mines, manufactures, navigation, and commerce--it is necessary only to say
that the internal prosperity of the country, its continuous and steady
advancement in wealth and population and in private as well as public
well-being, attest the wisdom of our institutions and the predominant
spirit of intelligence and patriotism which, notwithstanding occasional
irregularities of opinion or action resulting from popular freedom, has
distinguished and characterized the people of America. In the brief
interval between the termination of the last and the commencement of the
present session of Congress the public mind has been occupied with the care
of selecting for another constitutional term the President and
Vice-President of the United States.
The determination of the persons who are of right, or contingently, to
preside over the administration of the Government is under our system
committed to the States and the people. We appeal to them, by their voice
pronounced in the forms of law, to call whomsoever they will to the high
post of Chief Magistrate.
And thus it is that as the Senators represent the respective States of the
Union and the members of the House of Representatives the several
constituencies of each State, so the President represents the aggregate
population of the United States. Their election of him is the explicit and
solemn act of the sole sovereign authority of the Union.
It is impossible to misapprehend the great principles which by their recent
political action the people of the United States have sanctioned and
announced.
They have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the
States of the Union as States: they have affirmed the constitutional
equality of each and all of the citizens of the United States as citizens,
whatever their religion, wherever their birth or their residence; they have
maintained the inviolability of the constitutional rights of the different
sections of the Union, and they have proclaimed their devoted and
unalterable attachment to the Union and to the Constitution, as objects of
interest superior to all subjects of local or sectional controversy, as the
safeguard of the rights of all, as the spirit and the essence of the
liberty, peace, and greatness of the Republic. In doing this they have at
the same time emphatically condemned the idea of organizing in these United
States mere geographical parties, of marshaling in hostile array toward
each other the different parts of the country, North or South, East or
West.
Schemes of this nature, fraught with incalculable mischief, and which the
considerate sense of the people has rejected, could have had countenance in
no part of the country had they not been disguised by suggestions plausible
in appearance, acting upon an excited state of the public mind, induced by
causes temporary in their character and, it is to be hoped, transient in
their influence.
Perfect liberty of association for political objects and the widest scope
of discussion are the received and ordinary conditions of government in our
country. Our institutions, framed in the spirit of confidence in the
intelligence and integrity of the people, do not forbid citizens, either
individually or associated together, to attack by writing, speech, or any
other methods short of physical force the Constitution and the very
existence of the Union. Under the shelter of this great liberty, and
protected by the laws and usages of the Government they assail,
associations have been formed in some of the States of individuals who,
pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery
into the present or future inchoate States of the Union, are really
inflamed with desire to change the domestic institutions of existing
States. To accomplish their objects they dedicate themselves to the odious
task of depreciating the government organization which stands in their way
and of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of
particular States with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their
fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in
their assaults upon the Constitution, framed and adopted by our fathers,
and claiming for the privileges it has secured and the blessings it has
conferred the steady support and grateful reverence of their children. They
seek an object which they well know to be a revolutionary one. They are
perfectly aware that the change in the relative condition of the white and
black races in the slaveholding States which they would promote is beyond
their lawful authority; that to them it is a foreign object; that it can
not be effected by any peaceful instrumentality of theirs; that for them
and the States of which they are citizens the only path to its
accomplishment is through burning cities, and ravaged fields, and
slaughtered populations, and all there is most terrible in foreign
complicated with civil and servile war; and that the first step in the
attempt is the forcible disruption of a country embracing in its broad
bosom a degree of liberty and an amount of individual and public prosperity
to which there is no parallel in history, and substituting in its place
hostile governments, driven at once and inevitably into mutual devastation
and fratricidal carnage, transforming the now peaceful and felicitous
brotherhood into a vast permanent camp of armed men like the rival
monarchies of Europe and Asia. Well knowing that such, and such only, are
the means and the consequences of their plans and purposes, they endeavor
to prepare the people of the United States for civil war by doing
everything in their power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral
authority and to undermine the fabric of the Union by appeals to passion
and sectional prejudice, by indoctrinating its people with reciprocal
hatred, and by educating them to stand face to face as enemies, rather than
shoulder to shoulder as friends.
It is by the agency of such unwarrantable interference, foreign and
domestic, that the minds of many otherwise good citizens have been so
inflamed into the passionate condemnation of the domestic institutions of
the Southern States as at length to pass insensibly to almost equally
passion late hostility toward their fellow-citizens of those States, and
thus finally to fall into temporary fellowship with the avowed and active
enemies of the Constitution. Ardently attached to liberty in the abstract,
they do not stop to consider practically how the objects they would attain
can be accomplished, nor to reflect that, even if the evil were as great as
they deem it, they have no remedy to apply, and that it can be only
aggravated by their violence and unconstitutional action. A question which
is one of the most difficult of all the problems of social institution,
political economy, and statesmanship they treat with unreasoning
intemperance of thought and language. Extremes beget extremes. Violent
attack from the North finds its inevitable consequence in the growth of a
spirit of angry defiance at the South. Thus in the progress of events we
had reached that consummation, which the voice of the people has now so
pointedly rebuked, of the attempt of a portion of the States, by a
sectional organization and movement, to usurp the control of the Government
of the United States.
I confidently believe that the great body of those who inconsiderately took
this fatal step are sincerely attached to the Constitution and the Union.
They would upon deliberation shrink with unaffected horror from any
conscious act of disunion or civil war. But they have entered into a path
which leads nowhere unless it be to civil war and disunion, and which has
no other possible outlet. They have proceeded thus far in that direction in
consequence of the successive stages of their progress having consisted of
a series of secondary issues, each of which professed to be confined within
constitutional and peaceful limits, but which attempted indirectly what few
men were willing to do directly; that is, to act aggressively against the
constitutional rights of nearly one-half of the thirty-one States.
In the long series of acts of indirect aggression, the first was the
strenuous agitation by citizens of the Northern States, in Congress and out
of it, of the question of Negro emancipation in the Southern States.
The second step in this path of evil consisted of acts of the people of the
Northern States, and in several instances of their governments, aimed to
facilitate the escape of persons held to service in the Southern States and
to prevent their extradition when reclaimed according to law and in virtue
of express provisions of the Constitution. To promote this object,
legislative enactments and other means were adopted to take away or defeat
rights which the Constitution solemnly guaranteed. In order to nullify the
then existing act of Congress concerning the extradition of fugitives from
service, laws were enacted in many States forbidding their officers, under
the severest penalties, to participate in the execution of any act of
Congress whatever. In this way that system of harmonious cooperation
between the authorities of the United States and of the several States, for
the maintenance of their common institutions, which existed in the early
years of the Republic was destroyed; conflicts of jurisdiction came to be
frequent, and Congress found itself compelled, for the support of the
Constitution and the vindication of its power, to authorize the appointment
of new officers charged with the execution of its acts, as if they and the
officers of the States were the ministers, respectively, of foreign
governments in a state of mutual hostility rather than fellow-magistrates
of a common country peacefully subsisting under the protection of one
well-constituted Union. Thus here also aggression was followed by reaction,
and the attacks upon the Constitution at this point did but serve to raise
up new barriers for its defense and security.
The third stage of this unhappy sectional controversy was in connection
with the organization of Territorial governments and the admission of new
States into the Union. When it was proposed to admit the State of Maine, by
separation of territory from that of Massachusetts, and the State of
Missouri, formed of a portion of the territory ceded by France to the
United States, representatives in Congress objected to the admission of the
latter unless with conditions suited to particular views of public policy.
The imposition of such a condition was successfully resisted; but at the
same period the question was presented of imposing restrictions upon the
residue of the territory ceded by France. That question was for the time
disposed of by the adoption of a geographical line of limitation.
In this connection it should not be forgotten that when France, of her own
accord, resolved, for considerations of the most farsighted sagacity, to
cede Louisiana to the United States, and that accession was accepted by the
United States, the latter expressly engaged that "the inhabitants of the
ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and
admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal
Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and
immunities of citizens of the United States; and in the meantime they shall
be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty,
property, and the religion which they profess;" that is to say, while it
remains in a Territorial condition its inhabitants are maintained and
protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, with a right
then to pass into the condition of States on a footing of perfect equality
with the original States.
The enactment which established the restrictive geographical line was
acquiesced in rather than approved by the States of the Union. It stood on
the statute book, however, for a number of years; and the people of the
respective States acquiesced in the reenactment of the principle as applied
to the State of Texas, and it was proposed to acquiesce in its further
application to the territory acquired by the United States from Mexico. But
this proposition was successfully resisted by the representatives from the
Northern States, who, regardless of the statute line, insisted upon
applying restriction to the new territory generally, whether lying north or
south of it, thereby repealing it as a legislative compromise, and, on the
part of the North, persistently violating the compact, if compact there
was.
Thereupon this enactment ceased to have binding virtue in any sense,
whether as respects the North or the South, and so in effect it was treated
on the occasion of the admission of the State of California and the
organization of the Territories of New Mexico, Utah, and Washington.
Such was the state of this question when the time arrived for the
organization of the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska. In the progress of
constitutional inquiry and reflection it had now at length come to be seen
clearly that Congress does not possess constitutional power to impose
restrictions of this character upon any present or future State of the
Union. In a long series of decisions, on the fullest argument and after the
most deliberate consideration, the Supreme Court of the United States had
finally determined this point in every form under which the question could
arise, whether as affecting public or private rights--in questions of the
public domain, of religion, of navigation, and of servitude.
The several States of the Union are by force of the Constitution coequal in
domestic legislative power. Congress can not change a law of domestic
relation in the State of Maine; no more can it in the State of Missouri.
Any statute which proposes to do this is a mere nullity; it takes away no
right, it confers none. If it remains on the statute book unrepealed, it
remains there only as a monument of error and a beacon of warning to the
legislator and the statesman. To repeal it will be only to remove
imperfection from the statutes, without affecting, either in the sense of
permission, or of prohibition, the action of the States or of their
citizens.
Still, when the nominal restriction of this nature, already a dead letter
in law, was in terms repealed by the last Congress, in a clause of the act
organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, that repeal was made the
occasion of a widespread and dangerous agitation. It was alleged that the
original enactment being a compact of perpetual moral obligation, its
repeal constituted an odious breach of faith. An act of Congress, while it
remains unrepealed, more especially if it be constitutionally valid in the
judgment of those public functionaries whose duty it is to pronounce on
that point, is undoubtedly binding on the conscience of each good citizen
of the Republic. But in what sense can it be asserted that the enactment in
question was invested with perpetuity and entitled to the respect of a
solemn Compact? Between whom was the compact? No distinct contending powers
of the Government, no separate sections of the Union treating as such,
entered into treaty stipulations on the subject. It was a mere clause of an
act of Congress, and, like any other controverted matter of legislation,
received its final shape and was passed by compromise of the conflicting
opinions or sentiments of the members of Congress. But if it had moral
authority over men's consciences, to whom did this authority attach? Not to
those of the North, who had repeatedly refused to confirm it by extension
and who had zealously striven to establish other and incompatible
regulations upon the subject. And if, as it thus appears, the supposed
compact had no obligatory force as to the North, of course it could not
have had any as to the South, for all such compacts must be mutual and of
reciprocal obligation.
It has not unfrequently happened that lawgivers, with undue estimation of
the value of the law they give or in the view of imparting to it peculiar
strength, make it perpetual in terms; but they can not thus bind the
conscience, the judgment, and the will of those who may succeed them,
invested with similar responsibilities and clothed with equal authority.
More careful investigation may prove the law to be unsound in principle.
Experience may show it to be imperfect in detail and impracticable in
execution. And then both reason and right combine not merely to justify but
to require its repeal.
The Constitution, supreme, as it is, over all the departments of the
Government--legislative, executive, and judicial--is open to amendment by
its very terms; and Congress or the States may, in their discretion,
propose amendment to it, solemn compact though it in truth is between the
sovereign States of the Union. In the present instance a political
enactment which had ceased to have legal power or authority of any kind was
repealed. The position assumed that Congress had no moral right to enact
such repeal was strange enough, and singularly so in view of the fact that
the argument came from those who openly refused obedience to existing laws
of the land, having the same popular designation and quality as compromise
acts; nay, more, who unequivocally disregarded and condemned the most
positive and obligatory injunctions of the Constitution itself, and sought
by every means within their reach to deprive a portion of their
fellow-citizens of the equal enjoyment of those rights and privileges
guaranteed alike to all by the fundamental compact of our Union.
This argument against the repeal of the statute line in question was
accompanied by another of congenial character and equally with the former
destitute of foundation in reason and truth. It was imputed that the
measure originated in the conception of extending the limits of slave labor
beyond those previously assigned to it, and that such was its natural as
well as intended effect; and these baseless assumptions were made, in the
Northern States, the ground of unceasing assault upon constitutional
right.
The repeal in terms of a statute, which was already obsolete and also null
for unconstitutionality, could have no influence to obstruct or to promote
the propagation of conflicting views of political or social institution.
When the act organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska was passed,
the inherent effect upon that portion of the public domain thus opened to
legal settlement was to admit settlers from all the States of the Union
alike, each with his convictions of public policy and private interest,
there to found, in their discretion, subject to such limitations as the
Constitution and acts of Congress might prescribe, new States, hereafter to
be admitted into the Union. It was a free field, open alike to all, whether
the statute line of assumed restriction were repealed or not. That repeal
did not open to free competition of the diverse opinions and domestic
institutions a field which without such repeal would have been closed
against them; it found that field of competition already opened, in fact
and in law. All the repeal did was to relieve the statute book of an
objectionable enactment, unconstitutional in effect and injurious in terms
to a large portion of the States.
Is it the fact that in all the unsettled regions of the United States, if
emigration be left free to act in this respect for itself, without legal
prohibitions on either side, slave labor will spontaneously go everywhere
in preference to free labor? Is it the fact that the peculiar domestic
institutions of the Southern States possess relatively so much of vigor
that wheresoever an avenue is freely opened to all the world they will
penetrate to the exclusion of those of the Northern States? Is it the fact
that the former enjoy, compared with the latter, such irresistibly superior
vitality, independent of climate, soil, and all other accidental
circumstances, as to be able to produce the supposed result in spite of the
assumed moral and natural obstacles to its accomplishment and of the more
numerous population of the Northern States? The argument of those who
advocate the enactment of new laws of restriction and condemn the repeal of
old ones in effect avers that their particular views of government have no
self-extending or self-sustaining power of their own, and will go nowhere
unless forced by act of Congress. And if Congress do but pause for a moment
in the policy of stern coercion; if it venture to try the experiment of
leaving men to judge for themselves what institutions will best suit them;
if it be not strained up to perpetual legislative exertion on this
point--if Congress proceed thus to act in the very spirit of liberty, it is
at once charged with aiming to extend slave labor into all the new
Territories of the United States.
Of course these imputations on the intentions of Congress in this respect,
conceived, as they were, in prejudice and disseminated in passion, are
utterly destitute of any justification in the nature of things and contrary
to all the fundamental doctrines and principles of civil liberty and
self-government.
While, therefore, in general, the people of the Northern States have never
at any time arrogated for the Federal Government the power to interfere
directly with the domestic condition of persons in the Southern States,
but, on the contrary, have disavowed all such intentions and have shrunk
from conspicuous affiliation with those few who pursue their fanatical
objects avowedly through the contemplated means of revolutionary change of
the Government and with acceptance of the necessary consequences--a civil
and servile war--yet many citizens have suffered themselves to be drawn
into one evanescent political issue of agitation after another,
appertaining to the same set of opinions, and which subsided as rapidly as
they arose when it came to be seen, as it uniformly did, that they were
incompatible with the compacts of the Constitution and the existence of the
Union. Thus when the acts of some of the States to nullify the existing
extradition law imposed upon Congress the duty of passing a new one, the
country was invited by agitators to enter into party organization for its
repeal; but that agitation speedily ceased by reason of the
impracticability of its object. So when the statute restriction upon the
institutions of new States by a geographical line had been repealed, the
country was urged to demand its restoration, and that project also died
almost with its birth. Then followed the cry of alarm from the North
against imputed Southern encroachments, which cry sprang in reality from
the spirit of revolutionary attack on the domestic institutions of the
South, and, after a troubled existence of a few months, has been rebuked by
the voice of a patriotic people.
Of this last agitation, one lamentable feature was that it was carried on
at the immediate expense of the peace and happiness of the people of the
Territory of Kansas. That was made the battlefield, not so much of opposing
factions or interests within itself as of the conflicting passions of the
whole people of the United States. Revolutionary disorder in Kansas had its
origin in projects of intervention deliberately arranged by certain members
of that Congress which enacted the law for the organization of the
Territory; and when propagandist colonization of Kansas had thus been
undertaken in one section of the Union for the systematic promotion of its
peculiar views of policy there ensued as a matter of course a counteraction
with opposite views in other sections of the Union.