union, because they see their
advantage in it, the added power of each.
I suppose the Union can be left to take care of itself. As much real
union as there is, the statutes will be sure to express; as much
disunion as there is, no statute can long conceal. Under the Union I
suppose the fact to be that there are really two nations, the North
and the South. It is not slavery that severs them, it is climate and
temperament. The South does not like the North, slavery or no slavery,
and never did. The North likes the South well enough, for it knows its
own advantages. I am willing to leave them to the facts. If they continue
to have a binding interest, they will be pretty sure to find it out: if
not, they will consult their peace in parting. But one thing appears
certain to me, that, as soon as the constitution ordains an immoral law,
it ordains disunion. The law is suicidal, and cannot be obeyed. The Union
is at an end as soon as an immoral law is enacted. And he who writes a
crime into the statute-book digs under the foundations of the Capitol to
plant there a powder-magazine, and lays a train.