here, and fitter for other assemblies than this. Sir, the gentleman
seems to forget where and what we are. This is a Senate, a Senate of
equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of
absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators.
This is a hall for mutual consultation and discussion; not an arena for
the exhibition of champions. I offer myself, Sir, as a match for no man;
I throw the challenge of debate at no man's feet. But then, Sir, since
the honorable member has put the question in a manner that calls for an
answer, I will give him an answer; and I tell him, that, holding myself
to be the humblest of the members here, I yet know nothing in the arm of
his friend from Missouri, either alone or when aided by the arm of _his_
friend from South Carolina, that need deter even me from espousing
whatever opinions I may choose to espouse, from debating whenever I may
choose to debate, or from speaking whatever I may see fit to say, on the
floor of the Senate. Sir, when uttered as matter of commendation or
compliment, I should dissent from nothing which the honorable member
might say of his friend. Still less do I put forth any pretensions of my
own. But when put to me as matter of taunt, I throw it back, and say to
the gentleman that he could possibly say nothing less likely than such a
comparison to wound my pride of personal character. The anger of its
tone rescued the remark from intentional irony, which otherwise,
probably, would have been its general acceptation. But, Sir, if it be
imagined that, by this mutual quotation and commendation; if it be
supposed that, by casting the characters of the drama, assigning to each
his part,--to one the attack, to another the cry of onset; or if it be
thought that, by a loud and empty vaunt of anticipated victory, any
laurels are to be won here; if it be imagined, especially, that any or
all these things will shake any purpose of mine, I can tell the
honorable member, once for all, that he is greatly mistaken, and that he
is dealing with one of whose temper and character he has yet much to
learn. Sir, I shall not allow myself, on this occasion, I hope on no
occasion, to be betrayed into any loss of temper; but if provoked, as I
trust I never shall be, into crimination and recrimination, the
honorable member may perhaps find, that, in that contest, there will be
blows to take as well as blows to give; that others can state
comparisons as significant, at least, as his own; and that his impunity
may possibly demand of him whatever powers of taunt and sarcasm he may
possess. I commend him to a prudent husbandry of his resources.
[Illustration: _John Quincy Adams._]
[Sidenote: The "Coalition".]
But, Sir, the Coalition![27] The Coalition! Ay, "the murdered
Coalition!" The gentleman asks if I were led or frighted into this
debate by the spectre of the Coalition. "Was it the ghost of the
murdered Coalition," he exclaims, "which haunted the member from
Massachusetts; and which, like the ghost of Banquo, would never down?"
"The murdered Coalition!" Sir, this charge of a coalition, in reference
to the late administration, is not original with the honorable member.
It did not spring up in the Senate. Whether as a fact, as an argument,
or as an embellishment, it is all borrowed. He adopts it, indeed, from a
very low origin, and a still lower present condition. It is one of the
thousand calumnies with which the press teemed, during an excited
political canvass. It was a charge, of which there was not only no proof
or probability, but which was in itself wholly impossible to be true. No
man of common information ever believed a syllable of it. Yet it was of
that class of falsehoods which, by continued repetition, through all the
organs of detraction and abuse, are capable of misleading those who are
already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into
flame. Doubtless it served in its day, and in greater or less degree,
the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general
mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of
a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies
in the sewer, lifeless and despised. It is not now, Sir, in the power of
the honorable member to give it dignity or decency, by attempting to
elevate it, and to introduce it into the Senate. He cannot change it
from what it is, an object of general disgust and scorn. On the
contrary, the contact, if he choose to touch it, is more likely to drag
him down, down, to the place where it lies itself.
[Sidenote: An infelicitous allusion by Hayne.]
But, Sir, the honorable member was not, for other reasons, entirely
happy in his allusion to the story of Banquo's murder and Banquo's
ghost. It was not, I think, the friends, but the enemies of the murdered
Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not down. The honorable
gentleman is fresh in his reading of the English classics, and can put
me right if I am wrong; but, according to my poor recollection, it was
at those who had begun with caresses and ended with foul and treacherous
murder that the gory locks were shaken. The ghost of Banquo, like that
of Hamlet, was an honest ghost. It disturbed no innocent man. It knew
where its appearance would strike terror, and who would cry out, A
ghost! It made itself visible in the right quarter, and compelled the
guilty and the conscience-smitten, and none others, to start, with,
"Prithee, see there! behold! look! lo!
If I stand here, I saw him!"[28]
Their eyeballs were seared (was it not so, Sir?) who had thought to
shield themselves by concealing their own hand, and laying the
imputation of the crime on a low and hireling agency in wickedness; who
had vainly attempted to stifle the workings of their own coward
consciences by ejaculating through white lips and chattering teeth,
"Thou canst not say I did it!" I have misread the great poet if those
who had no way partaken in the deed of the death, either found that they
were, or feared that they should be, pushed from their stools by the
ghost of the slain, or exclaimed to a spectre created by their own fears
and their own remorse, "Avaunt! and quit our sight!"
There is another particular, Sir, in which the honorable member's quick
perception of resemblances might, I should think, have seen something in
the story of Banquo, making it not altogether a subject of the most
pleasant contemplation. Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by
it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment, rather, and
sore mortification,--dust and ashes, the common fate of vaulting
ambition overleaping itself? Did not evenhanded justice ere-long commend
the poisoned chalice to their own lips? Did they not soon find that for
another they had "filed their mind"? that their ambition, though
apparently for the moment successful, had but put a barren sceptre in
their grasp? Ay, Sir,
"a barren sceptre in their gripe,
_Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand,
No son of theirs succeeding_."
Sir, I need pursue the allusion no farther. I leave the honorable
gentleman to run it out at his leisure, and to derive from it all the
gratification it is calculated to administer. If he finds himself
pleased with the associations, and prepared to be quite satisfied,
though the parallel should be entirely completed, I had almost said, I
am satisfied also; but that I shall think of. Yes, Sir, I will think of
that.
[Sidenote: The Ordinance of 1787.]
[Sidenote: What Webster said, and did not say, about slavery.]
I spoke, Sir, of the Ordinance of 1787,[29] which prohibits slavery, in
all future times, northwest of the Ohio, as a measure of great wisdom
and foresight, and one which had been attended with highly beneficial
and permanent consequences. I supposed that on this point no two
gentlemen in the Senate could entertain different opinions. But the
simple expression of this sentiment has led the gentleman not only into
a labored defence of slavery, in the abstract, and on principle, but
also into a warm accusation against me, as having attacked the system of
domestic slavery now existing in the Southern States. For all this,
there was not the slightest foundation in anything said or intimated by
me. I did not utter a single word which any ingenuity could torture into
an attack on the slavery of the South. I said, only, that it was highly
wise and useful, in legislating for the Northwestern country while it
was yet a wilderness, to prohibit the introduction of slaves; and I
added that I presumed there was no reflecting and intelligent person, in
the neighboring State of Kentucky, who would doubt that, if the same
prohibition had been extended, at the same early period, over that
commonwealth, her strength and population would, at this day, have been
far greater than they are. If these opinions be thought doubtful, they
are nevertheless, I trust, neither extraordinary nor disrespectful. They
attack nobody and menace nobody. And yet, Sir, the gentleman's optics
have discovered, even in the mere expression of this sentiment, what he
calls the very spirit of the Missouri question! He represents me as
making an onset on the whole South, and manifesting a spirit which would
interfere with, and disturb, their domestic condition!
[Sidenote: Slavery a matter of domestic policy, left with the States.]
[Sidenote: But a great evil.]
Sir, this injustice no otherwise surprises me, than as it is committed
here, and committed without the slightest pretence of ground for it. I
say it only surprises me as being done here; for I know full well that
it is, and has been, the settled policy of some persons in the South,
for years, to represent the people of the North as disposed to interfere
with them in their own exclusive and peculiar concerns. This is a
delicate and sensitive point in Southern feeling; and of late years it
has always been touched, and generally with effect, whenever the object
has been to unite the whole South against Northern men or Northern
measures. This feeling, always carefully kept alive, and maintained at
too intense a heat to admit discrimination or reflection, is a lever of
great power in our political machine. It moves vast bodies, and gives
to them one and the same direction. But it is without adequate cause,
and the suspicion which exists is wholly groundless. There is not, and
never has been, a disposition in the North to interfere with these
interests of the South. Such interference has never been supposed to be
within the power of government; nor has it been in any way attempted.
The slavery of the South has always been regarded as a matter of
domestic policy, left with the States themselves, and with which the
Federal government had nothing to do. Certainly, Sir, I am, and ever
have been, of that opinion. The gentleman, indeed, argues that slavery,
in the abstract, is no evil. Most assuredly I need not say I differ with
him, altogether and most widely, on that point. I regard domestic
slavery as one of the greatest evils, both moral and political. But
whether it be a malady, and whether it be curable, and if so, by what
means; or, on the other hand, whether it be the _vulnus immedicabile_ of
the social system, I leave it to those whose right and duty it is to
inquire and to decide. And this I believe, Sir, is, and uniformly has
been, the sentiment of the North.
[Sidenote: The public lands.]
[Sidenote: Webster's broad view of national relations to internal
improvements.]
[Sidenote: Public works are bonds of union.]
We approach, at length, Sir, to a more important part of the honorable
gentleman's observations. Since it does not accord with my views of
justice and policy to give away the public lands altogether, as a mere
matter of gratuity, I am asked by the honorable gentleman on what ground
it is that I consent to vote them away in particular instances. How, he
inquires, do I reconcile with these professed sentiments, my support of
measures appropriating portions of the lands to particular roads,
particular canals, particular rivers, and particular institutions of
education in the West? This leads, Sir, to the real and wide difference
in political opinion between the honorable gentleman and myself. On my
part, I look upon all these objects as connected with the common good,
fairly embraced in its object and its terms; he, on the contrary, deems
them all, if good at all, only local good. This is our difference. The
interrogatory which he proceeded to put at once explains this
difference. "What interest," asks he, "has South Carolina in a canal in
Ohio?" Sir, this very question is full of significance. It develops the
gentleman's whole political system; and its answer expounds mine. Here
we differ. I look upon a road over the Alleghanies, a canal round the
falls of the Ohio, or a canal or railway from the Atlantic to the
Western waters, as being an object large and extensive enough to be
fairly said to be for the common benefit. The gentleman thinks
otherwise, and this is the key to his construction of the powers of the
government. He may well ask what interest has South Carolina in a canal
in Ohio. On his system, it is true, she has no interest. On that system,
Ohio and Carolina are different governments, and different countries;
connected here, it is true, by some slight and ill-defined bond of
union, but in all main respects separate and diverse. On that system,
Carolina has no more interest in a canal in Ohio than in Mexico. The
gentleman, therefore, only follows out his own principles; he does no
more than arrive at the natural conclusions of his own doctrines; he
only announces the true results of that creed which he has adopted
himself, and would persuade others to adopt, when he thus declares that
South Carolina has no interest in a public work in Ohio.
[Sidenote: The States are one.]
Sir, we narrow-minded people of New England do not reason thus. Our
notion of things is entirely different. We look upon the States, not as
separated, but as united. We love to dwell on that union, and on the
mutual happiness which it has so much promoted, and the common renown
which it has so greatly contributed to acquire. In our contemplation,
Carolina and Ohio are parts of the same country; States, united under
the same general government, having interests common, associated,
intermingled. In whatever is within the proper sphere of the
constitutional power of this government, we look upon the States as one.
We do not impose geographical limits to our patriotic feeling or regard;
we do not follow rivers and mountains, and lines of latitude, to find
boundaries, beyond which public improvements do not benefit us. We who
come here, as agents and representatives of these narrow-minded and
selfish men of New England, consider ourselves as bound to regard with
an equal eye the good of the whole, in whatever is within our powers of
legislation. Sir, if a railroad or canal, beginning in South Carolina
and ending in South Carolina, appeared to me to be of national
importance and national magnitude, believing, as I do, that the power of
government extends to the encouragement of works of that description, if
I were to stand up here and ask, What interest has Massachusetts in a
railroad in South Carolina? I should not be willing to face my
constituents. These same narrow-minded men would tell me that they had
sent me to act for the whole country, and that one who possessed too
little comprehension, either of intellect or feeling, one who was not
large enough, both in mind and in heart, to embrace the whole, was not
fit to be intrusted with the interest of any part.
[Sidenote: The powers of the government to be used for the general
benefit of the whole.]
[Sidenote: One in war, in peace, and in commerce.]
Sir, I do not desire to enlarge the powers of the government by
unjustifiable construction, nor to exercise any not within a fair
interpretation. But when it is believed that a power does exist, then it
is, in my judgment, to be exercised for the general benefit of the
whole. So far as respects the exercise of such a power, the States are
one. It was the very object of the Constitution to create unity of
interests to the extent of the powers of the general government. In war
and peace we are one; in commerce, one; because the authority of the
general government reaches to war and peace, and to the regulation of
commerce. I have never seen any more difficulty in erecting light-houses
on the lakes than on the ocean; in improving the harbors of inland seas,
than if they were within the ebb and flow of the tide; or in removing
obstructions in the vast streams of the West, more than in any work to
facilitate commerce on the Atlantic coast. If there be any power for
one, there is power also for the other; and they are all and equally for
the common good of the country.
[Sidenote: The government a great untaxed proprietor.]
There are other objects, apparently more local, or the benefit of which
is less general, towards which, nevertheless, I have concurred with
others to give aid by donations of land. It is proposed to construct a
road, in or through one of the new States, in which this government
possesses large quantities of land. Have the United States no right, or,
as a great and untaxed proprietor, are they under no obligation to
contribute to an object thus calculated to promote the common good of
all the proprietors, themselves included? And even with respect to
education, which is the extreme case, let the question be considered. In
the first place, as we have seen, it was made matter of compact with
these States, that they should do their part to promote education. In
the next place, our whole system of land laws proceeds on the idea that
education is for the common good; because in every division a certain
portion is uniformly reserved and appropriated for the use of schools.
And, finally, have not these new States singularly strong claims,
founded on the ground already stated, that the government is a great
untaxed proprietor, in the ownership of the soil? It is a consideration
of great importance, that probably there is in no part of the country,
or of the world, so great call for the means of education, as in these
new States, owing to the vast numbers of persons within those ages in
which education and instruction are usually received, if received at
all. This is the natural consequence of recency of settlement and rapid
increase. The census of these States shows how great a proportion of the
whole population occupies the classes between infancy and manhood. These
are the wide fields, and here is the deep and quick soil for the seeds
of knowledge and virtue; and this is the favored season, the very
spring-time for sowing them. Let them be disseminated without stint. Let
them be scattered with a bountiful hand, broadcast. Whatever the
government can fairly do towards these objects, in my opinion, ought to
be done.
These, Sir, are the grounds, succinctly stated, on which my votes for
grants of lands for particular objects rest; while I maintain, at the
same time, that it is all a common fund, for the common benefit. And
reasons like these, I presume, have influenced the votes of other
gentlemen from New England. Those who have a different view of the
powers of the government, of course, come to different conclusions, on
these, as on other questions. I observed, when speaking on this subject
before, that if we looked to any measure, whether for a road, a canal,
or anything else, intended for the improvement of the West, it would be
found that if the New England _ayes_ were struck out of the lists of
votes, the Southern _noes_ would always have rejected the measure. The
truth of this has not been denied, and cannot be denied. In stating
this, I thought it just to ascribe it to the constitutional scruples of
the South, rather than to any other less favorable or less charitable
cause. But no sooner had I done this, than the honorable gentleman asks
if I reproach him and his friends with their constitutional scruples.
Sir, I reproach nobody. I stated a fact, and gave the most respectful
reason for it that occurred to me. The gentleman cannot deny the fact;
he may, if he choose, disclaim the reason. It is not long since I had
occasion, in presenting a petition from his own State, to account for
its being intrusted to my hands, by saying that the constitutional
opinions of the gentleman and his worthy colleague prevented them from
supporting it. Sir, did I state this as matter of reproach? Far from it.
Did I attempt to find any other cause than an honest one for these
scruples? Sir, I did not. It did not become me to doubt or to insinuate
that the gentleman had either changed his sentiments, or that he had
made up a set of constitutional opinions accommodated to any particular
combination of political occurrences. Had I done so, I should have felt
that, while I was entitled to little credit in thus questioning other
people's motives, I justified the whole world in suspecting my own. But
how has the gentleman returned this respect for others' opinions? His
own candor and justice, how have they been exhibited towards the motives
of others, while he has been at so much pains to maintain, what nobody
has disputed, the purity of his own? Why, Sir, he has asked _when_, and
_how_, and _why_ New England votes were found going for measures
favorable to the West. He has demanded to be informed whether all this
did not begin in 1825, and while the election of President was still
pending.
[Sidenote: New England's aid to Western improvements.]
Sir, to these questions retort would be justified; and it is both cogent
and at hand. Nevertheless, I will answer the inquiry, not by retort, but
by facts. I will tell the gentleman _when_, and _how_, and _why_ New
England has supported measures favorable to the West. I have already
referred to the early history of the government, to the first
acquisition of the lands, to the original laws for disposing of them,
and for governing the territories where they lie; and have shown the
influence of New England men and New England principles in all these
leading measures. I should not be pardoned were I to go over that ground
again. Coming to more recent times, and to measures of a less general
character, I have endeavored to prove that everything of this kind,
designed for Western improvement, has depended on the votes of New
England; all this is true beyond the power of contradiction. And now,
Sir, there are two measures to which I will refer, not so ancient as to
belong to the early history of the public lands, and not so recent as to
be on this side of the period when the gentleman charitably imagines a
new direction may have been given to New England feeling and New England
votes. These measures, and the New England votes in support of them, may
be taken as samples and specimens of all the rest.
[Illustration: _Robert Y. Hayne._]
In 1820 (observe, Mr. President, in 1820) the people of the West
besought Congress for a reduction in the price of lands. In favor of
that reduction, New England, with a delegation of forty members in the
other house, gave thirty-three votes, and one only against it. The four
Southern States, with more than fifty members, gave thirty-two votes for
it, and seven against it. Again, in 1821 (observe again, Sir, the time),
the law passed for the relief of the purchasers of the public lands.
This was a measure of vital importance to the West, and more especially
to the Southwest. It authorized the relinquishment of contracts for
lands which had been entered into at high prices, and a reduction in
other cases of not less than thirty-seven and a half per cent on the
purchase-money. Many millions of dollars, six or seven, I believe,
probably much more, were relinquished by this law. On this bill, New
England, with her forty members, gave more affirmative votes than the
four Southern States, with their fifty-two or fifty-three members. These
two are far the most important general measures respecting the public
lands which have been adopted within the last twenty years. They took
place in 1820 and 1821. That is the time _when_.