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SPEECHES

POLITICAL QUESTIONS

BY

GEORGE W. JULIAN.

WITH ArJ IOTBODT7CTION

L. MARIA CHILD.

NEW YORK:

PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON.

QTambribge: Eit)*rsi&.e flhess.

1872.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by

George W. Julian, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

riverside: Cambridge: printed by h. o. houghton and company

To the people I have so long served in Congress, and especially to the many devoted friends who have sustained me with such singular steadfastness in the political con- flicts of the past, I respectfully dedicate this volume. It is compiled and published chiefly for them, and in memory of common struggles and sacrifices for principles long overwhelmingly trampled down, but now finally in the ascendant. To the general public these speeches will possess only such interest as pertains to by-gone dis- cussions of great public questions, and to views, vehe- mently combated when uttered, which have been tried by the verdict of time. With a single exception they are printed in the order of their delivery ; and I only add, that while in a few instances opinions are advanced which have since been modified, my constant and inspiring aim was to declare what I believed to be the truth.

GEORGE W. JULIAN.

Centreville, Indiana, October, 1S71-

INTRODUCTION.

BY L. MARIA CHILD.

No one who has observed the course of our public men, and who sincerely believes in the great principles of justice and freedom on which the government of the United States is founded, can fail to honor the character and appreciate the labors of the Hon. George W. Julian, whose name has for several years past been familiar to the public as a prominent Member of Congress from Indiana.

Like many of our distinguished citizens, he is what ( is called " a self-made man ; " a class that would be better designated as Mor-made men. His paternal ancestors emigrated from France to the eastern shore of Maryland the latter part of the seventeenth century. His father was one of the pioneer settlers of Indiana, and became a member of the Legislature of that State. He established himself near Centreville, the shire town of Wayne County, where George was born May 5, 1817. When he was six years old, the father died ; leaving a widow with six children and straitened means for their support. She was a faithful mother to the little orphans, but they were obliged to struggle with many difficulties. Under this early rigorous training of circumstances, George grew mentally and physically vigorous. From boyhood he was distinguished by uncommon diligence and perseverance, both in work and study. The common country schools of that period, and the occasional loan of a good book from some friendly neighbor, constituted the whole of the

vi INTRODUCTION.

educational advantages within his reach ; but he availed himself of them to the utmost. After working all day in the fields he was accustomed to split a quantity of kin- dlings, and, in lieu of oil or candles, pursue his studies till late into the night by the light they afforded. It was fortunate for himself and for his country, that he was not born to drift down the stream of life in a pleasure-barge, gazing listlessly at the stars above him, or at the flowers on the banks ; that he was, on the contrary, from child- hood upward, obliged to row his own boat, against the current, and often among snags and rapids. The arduous task imparted muscular strength to mind and body, and formed him to habits of self-reliance and close observa- tion. The well-known Quaker, Elias Hicks, used to say, " It takes live fish to swim up stream ; " and George W. Julian, by his success in that operation, has proved him- self very much alive.

At eighteen years old he began to teach school, and dis- charged creditably the duties of that vocation. Even at that early age, he manifested the tendency, which has since characterized him, to take a firm stand against abuses. The big boys of his school combined with some men at work on the Cumberland Road to compel him to " treat " on Christmas Day, according to a custom prevailing in that region ; but being aware that the holi- day was thus often made an occasion of riot, and some- times of violence, he manfully resisted all their importu- nities and threatening^.

He continued to teach school for nearly three years, and toward the close of that period began to study law. He was admitted to the Bar in 1840, and has practiced law ever since, in his native place, with the interruptions incident to an active political career. In 1845, he was elected to the Legislature of Indiana, where he distin- guished himself by his earnest opposition to the barbarism of Capital Punishment, and by his exertions to prevent

INTRODUCTION. vn

the repudiation of the State Debt. Although he belonged to a Whig family, and was elected by Whig votes, he never hesitated to act independently of his party when- ever their views conflicted with his own principles. From the commencement of his public career, it was evident that his character furnished none of the materials neces- sary for a political tool. The lines of Schiller might be justly applied to him, —

'" This man was never made To ply and mould himself, like wax, to others : It goes against his heart ; he cannot do't."

About this period the writings of Dr. Channing awak- ened in his mind a lively interest on the subject of Slav- ery. It was a question that greatly plagued the politi- cians of that period, and both parties would gladly have dodged it if they could. Finding that impossible, they exerted their ingenuity to devise perpetual compro- mises between the antagonistic principles of freedom and oppression. Such service was alien to Mr. Julian's na- ture. He saw clearly that the system of slavery was evil throughout, in its character and its consequences ; and no motives of expediency could tempt him to suppress his convictions. It was a severe trial to him when the Whigs nominated General Taylor for the Presidency. He wanted to act with his old political friends and allies ; but his con- science was disquieted at the idea of helping to make the owner of many slaves the ruler of the Kepublic. For a while, he remained neutral. But Anti-slavery was then assuming a political form under the name of the Free Soil Party, whose object mainly was to prevent the ex- tension of Slavery over any new Territories. He lent a thoughtful ear to the arguments they advanced, and when they invited him to become a delegate to their great Con- vention at Buffalo, in 1848, he accepted the nomination. The proceedings of that convention were in harmony with his state of mind, and he returned from it full of

vin INTRODUCTION.

enthusiasm for the new Party of Freedom. He canvassed for it with unexampled zeal and energy ; going from place to place, and often making three speeches a day. Nothing kindles intellect into such a glowing flame as a living coal from the altar of Truth. Those who had previously recog- nized Mr. Julian as a man of very promising ability were surprised at the masterful energy and eloquence which he now exhibited. But the more efficiently he advocated unpopular truths, the more he was hated and maligned. Only those Avho were themselves abolitionists, at that stormy period, can imagine how much he had to encoun- ter from the alienation of friends and relatives, the mis- representations of political opponents, and the displeasure of former political associates. He was accused of being a general disorganizer of society ; of trying to promote bloody insurrections at the South ; of intending to cheapen the labor of white men by flooding the North with fugitive slaves ; and of the crowning iniquity of promoting marriages between blacks and whites. But though he was persecuted as such a dangerous disturber of the public peace, editors indulged in facetious gibes and jeers concerning the smallness of the audiences he addressed ; representing them as consisting mostly of " negroes and women." Mr. Julian considered large prin- ciples more important than large audiences ; and he went on proclaiming Anti-slavery truths to whomsoever would listen, spicing his discourse with pungent sarcasms on all those who proved recreant to the cause of freedom. The armor of his pro-slavery adversaries was full of holes, through which his keen eye and skillful hand could easily pierce them to the marrow of their bones with the sharp arrows of truth. The worst of all was that thev knew he was in the right ; and his ability to prove it made him the most thoroughly hated man by all the time-servers of that region.

The result of this fierce struggle between truth and

INTRODUCTION. ix

falsehood, freedom and slavery, was highly creditable to the good sense and correct principles of the people in Mr. Julian's District. They signified their high apprecia- tion of his character by electing him to Congress in 1849. A large portion of the Democratic Party, willing to de- feat the Whig ticket by any process, threw their votes for him. This led to charges of " bargain and corruption." But Mr. Julian, who never prowled in dark corners, but always walked abroad in open daylight, had repeatedly and publicly declared that he wanted the vote of no man who did not stand fairly and squarely on the platform of his own avowed principles ; and the slander, though oft repeated, was not believed. His election was fairly earned and richly deserved. Probably there was no individual who labored more efficiently than he did to extend the principles of the Free Soil Party, — principles which made California a Free State, rescued Oregon from the curse of Slavery, and culminated in the overwhelming strength and final ascendency of the Republican Party.

As a Member of Congress Mr. Julian manifested the same uprightness and downrightness of character, which had previously distinguished him. There was then before the House a Bill called the Wilmot Proviso, intended to prevent the extension of Slavery into the new Territories acquired by the war with Mexico. The Slave Power and its servile tools at the North, sought to checkmate the increasing influence of Free Soil principles, by inaugu- rating an idea which they styled " the doctrine of pop- ular sovereignty ; " the plain meaning of which was that the people who settled a Territory had a right to decide whether they would introduce Slavery or not, and that Congress had no right to legislate on the subject. Their plan was to crowd the poor, ignorant whites of the South into the Territories, and by their agency secure the intro- duction of Slavery ; a plan which not long after began to be worked out in the murderous onslaughts of Missouri

x INTRODUCTION.

ruffians upon the Northern settlers of Kansas. The polit- ical tools of the South were very ready to adopt this compromise of free principles disguised under the attrac- tive name of " Popular Sovereignty." But Mr. Julian was alive to the falseness of its pretensions and the danger of its consequences, and he resisted it with all the strength of his earnest nature. In the same spirit, he fought against the Fugitive Slave Bill, which converted the North into a slave-hunting ground for the South. And he also labored strenuously to restrict, as much as possi- ble, the boundaries of Texas, which, by much political manoeuvring, and in palpable violation of the Constitu- tion of the United States, had managed to gain admission into the Union as a new Slave State. He also, at this early day, zealously advocated the Homestead Policy.

The bold, uncompromising ground which he took against the Slave Power, at every turn, enraged those whose self-interest was involved in the corrupt and artful game, while it also alarmed the timid ; for much that now appears wise and just, when reviewed in the light of his- tory, then seemed like a dangerous extreme of radicalism. He was again nominated for Congress, in 1851 ; but his political opponents rallied against him in such force that they defeated his election.

He was not a man to suppress truth, or to consent merely to whisper it, for the sake of the honors and emoluments of office. He still continued to hurl his sharp and well- aimed spears at the powerful and malignant Demon of Slavery. In 1852, he made a speech at Cincinnati on the " Strength and Weakness of the Slave Power," in which he arraigned both Whigs and Democrats as traitors to freedom, and boldly rebuked the time-serving course of the American churches and their clergy. It was in this year that he was nominated by his party for the Vice- Presidency, on the ticket with John P. Hale. In 1853, he delivered a speech at Indianapolis on " The Signs of the

INTRODUCTION. XI

Times — The State of Political Parties." It was a dark hour for the Anti-slavery Cause ; but he saw gleams of light around the horizon of the clouded sky, and ut- tered hopeful prophecies, which subsequent events have confirmed. This speech was extensively circulated in the form of a tract, and did much to sustain the courage and strengthen the hands of the friends of freedom. He seized every opportunity to serve the good cause, whether by public addresses, or wayside conversation. In vain was he denounced, persecuted, and threatened with mob violence ; nothing could drive him from the rugged path in which he had chosen to walk, because its end was free- dom. In vain was he reminded that he was ruining his prospects in life ; nothing could tempt him into the crooked ways of policy. He saw the truth as only honest souls can see it, and he defended it as only brave souls will. When the mysterious Know Nothing Party sud- denly burst upon the public, like an army raised by the touch of a magician's wand, he at once perceived that the movement was contrary to the genius of our govern- ment and subversive of its principles ; and he did battle with it accordingly. His Speech at Indianapolis, in 1855, was published by Dr. Bailey in the " National Era," and " Facts for the People," and was generally considered the most thorough argumentation of. the question. The stand he took on this subject displeased many of his old friends and supporters, and greatly increased the pop- ular hostility he had incurred by joining the Anti-slavery movement. A comparatively small band of freedom, how- ever, adhered to him, and it pretty soon became evident that he was destined to outlive his unpopularity. When the fluctuations of political parties began, in 1856, to tend toward a new form under the name of the National Ee- publican Party, he was chosen a Vice-President of its first Convention at Pittsburg, and Chairman of the Com- mittee of Organization.

xii INTRODUCTION.

But, while politicians considered him an impracticable man, as they invariably do consider every man who will not bend his principles to party policy, his honest, straight- forward, daring course commended him to the respect and confidence of the people ; and in the face of very formidable opposition, he was elected to Congress in 1860 by an overwhelming vote ;• and reelected during four suc- cessive terms. Those ten years in Congress bear record of Herculean labor, and unremitting watchfulness over the true interests of the country. He was prominent and active in all the salutary measures connected with the War of the Rebellion. Though he had great respect for President Lincoln, and approved of his administration in the main, he failed not to rebuke that unnecessary timid- ity and delay on the part of the government, which so greatly increased the expenditure of lives and treasure. Many considered it impolitic to find any fault, lest polit- ical opponents should make use of it to their own advan- tage ; but he conceived that the people, in making him their public servant, had placed him on the watch-tower, and that it was his duty to perform the part of a faithful sentinel. He urged the emancipation of the slaves long before it took place, and, in fact, from the beginning of the struggle ; he argued in favor of arming the negroes of the South, as an act of justice as well as of military necessity ; he maintained that it was a duty to confiscate the lands of rebels, as a measure of war, and also to fur- nish homesteads for the soldiers and sailors of the United States ; he earnestly demanded the punishment of rebel leaders ; he labored for the safe reconstruction of Rebel States; he zealously advocated all the amendments to the Constitution for securing universal freedom and equality of civil rights ; and he was the first of our public men to demand suffrage for the emancipated slaves.

But while the pro-slavery army, at every change of base, and in all manner of disguises, found him always

INTRODUCTION. xiii

wide awake, with lance in rest, ready to meet their onset, and proclaim their deceptions, he was very far from confin- ing his attention to that range of subjects. He was indeed " a man of one idea ; " but only in the sense that his one idea was to stand by all right principles, whether his ad- vocacy of them seemed likely, or not, to advance his own interests, or those of his party. He was the first and fore- most in advocating the Homestead Policy, which grants homes to poor settlers on the public domain. And sub- sequently, when the rights and privileges of the Home- stead Bill were endangered by the schemes of land-specu- lators, he originated his well-known Bill forbidding the further sale of agricultural lands, except in small allot- ments, and to actual settlers. He vindicated this policy in very able and convincing speeches, and the House voted, nearly two to one, in favor of the proposed meas- ure near the close of the Forty-first Congress. He also lifted up his voice against mammoth grants of land to railroad companies ; thereby enabling them to keep large tracts unsettled while they wait to enrich themselves by advance of prices. It is not easy to exaggerate the im- portance of guarding this country against land monop- oly, which has kept the masses in Europe hopelessly poor. It is both kind and politic to facilitate to the ut- most the settlement and cultivation of the broad acres of our public domain ; for labor constitutes the true wealth of a nation, and one industrious settler is more honorable and useful to the country, than a dozen adventurers who have made themselves millionaires by monopoly. The increase of small farms and comfortable homesteads im- proves the character of a people, and is far more con- ducive to national prosperity than ingots of silver and nuggets of gold, the seeking and finding of which in- evitably produces deterioration of character ; and every process to grow rich suddenly, without labor, has the same results. Mr. Julian deserves our gratitude as a public

xiv INTRODUCTION.

benefactor for his unwearied exertions to warn the peo- ple against land monopoly, to check wastefulness in the disposal of the public domain, and to secure the distribu- tion of it into small farms.

The United States, in the year 1850, granted to the States the swamp and overflowed lands within their bor- ders, and the vigilant eyes of Mr. Julian discovered that great frauds on the rights of the people were being per- petrated under cover of those grants. He accordingly introduced a Bill defining Swamp and Overflowed Lands, the passage of which would save millions of acres for honest settlers. This Bill likewise received a large ma- jority of votes in the House in the Forty-first Congress.

The rich Mineral Lands of the United States also re- ceived a share of his attention. He objected to their being reserved from sale, and deprecated the system of leasing them, or the policy of abandoning them to set- tlers without law, as unwise in an economical point of view, and productive of deleterious moral effects ; and the reform which he ably urged on this subject has already been partially carried out.

The interests of Labor and the Resumption of Specie Payments have also been earnestly pleaded for by him. On all these subjects, and various others, he has in- troduced important measures, and sustained them with speeches more or less elaborate. These are all marked by strong good sense, forcible and well-arranged argu- ments, habitual independence of thought, a high standard of moral rectitude, and not unfrequently by eloquence of style. Some of them have been justly ranked among the best utterances in the Congress of the United States.

Among his other good services, it would be ungrateful in me to omit that he has introduced and advocated a proposition to grant the Right of Suffrage to Women in the District of Columbia, and in the Territories of the United States ; and that he has been outspoken in favor

INTRODUCTION. xv

of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, first pro- posed by himself in the Fortieth Congress, for the pur- pose of securing to women all the civil rights enjoyed by other citizens.

In addition to the great labor involved in the careful preparation of so many speeches, Mr. Julian was ten years a member of the House Committee on Public Lands, and eight years the Chairman of it. During four years he was a member of the important Joint Committee of both Houses on the Conduct of the War. For two years he was a member of the House Committee on Reconstruc- tion ; and he was also one of the Committee that pre- pared articles of impeachment against President Johnson.

This brief outline may serve to give an idea of his unremitting industry, and of the enlightened patriotism which kept such vigilant watch over the interests of the country, in all directions. Next to his powerful aid in the extermination of Slavery, I think we owe him most for his exertions, in various forms, to establish and pro- mote the Homestead Policy, and to keep the Public Lands ,out of the clutches of speculators and monopolists. But his efforts in that direction of course raised wp a host of enemies among the legions who seek to acquire wealth at the expense of the United States. In 1870, the forces against him were marshaled with so much skill, that he again lost liis election ; a result to be deeply regretted at this period, when political corruption spreads so widely, and honesty is comparatively rare.

In private life, Mr. Julian has the universal reputation of being most exemplary. He has been twice married, and in both cases is said to have had the good fortune to become united with a sensible, conscientious, and energetic woman. In 1845 he married Miss Anne E. Finch, of In- diana, who died in the year 1860 ; and in 1863 he mar- ried Miss Laura Giddings, of Ohio. She is the daughter of the able and heroic Joshua R. Giddings, to whom the

xvi INTRODUCTION.

country owes an everlasting debt of gratitude for his powerful and persistent battling with the Slave Power in Congress through many a stormy year. The State of Ohio would have done herself honor if she had kept that brave veteran in Congress as long as he had a voice to speak or vote. Mrs. Julian, being "Brutus' wife and Cato's daughter/' may well be stronger than her sex, " being so fathered and so husbanded." John Stuart Mill acquired faith in woman's capacity for public affairs by the intelli- gent sympathy and cooperation of his remarkable wife in the advancement of all the great principles that inter- ested his own mind. Perhaps Mr. Julian may be under similar obligations to his fortunate experience in matri- mony. On most of the great questions of the day he has been in advance of public opinion ; and his annuncia- tion of principles for which he contended against power- ful odds, seems like the voice of prophecy when read in connection with the ultimate triumph of those principles. It will be the same with the great principle of the perfect equality of the sexes, which he espoused many years ago, and now advocates so earnestly with a minority.

Mr. Julian is eminently Western in his character : frank and fearless, prompt and decided ; loyal in his attach- ments, but ready to thrust at friends or foes, if they place themselves in a position to impede the progress of Truth and Freedom. He seems to have chosen for his motto : " First be sure you are right, then go ahead." And he has gone ahead, like a steam-engine, and drawn many cars full after him.

It has been said of John Bright of England that during thirty or forty years of public life, he has never swerved from the straight line on which he started ; that his prin- ciples have known no change, except the greater devel- opment and perfection which result from experience ; and that events were continually proving his foresight and corroborating his opinions. I know of no public

INTRODUCTION. xvii

man in this country, except the Hon. Charles Sumner, to whom this remark can be so justly applied as to the Hon. George W. Julian. His speeches furnish proof of this. They reflect credit on our National Legislature, and form a valuable record of an important transition state in the history of the Republic.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE SLAVERY QUESTION 1

House of Representatives, May 14, 1850, in Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union.

"THE HEALING MEASURES" 34

In Committee of the Whole on the Army Appropriation Bill, September 25, 1850.

THE HOMESTEAD BILL 50

House of Representatives, January 29, 1851.

THE STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF THE SLAVE POWER —

THE DUTY OF ANTI-SLAVERY MEN 67

Delivered in Cincinnati, April 27, 1852.

THE STATE OF POLITICAL PARTIES — THE SIGNS OF THE

TIMES ' 83

Delivered at the Free Soil State Convention, Indianapolis, May 25, 1853.

THE SLAVERY QUESTION LN ITS PRESENT RELATIONS TO AMERICAN POLITICS 102

Delivered at Indianapolis, June 29, 1855.

INDIANA POLITICS 126

Delivered at Raysville, July 4, 1857.

THE CAUSE AND CURE OF OUR NATIONAL TROUBLES . 154

In Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, January 14, 1862.

CONFISCATION AND LIBERATION 181

House of Representatives, May 23, 1862.

THE REBELLION — THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST — THE

DUTY OF THE PRESENT 192

House of Representatives, February 18, 1863.

HOMESTEADS FOR SOLDIERS ON THE LANDS OF REBELS 212 House of Representatives, March 18, 1864.

RADICALISM AND CONSERVATISM — THE TRUTH OF HIS- TORY VINDICATED 229

In Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, February 7,1865.

xx CONTENTS.

PAGE

SALE OF MLNEEAL LANDS 225

House of Representatives, February 9, 1865.

DAN GEES AND DUTIES OF THE HOUE — EECONSTRUCTION

AND SUFFEAGE 262

In the Hall of the House of Representatives, Indianapolis, November 17, 1865.

SUFFEAGE IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA . . . . 291 House of Eepresentatives, January 16, 1866.

AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION ...... 309

House of Eepresentatives, January 29, 1866.

THE PUNISHMENT OF REBEL LEADEES 319

House of Eepresentatives, April 30, 1866.

EADICALISM THE NATION'S HOPE 332

House of Representatives, June 16, 1866.

REGENERATION BEFORE RECONSTRUCTION .... 348 House of Representatives, January 28, 1867.

IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON ... 361

House of Eepresentatives, December 11, 1867.

SPOLIATION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN— THE SAVING REM- EDY -.. 365

House of Representatives, March 6, 1868.

IMPOLICY OF LAND BOUNTIES -THE HOMESTEAD LAW DE- FENDED 385

In Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, July 13, 1868.

THE SEYMOUR DEMOCRACY AND THE PUBLIC LANDS . 399

Delivered at Shelbyville, August 8, 1868.

HOW TO RESUME SPECIE PAYMENTS 415

In Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, February 5, 1869.

THE OVERSHADOWING QUESTION 432

House of Eepresentatives, January 21, 1871.

THE RAILWAY POWER 456

House of Representatives, February 21, 1871.

REVIEW OF CONGRESSIONAL POLITICS 463

Closing Remarks at Dublin, October 25, 1868.

SPEECHES.

THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MAY 14, 1850, IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE OX THE STATE OF THE UNION.

[This speech, like the one which follows it, will vividly recall the anti-slavery crisis of 1850, and the shameful surrender of Congress to the slave power through the famous compromise measures of that year. These measures paved the way for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the bloody raid into Kansas, the Dred Scott decis- ion, and the final chapter of civil war ; and in the light of these results the facts and arguments here so carefully arrayed possess a certain historical interest, while com- pletely vindicating the action of the little party of Independents in the Thirty-first Congress in standing aloof from the Whig and Democratic organizations, and warn- ing the country against further submission to their rule.]

Mr. Chairman, — Representing, as I do, one of the strongest anti-slavery districts in the Union, I feel called upon to expi'ess, as nearly as may be, the views and feelings of my constituents, in reference to the exciting and painfully interesting question of slavery. I am not vain enough to suppose that anything I may say will influence the action of this committee ; yet I should hereafter reproach myself were I to sit here day after clay, and week after week, till the close of the session, listening to the monstrous heresies, and I am tempted to say the impudent bluster, of South- ern gentlemen, without confronting them on this floor with a becoming protest in the name of the people I have the honor to represent. Sir, what is the language writh which these gentlemen have greeted our ears for some months past ? The gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Clingman] tells us, that less pauperism and crime abound in the South than in the North, and that there never has existed a higher state of civilization than is now exhib- ited by the slaveholding States of this Union ; and so in love is he with his "peculiar institution," which thus promotes the growth of civilization by turning three millions of human beings into sav- ages, and prevents them from becoming paupers by 'converting

2 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

them into brutes, that he gives out the threat, doubtless in behalf of his Southern friends, that unless they are permitted, under national sanction, to extend their accursed system over the virgin soil of our Territories, they will block the wheels of government, revolutionize the forms of legislation, and involve this nation in the horrors of civil war. Nay, he goes farther, and anticipating the triumph of Northern arms, and comparing the vanquished " chiv- alry " to the Spartans at Thermopylae, he kindly furnishes the future historian with the epitaph which is to tell posterity the sad story of slaveholding valor: " Sere lived and died as noble a race as the sun ever shone wpon" — fighting (he should have added) for the extension and perpetuation of human bondage !

The gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Brown] manifests an equal devotion to the controlling interest of the South. He declares that he regards slavery " as a great moral, social, political, and religious blessing, — a blessing to the slave and a blessing to the master." The celebrated John Wesley was so "fanatical" as to declare that " slavery is the sum of all villainies." Had he lived in this enlightened age and Christian land, he would have learned that, on the contrary, it is the sum of all blessings. He would have been told that even the Bible sanctions it as a Divine institu- tion. Southern gentlemen remind us that it " existed in the tents of the Patriarchs, and in the households of Plis own chosen peo- ple ; " that " it was established by decree of Almighty God," and " is sanctioned in the Bible — in both Testaments — from Genesis to Revelation ; "* and so sacredly is it to be cherished, that we in the North are not allowed to give utterance to our deepest moral convictions respecting it. My friend from Mississippi graciously admits that we think slavery an evil ; but he adds, " Very well, think so ; but keej) your thoughts to yourselves" Thus, in the imperative mood and characteristic style of a slave-driver are we to be silenced. In this " freest nation on earth," our thoughts must be suppressed by this slaveholding inquisition. We must. I sup- pose, make a bonfire of the writings of Whittier, and expurgate our best literature. Indeed, to be consistent, and in order to eradicate every trace of " fanaticism " from the minds of the peo- ple, Ave must blot out the history of the American Revolution, and " keep our liberty a secret," lest we should give offense to the immaculate institution of the South. Of other institutions of society we may speak with the utmost freedom. We may talk of Northern labor and Northern pauperism. We may advocate with

1 Jefferson Davis.

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 3

tongue and pen the most radical schemes of reform, and thus assail every existing feature of our civilization. We may discourse freely of things even the most sacred, as the Supreme Being, his attri- butes, and Providence — yes, in this boasted land of free speech, we may deny his existence, or blaspheme his name by invoking his sanction of the most heaven-daring crimes ; but American slavery is an institution so precious, so beneficent, so exalted among the ordinances of God, so " sanctioned and sanctified by the legislation of two hundred years," that Northern men are not permitted to breathe an honest whisper against it. We must hold our tongues and seal our lips before the majesty of this Southern Moloch, lest he should lose some of the victims which otherwise his worshippers might sacrifice upon his blood-stained altar. O, the devouring loveliness, the enrapturing beauties, the unspeakable beatitudes of the " patriarchal institution ! " And what a blessed thing it must be to live in the pure atmosphere and under the clear sky of the South, feasting upon philosophy and reason, far removed from the folly and " fanaticism " of the North !

And the gentleman from Mississippi, like his friend from North Carolina, is in favor of extending the blessings of slavery at all hazards. The South ivill not submit to be girdled round by free soil ; and if we dare to thwart her purpose, we are reminded of the struggle of our fathers against British tyranny. Southern gentlemen point us to the battle-fields of our Revolution, and bid us beware. A Northern man, especially if disposed to be " fanat- ical," would suppose that our Southern brethren would avoid such allusions. Our fathers, it is true, resisted the aggressions of the mother country "at all hazards, and to the last extremity; " but their resistance was not in behalf of slavery, but freedom. Mr. Madison declared, in 1783, that " it was the boast and pride of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature." And Mr. Jefferson said, that " one hour " of this American slavery, which has been so recently transfigured into all blessedness, " is fraught with more misery than ages of that which we rose in T'ebellion to oppose." In speaking of an apprehended struggle of the blacks to rid themselves of their bond- age, he affirmed that " the Almighty has no attribute whicji can take sides with us in such a contest." Yet Southern gentlemen appeal to our revolutionary history as a warning to us, and a jus- tification of a war on their part, not for the establishment, but for the subversion of liberty, and the destruction of " the rights of human nature," by the indefinite extension over free lands of that

4 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

system of bondage which the very soul of Jefferson abhorred. All this, to Northern men, seems strange. As a specimen of South- ern philosophy it may be very creditable to politicians from that quarter, and it may appeal powerfully to their patriotism, but we cannot comprehend it. Nothing short of the serene understand- ing and unclouded vision of a slaveholder can fathom such argu- ments in defense of the South.

The gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Morton] makes war upon the ballot-box. He says it has become " sectional ; " and a distin- guished gentleman in the other end of the Capitol, after charging it with being the parent of the anti-slavery agitation and its appre- hended disasters to the country, pronounces it " worse than Pan- dora's box." We in the North have been taught that a constitu- tional majority should rule. We believe this principle lies at the foundation of our free system of government. We have been so " fanatical " as to regard the ballot-box as the palladium of our liberty. But our slaveholding brethren have discovered that this supposed safeguard of freedom is, in fact, an engine of mischief. It is the dreaded instrument by which this Union is to be broken into fragments. How we should get alone: in a Democratic gov- ernment without it, I am not able to explain ; and I regret that Southern gentlemen, whose minds are free from anv " fanatical " influence, have not seen fit to enlighten us on that subject.

The gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Wellborx] assails the dogma that " men are created equal ; " he styles it " a mystical postulate," although our fathers regarded it as a self-evident truth. They, I suppose, lived in the twilight of political wisdom ; for, since I have had the honor to occupy a seat on this floor, I have on more occasions than one heard Southern gentlemen denounce Jefferson as a sophist, and the Declaration of Independence as a humbug. And some of these gentlemen, strange to tell, coolly style themselves Democrats I Why, we are told that so far from being created equal, men are not created at all. Adam alone was a created man. Neither are men born. Infants are born, and grow up to the estate of manhood ; but men are neither born nor created. The equality of men is declared to be absurd for other reasons. Some men, we are told, are taller than others, some of a fairer complexion, some more richly endowed with intellect ; as if the author of the Declaration of Independence had meant to affirm that men are equal in respect to their physical or intellectual peculiarities !

Mr. Chairman, I will speak seriously. I need not further

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 5

multiply these examples of Southern opinion and feeling. I have brought them forward because, while the cry of "Northern fanati- cism " is incessantly ringing in our ears, I desire the country to judge whether a much larger share of fanaticism does not exist in the Southern States ; and whether this slaveholding fanaticism is not infinitely less excusable than that which prevails in the North. Sir, I can respect the man who, under the impulse of philanthropy or patriotism, deals his ill-judged blows at an institution which is crushing the dearest rights of millions, and now seeks at all hazards to curse new regions with its presence ; but it is difficult to respect the slaveholder, who, with his foot upon the neck of his brother, sits down with his Bible in one hand and his metaphysics in the other, to argue with me, that the truths of the Declaration of Independence are mere sophisms, and that the forcible stripping of three millions of human beings of all their rights, even their humanity itself, receives the sanction of the Almighty, and is a blessing to both tyrant and slave. This is a species of fanaticism above all others the most distasteful, the most preposterous, the most revolting. I Avill not undertake to combat these absurdities of its champions ; for it has been said truly, that to argue with men who have renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by Scripture.

Mr. Chairman, we hear much of Northern and Southern aggression. Nothing is more current in Southern speeches and newspapers than the charge, that the people of the free States are aggressiyig upon the rights of the South ; and this Union, it seems, is to be dissolved, unless these aggressions shall cease. On the other hand, the people of the free States charge the South with being the aggressor, and plead not guilty to the indictment of the slaveholders. Now, how stands the case ? Who is the aggressor ? This is the question to be solved, and the one I propose mainly to examine. I wish to do this fairly and dispassionately ; for I am fully aware of the differences of opinion which prevail in regard to it, resulting, perhaps necessarily, from the different circumstances of the parties.

The charge of Northern aggression I certainly deny. It has no just foundation. Neither is the charge of Southern aggression, perhaps, fully and strictly true. The truth rather seems to be, that under the lead of Southern counsels, both sections of the Union have united in enlarging and aggrandizing the slave power. This proposition I shall endeavor to establish.

6 THE- SLAVERY QUESTION.

What are these Northern ao-o-ressions of which we have heard so much complaint ? Of what hostile acts do they consist ? Have the people of the free States attempted to interfere, by law, with slavery in the South? This charge, I am aware, is frequently brought against us. You can scarcely open a newspaper from that quarter in which it is not gravely made. It has been again and again denied by Northern men on this floor, but Southern gentle- men still continue to repeat it. Sometimes it is preferred against the people of the North generally, but more frequently against a comparatively small portion of them, as the Free Soil party. The charge is utterly unfounded in truth. The Whigs and Democrats of the North, as well as the Free Soil men, disclaim all right on the part of Congress to touch the institution of slavery where it exists. We all agree that the subject is beyond our control. As regards the naked question of constitutional power, Congress has no more right to abolish slavery in South Carolina, than it has to abolish free schools in Massachusetts, — no more right to support slavery in one State than in the other. It is an institution de- pendent wholly upon State law, with which the General Gov- ernment lias no more concern than with slavery in Russia or Austria. It is true, that some of us in the North claim the right to assault slavery with moral weapons, even in the States. When the slaveholder says to us that on this subject we must keep our thoughts to ourselves, we shall obey him if it suits us. We have a right to employ those moral forces by which reforms of every kind are carried forward. We understand the power of opinion. We believe, in the language of Dr. Channing, that " opinion is stronger than kings, mobs, lynch-laws, or any other laws for the suppression of thought and speech ; " and that, " whoever spreads through his circle, be that circle wide or narrow, just opinions and views respecting slavery, hastens its fall." Sir, it is not only our right, but our duty, to give utterance to our cherished moral con- victions ; and if slavery, rooted as it is in the institutions and opinions of the South, cannot brave the growing disapprobation of Christendom, let it perish. And it will perish. If by " reenact- ing the law of God," we can prevent its extension, the South will be constrained to adopt some plan of gradual emancipation. She will realize forcibly the important fact, which she now endeavors to overlook, that truth, justice, humanity, and the spirit of the age, are all leagued against her system. I will not harbor the impious thought that an institution, so freighted with wretchedness and woe, is to be perpetuated under the providence of God. I cannot adopt

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 7

a principle that would dethrone the Almighty, and make Satan the governor of the moral world. It is " the fool " who " hath said in his heart there is no God." Nor do we mean to be silenced by the hackneyed argument that slavery is a civil institution, and therefore none of our business. We deny that the public laws of a community can sanctify oppression, or stifle the expression of our sympathy for the oppressed. Your slavery, when intrenched be- hind your institutions, is still slavery ; and although your laws may uphold it, they cannot repeal that Christian law which teaches the universal brotherhood of our race. But while I thus frankly avow these sentiments, I repeat what I have already said, that the people of the North claim no right, through the action of the Gen- eral Government, to interfere with slavery in the slaveholding States. We most emphatically disavow any such purpose. Are we, then, guilty of aggression upon the rights of the slaveholder? We are charged with violating the clause in the Federal Consti- tution relative to fugitives from labor. This is among the gravest accusations preferred against us. Sir, this clause, and the act of Congress made in pursuance of it, have been elaborately argued and solemnly adjudicated in the highest court in the nation. Our duty in the free States has been made so plain that a child may understand it. I would not refer to this subject, which has been so often discussed on this floor, and repeat what has been so often said, were it not for the unending clamor of the South against us. We are driven to a repetition of the grounds of our defense. We say the slave-hunter may come upon our soil in pursuit of his fugitive, and take him if he is able, either with or without warrant, and we are not allowed to interfere in the race. " Hands off" is our covenant, and the whole of it. If the owner sees fit to sue out a warrant, he must go before a United States officer with his complaint. It is not the duty of our State magistrates to aid him, the execution of the clause in question depending exclusively upon federal authority. I think I state fairly the opinion of the Su- preme Court in the case of Prigg vs. the State of Pennsylvania. Now, if Congress alone can provide for the execution of this clause through federal jurisdiction, and the State magistrates of the North are under no obligations to interfere, is it a violation of the constitutional rights of the South for us to pass laws prohibiting such interference ? I would like to have Southern gentlemen answer this question ; for I insist upon it, that if the Federal Con- stitution does not require us to assist in the recapture of fugitives, it cannot be an aggression upon Southern rights to withhold such

8 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

assistance, and thus maintain the position of neutrality, or non- action, assigned us by the Constitution. Can it be that the North- ern States have any other duties to perform than those which the Constitution itself imposes ? Is slavery so endeared to us that we must volunteer- in its support ? Sir, in examining this question, the constitutional rights of the South, and the corresponding con- stitutional obligations of the North, are the only legitimate matters of consideration. No free State has as yet passed any laws dis- charging fugitives from the service they owe by the laws of other States, or preventing their recapture ; and if this is not done, there can be no reasonable ground of complaint against the North. According to the decision alluded to, the fugitive may be recap- tured without warrant, and, without any trial of his rights by jury or otherwise, carried into slavery. This manifestly exposes the colored people of the free States to the Southern kidnapper. They have the right, which belongs to all communities, to guard the liberties of their own citizens ; and if, for this purpose, some of them have passed laws against the kidnapping of free persons as slaves, and providing a trial by jury to determine the question whether the party claimed is or is not a slave, is it an aggression upon Southern rights? When the free colored citizens of the North visit the ports of South Carolina, they are thrown into prison, and sometimes even sold into slavery. This, if I mistake not, is justified by the South on the ground of a necessary police regulation. Have not the Northern States a right to establish their police regulations, to secure the rights of their citizens ? Are not police regulations in behalf of liberty as justifiable as police regu- lations in behalf of slavery ?

As regards the enticement of slaves from their masters, the number of such cases is small. Neither the States, nor the mass of their citizens, are accountable, or have any connection whatever with such transactions. The great majority of escapes are prompted by other causes than Northern interference. The slave has the power of locomotion, and the instinct to be free ; and it would indeed be wonderful did he not, of his own will and by his own efforts, smuggle for the prize of which he has been robbed. That men will strive to better their condition is a law of nature. The flight of the bondman is a necessary consequence of the oppression under which he groans. Blame not the North for this, but blame your diabolical system, which impiously tramples under foot the God-given rights of men. Upbraid Nature, for she is always " agitating " the question of slavery, and persuading its victims to

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 9

flee. You hold three millions of your fellow-beings as chattels. You shut out from them the light of the Bible, and degrade and brutalize them to the extent of your power, for your system re- quires it. You trample under foot their marriage contracts, and spread licentiousness over half the States of the Union. You den}r them that principle of eternal justice, a fair day's wages for. a fair day's work. You sunder their dearest relations, separating at your will husbands and wives, parents and children. And do you suppose the poor slave, smarting under these wrongs, will not seek deliverance by flight? And when, through peril and starva- tion, he finds his way among us, panting for that liberty for which our fathers poured out their blood, do you imagine we shall drop our work and join in the chase with his Christless pursuers ? Sir, there is no power on earth that can induce us thus to take sides with the oppressor. Such, I rejoice to believe, is the public senti- ment of the North, that I care not what laws Congress may enact, the slave-hunter will find himself unaided. The free States will observe faithfully the compromises of the Constitution. They will give up their soil as a hunting-ground for the slaveholder, suspend- ing their sovereignty that he may give free chase to his fugitive. They will pass no law to discharge him from the service he may legally owe to his claimant, or to hinder his recapture. But we will not actively cooperate against the unhappy victim of your tyranny. And if Southern gentlemen mean to insist upon such active cooperation on our part, as a condition of their continuing in the Union, they may as well, in my judgment, begin to look about them for some way of getting out of it on the best terms they can. Under no circumstances, I trust, will we yield to their demand.

Another intolerable aggression with which the North is charged is that of scattering incendiary publications in the South, designed to incite insurrections among the slaves. The Southern gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Ross] has paraded this charge in the most hideous colors. My friend from North Carolina has also been quite graphic in setting it forth, declaring that the free States " keep up and foster in their bosoms Abolition societies, whose main purpose is to scatter firebrands throughout the South, to incite servile insurrections, and stimulate by licentious pictures our negroes to invade the persons of our white women." Sir, this is a serious accusation, and if true, the South unquestionably has a right to complain. I will not charge the gentleman with fabricating it, but I regret that he did not produce the evidence on which he felt

10 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

authorized to make it. I deny the charge. I deny that the free States " keep up and foster in their bosoms Abolition societies," for any purpose. The Abolition societies, now known as such, belong to what is called the Garrison School. They are voluntary associations of men and women, the Northern States being no more responsible for their doings than the Southern States. Unlike all other parties in the North, they lay down their platform outside of the Constitution, and hold that the freedom of the black race can only be accomplished by its ovei'throw ; but they rely upon moral force alone for the triumph of their cause. I deny that they are guilty of inciting, or of wishing to incite servile insurrections, or of scattering firebrands among the slaves, or licentious pictures. These Abolitionists are generally the friends of peace, non-resist- ants, the enemies of violence and blood ; and they would regret as much as any people in the Union to see a servile war set on fcrot by the millions in the land of slavery. I will add further, while dissenting entirely from their constitutional doctrines, that they have among them some of the purest and most gifted men in the nation. But is the charge meant for the Free Soil party of the North ? Are they the incendiaries complained of, and their doc- trines the firebrands which have been scattered in the South? We hold that Congress should abolish slavery in this District, prevent its extension beyond its present limits, refuse the admission of any more slave States, and that the government should relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or support of slavery where it has the constitutional power thus to relieve itself, leaving it a State institution, dependent upon State law exclusively. We are for non-intervention in its true sense. Such is our creed, and we proclaim it North and South. If it is incendiary, then are we guilty, for our newspapers circulate* in the slaveholding States. If our faith is a firebrand, we have scattered it, not among your slaves, who are unable to read, but among their owners. Acting within the Constitution, and resolving not to go beyond its granted powers, we mean to avail ourselves of a free press to disseminate our views far and wide. If truth is incendiary, we shall still proclaim it ; if our constitutional acts are firebrands, we shall nevertheless do our duty. Sir, this charge has been conceived in the diseased brain of the slaveholder, or the sickly conscience of the doughface. I reiter- ate my denial that any party in the free States has labored to bring about a war between the two races in the South. I am aware that we have our ultra men among us, nor do I pretend to justify all they have done. They must answer for themselves, and can-

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 11

not involve the North in their responsibility. But there is no party in the free States that harbors any such purpose, or that would not shudder at the contemplation of so merciless and heart-appalling a project.

Passing over the subject of slavery in this District, which I shall notice in a different connection, I come now to the Wilmot Proviso. This would seem to be the sum of all wrongs and out- rages — the aggression of aggressions, — the monster that, if not at once throttled and destroyed, is to rend the Union asunder. Let us once more look it in the face, take its dimensions, and con- template its supposed power of mischief. This Wilmot Proviso has been much discussed in Congress and throughout the country ; it might be thought, by this time, a stale topic ; yet it is far from being an uninteresting one, as the continual discussion of it here evinces. Endeavoring as much as possible to lay aside passion, I would say to Southern gentlemen, " Let us reason together.'" Suppose this alarming measure should pass both houses of Con- gress, and receive the Executive sanction, I ask wherein would consist the aggression upon the guaranteed rights of the South ? Would not every slave State still retain its sovereignty over its peculiar institution ? Would not the rights of the master, as sanctioned by local law, remain unimpaired ? Look next at the constitutional compromises. The free States bound themselves to allow you to pursue your fugitives upon their soil. Would the adoption of the proviso affect, in the smallest degree, this right ? We agreed that you might carry on — or, if you please, that we would join you in carrying on — the slave-trade, for twenty years. We faithfully lived up to this compromise ; and there is, long since, an end of it. Of course, the proviso can have nothing to do with it. Lastly, it was stipulated that every five of your slaves, for the purposes of taxation and representation, should be counted equal to three of our citizens. Most obviously, the passage of the proviso would not invalidate the rights of the South growing out of this compromise. The old slave States, and those subsequently admitted, would retain all the advantages of the original bargain. Now, I maintain that these subjects of taxation, representation, and the recovery of fugitives, are the only matters touching which Congress can constitutionally legislate in favor of slavery. So far, I admit, our fathers compromised the freedom of the black race, and involved the free States in the political obligation to uphold slavery. Beyond these express compromises, they did not go nor design to go. They yielded thus much to the South, under the

12 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

impelling desire for union, believing that the powers of the gov- ernment, with the exceptions expressly made, would be " actively and perpetually exerted on the side of freedom," and that slavery would gradually cease to exist in the country. I do not speak of this as matter of conjecture. As early as 1774, Mr. Jefferson declared that " the abolition of domestic slavery is, the greatest object of desire in these colonies ; " and the opinion was then common throughout the country that this object could be at- tained by discontinuing the importation of slaves from abroad. The action of the memorable Congress of this year, and popular movements in all the colonies, about this time, evinced a very de- cided determination to carry into practice this non-importation policy. This, I presume, will be denied by no one. Our revolu- tionary struggle commenced soon afterwards ; and, basing its justi- fication upon the inalienable rights of man, it could not fail to give an impulse to the spirit of liberty favorable to the abolition of slavery in the colonies. After the war was over, Mr. Jefferson himself declared that such had been its tendency. Indeed, our fathers could not avoid seeing that slavery was practically at war with the Declaration of Independence, and their own example in resisting the tyranny of Britain. In 1787 the Federal Constitu- tion was framed, and it is a noteworthy fact, that the word slave is not to be found in it. According to Mr. Madison, this word was studiously omitted, to avoid the appearance of a sanction, by the Federal Government, of the idea " that there could be property in man." This circumstance, it seems to me, is very significant. The Constitution is so guardedly framed, that, were slavery at any moment to cease to exist, scarcely a clause or a word would require to be changed. Who does not see in this, that whilst our fathers were framing a constitution that was to last for ages, the idea stood out palpably before their minds that the days of slavery were numbered? Be it remembered, too, that at the time the Constitution was adopted, slavery had already been abolished, or measures had been taken for its abolition, in seven of the thirteen colonies ; and at the very time the convention which formed the Constitution was in session, maturing its provisions, the Congress of the Confederation was sitting at New York, enacting the cele- brated ordinance by which territory enough for five large States was forever consecrated to freedom. Every inch of soil which the government then owned was, by this ordinance, made free, and a preponderance secured in favor of the North of twelve non- slaveholding to only six slaveholding States. Thus we see, that

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 13

at the time the government was about to enter upon its career, and to exemplify the spirit of its founders, slavery was a receding power, a decaying interest, a perishing institution. Not chains and stripes, but freedom, was the dominant idea, the great thought of our fathers. They would have been astounded at the sugges- tion that slavery was to be perpetuated in this country, as the source of all blessings, and lauded as " the corner-stone of our republican edifice." It was among them, and had been forced upon them by the mother country ; and not being able immedi- ately to get rid of it, it was to be tolerated, and endured, till meas- ures could be taken for its final extirpation from the land. And if they regarded it as a curse, and did not expect it to be perpetu- ated where it then existed, much less did they imagine that it was to be carried into new regions under the sanction of the govern- ment of their formation, and become the great central power and all-absorbing interest of the nation. Sir, the thought is mon- strous, that the Northern States, when reluctantly agreeing to those compromises by which slavery received a qualified support in the old States, intended that those compromises should after- wards be indefinitely extended over the American Continent. Let it be borne in mind, also, as corroborating the view under consider- ation, that the founders of our government had no expectation that the boundaries of the United States, as established by the Treaty of 1783, would ever be enlarged. There is not one syllable of evi- dence, either in the Constitution itself, or the history of its forma- tion, to justify the idea that the acquisition of foreign territory was contemplated. This has been admitted by distinguished Southern gentlemen in this hall, and in the other end of the Capitol. Mr. Jefferson seems to have entertained this view ; for he questioned the power of the nation to annex foreign territory without an amend- ment of the Constitution. I deduce from this the obvious and in- evitable conclusion, that the Constitution was made for the United Mates as then bounded, and that the compromises on the subject of slavery, to which the Northern States assented, had reference alone to the slavery of the then slaveholding States ; the slavery that was dwindling and perishing under the weight of its own acknowledged evils ; the slavery that our fathers prevented from spreading into the only territory then belonging to the government ; the slavery that was almost universally expected, at no very distant day, to be swept from the Republic. The adoption of the Wilmot Proviso, there- fore, would be in harmony with the Constitution, with the views and expectations of the people at the time of its formation, and

14 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

with the Declaration of Independence, on which our fathers planted themselves in their struggle against a foreign yoke. It is impossible to escape this conclusion without contradicting the truth of history, and branding the founders of the government as hypocrites, who, after having paraded the rights of man before the world, and achieved their own freedom, deliberately went to work to found an empire of slaves. And yet Southern gentlemen speak of the restriction of slavery as an aggression upon their rights ! What makes this charge look still worse is the fact, that the supreme power of legislation by Congress over the Territories of the government has been uniformly exercised from its beginning till the year 1848, and acquiesced in by all its departments. The power in question — that of restricting slavery — Avas exercised in 1787 ; it was exercised in 1820 ; it was exercised in the passage of the resolutions annexing Texas in 1845, and in its most objection- able form ; and it wras again exercised in 1848, with the sanction of a slaveholding President. And still we are told that the passage of the Proviso would be such an intolerable outrage as to justify the dissolution of the Union !

Mr. Chairman, I have now briefly noticed most of the alleged

aggressions of the North. The historical facts I have brought for- es? o

ward, bearing upon the question of slavery restriction, have been often presented ; but they cannot be too often repeated, or too care- fully remembered, in the present crisis. Sir, it is as true at this day as at any former period of our history, that " a frequent recur- rence to first principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty."

Turning now to the other side of the picture, I propose to glance at that policy and some of those acts by which slavery, instead of wearing out its life within its original limits, has been transplanted into new regions, fostered by the government as a great national interest, and interwoven with the whole fabric of its policy. I shall make no special complaint about " Southern aggression," for it will appear, as I have already stated, that the slave power has built itself up by the cooperation or acquiescence of the non-slaveholding States. Nor shall I claim any novelty for the facts I am about to present. They form a part of the history of the country and the public records of the government. Through various channels they have found their way to the people ; yet it may not be entirely a useless labor to gather them together, and endeavor to keep them in remembrance in determining what further concessions shall be made to the demands of slavery.

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 15

At the time the Federal Constitution was adopted, the States of North Carolina and Georgia claimed certain territory, which they afterwards ceded or relinquished to the General Government ; and out of this territory the three States of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi were formed, and successively admitted into the Union. The compromises by which the Northern States had bound themselves in reference to slavery in the old States, were now stretched over these new ones, containing at present a slave population considerably exceeding that of the entire Union at the time of its formation. I have already shown that such an accession of slaveholding States, thus forcing the North into a further part- nership with the curses of slavery, was not contemplated by our fathers. It was accomplished, however, and of course by the aid of Northern votes.

In 1808 we gave fifteen millions of dollars for the Territory of Louisiana, and the three large slave States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, were subsequently carved out of it, and from time to time admitted into the Union. They contain a slave population of upwards of three hundred thousand souls. Here, again, the obligation of the free States to support slavery was enlarged, and the fond expectations of our fathers disappointed.

In 1819 we gave five millions of dollars for the Territory of Florida. We did not buy it on account of the value of its lands, or of the added wealth it would bring into the Union, but mainly to strengthen the slaveholding interest. Difficulties were appre- hended from the pursuit of fugitives into the territory wdiilst it continued a Spanish province, and to obviate these difficulties, and at the same time to widen the domain of slavery, the purchase was made. Florida was subsequently admitted, by the help of Northern votes, into full fellowship with Massachusetts and the other free States, whose relations with slavery were thus again extended, in ' violation of the faith upon which the Union had been consum- mated.

In 1815 Texas was annexed, containing territory enough for five or six States. That this was a measure " essentially Southern in its character," is placed beyond all doubt by the records of the State Department. It is likewise proved by the declarations of Southern members of Congress in 1814, and by the avowals of the Southern press and of leading men in the South, from the time the question was first agitated till the project was consummated. No man, it seems to me, can read the history of Texas from its first settlement by emigrants from this country, and for one moment

16 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

doubt the truth of what I assert. I know it has been said on this floor that the acquisition of Texas was not a Southern measure, but a measure of the National Democratic party. I am aware too that John Quincy Adams declared, in 1845, that it was "in its concep- tion and in its conclusion a Whiff measure." With these declara- tions I have nothing to do. I do not charge any party in the North with favoring annexation with the design of extending slav- ery. I speak not as a partisan, but as a seeker of facts, bearing upon the alleged charge of Northern aggression ; and what I assert is, • that while the motive of the South in grasping Texas was un- masked, and was in fact glaringly manifest, the North was induced to come to her rescue, and thus added an empire of slavery to her dominions in the Southwest. Was this a Northern aggression? Nine slaveholding States have been added to the Union since the date of its formation, and five of them out of soil then the property of foreign nations. All this has been generously done by the free States, for they have had the strength in every instance to prevent these additions, and this constantly augmenting Southern power.

The facts I have stated are significant. They show that the Northern States, instead of aggressing upon the rights of the South, have aided her in incorporating additional slaveholding States into the Union, whenever such aid has been demanded. But this is not all. Some thirty years ago the States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Mis- souri, were more or less incumbered with an Indian population. The white man and his slave were shut out from laro-e regions of those States by the barriers of the red man. which the States them- selves had no power to remove. All these regions are now redeemed from the Indian, and actual slavery extended where it could not go before ; and all this has been done by the help of Northern votes ; for without that help, the laws could not have been passed, nor the treaties have been ratified, by which this great extension of slavery in so many great States was accomplished.1 What a commentary upon the charge of Northern aggression !

In 1778 and 1790 the States of Virginia and Maryland ceded to the General Government the territory constituting the District of Columbia, till the late retrocession of the portion ceded by the former. These cessions, under the Constitution, necessarily gave Congress the exclusive power of legislation over the territory ceded, and its inhabitants. Congress accepted these grants, and in 1801 re- enacted the slave codes of Maryland and Virginia, and thus legal-

1 Benton's late speech.

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 17

ized and nationalized slavery in this District. Slaves are now held here by virtue of this law, and have been so held for nearly half a century. The free States have always had strength enough in Con- gress to repeal it, but they have forborne to do so. They have done more ; they have permitted you to carry on, by their sanction, the slave traffic here, which is interdicted by your own slave States. This execrable commerce, which the laws of the civilized world pronounce piracy, punishable with death, and which even the Sul- tan of Turkey and the Bey of Tunis have put under their ban ; this " piratical warfare," as Jefferson called it, and which he de- clared, three quarters of a century ago, to be the " opprobrium of infidel powers ; " this heir of all abominations has existed here for nearly fifty years by our permission, — here in the heart of this Model Republic, around the walls of its Capitol, and under the folds of its flag ; here, in the noon of the nineteenth century, and under the full blaze of Christian truth ! And Northern men have not only upheld this traffic thus far, but their forbearance toward the South inclines some of them to uphold it still longer. I doubt if there are men enough in Congress to-day to pass a bill through either House for its abolition. And yet, Southern gentlemen talk about the aggressions of the North, and threaten to break up the Union to secure their deliverance from our oppression ! Will they snap asunder the cords that bind us, in anticipation of an act of justice ? Suppose Congress should abolish slavery and the slave- trade here ; would such abolition interfere in any way with the constitutional rights of the slaveholding States ? We in the North are upholding these evils in this District; Ave are morally and politically responsible for their continuance ; and I say to gentlemen from the South, that if by the exercise of an unquestionable power of Congress we rid ourselves of this responsibility, it is our business, not yours. You have no right, to complain, and your clamor in this respect about Northern aggression ought to be regarded as an insult to the free States.

I pass to another topic. Since the formation of the government, if I have rightly calculated, about five hundred thousand dollars have been paid by the United States, either directly or indirectly* for fugitive slaves that have taken shelter among the Creek and Seminole Indians. The most of this sum has been paid to the slaveholders of the State of Georgia alone, and directly from the public treasury.

Have the slave States the right thus to call on the General Gov- ernment and the common fund of the nation to aid them ? It has 2

IS THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

been truly said by an eminent man, himself a slaveholder, that " the existence, continuance, and support of slavery depend exclu- sively upon the power and authority of the several States in which it is situated.' It was not the intention of our fathers, as I have shown, that this government should interfere with slavery in the States, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. It is their own affair ; and if their laws are not strong enough to give it life, it must submit to its doom. When your bondman comes among us in the character of a fugitive, you have the right, guaranteed by the ex- press terms of the Constitution, to carry him again into slavery ; but have no right to call upon us to pay our money for slaves escaping into Canada, Mexico, or among the savages and swamps of a Span- ish province. Believing slavery to be a great moral and political evil, we will not go beyond the express letter of our covenant in giving it our support. The Constitution, in the language of Judge McLean, acts upon slaves as persons, and not as property. Con- gress has uniformly been governed by this principle ; and you might as well call upon us to pay for your runaway mules as your slaves. The action of the treaty-making power has been different. A large number of slaves fled from their masters during our last war with Great Britain; and for twenty years did this government ply its diplomacy in urging the British Government to pay for these fugitives. The sum of one million two hundred and four thousand dollars was at length obtained and paid to Southern slaveholders. This open espousal of the cause of slavery by the Federal Govern- ment seems to have been sanctioned by the free States. It was not the work, exclusively, of Southern men. The policy of our fathers was to discourage slavery, and as far as possible to divorce the government from it. Is the reversal of this policy a Northern aggression ?

Again, in 1831 and 1833, the ships Comet and Eifcomiui)), laden with slaves, were wrecked on British soil ; and the Federal Government, again hoisting its flag over the peculiar institution, obtained from Great Britain twenty-five thousand pounds for slaves lost bv these accidents. Similar losses were incurred by the sub- sequent fate of the Enterprise^ Creole, and Hermosa^ and the United States threatened Great Britain with war, for refusing to foot these bills of Southern slaveholders. An honorable member of this House was virtually expelled from this hall in 184:2, for introducing resolutions denying the constitutional power of the gov- ernment to support the coastwise slave-trade, and declaring its duty to relieve itself from all action in favor of slavery. The Senate,

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 19

not wishing to be outdone by the House, unanimously adopted resolutions declaring it to be the duty of the government to protect by its flag the rights of American slaveholders in British ports, where by the local law their slaves would otherwise become free. Were these ajTo-ressions upon Southern rights ?

Co I G

Merely glancing at the unwarranted efforts of the government to obtain pay for fugitives to Canada and Mexico, in 1826 and 1828, I proceed to notice a more remarkable example of Federal intervention in favor of slavery. About twenty-five years ago, when Mexico and Colombia, who had just achieved their independ- ence of Spain, and emancipated their slaves, were threatening to grasp the island of Cuba, our government distinctly intimated to these young republics that they must abandon their purpose. And why ? Because emancipation in Cuba might otherwise take place, and the contagion spread in the United States. Thus the Federal Government espoused the cause of slavery in Cuba, in order at the same time to perpetuate it in our own boasted land of freedom. It did the same thing in 1829. Were these acts Northern aggressions? I need scarcely add in this connection, that the main, if not the sole reason, why the United States have refused to acknowledge the independence of Hayti, or to hold intercourse with her, is, that the independence of a black republic might prove dangerous to the perpetuity of American slavery. Thus the people of the North are deprived of the profits which would arise from establisheclcom- mercial relations between the two governments, in order that Southern slavery may be sustained.

In 1807, Congress passed a law regulating the coastwise slave- trade in vessels of over forty tons burden, and prescribing minutely the manifests, forms of entry at the custom-house, and specifications to be made by the masters of such vessels. The North was thus made responsible for a traffic which is piracy by the law of nations ; and such has been our forbearance toward the South, that we have made no effort to relieve ourselves of this responsibility. Take another item of Congressional legislation in favor of slaverv, — the Act of 1793. This act made it the duty of State magistrates to assist in the recapture of fugitives, and for nearly fifty years the slave- holders had the benefit of it, in the prompt interference of the authorities of the North in behalf of their institution. This act, so far as it imposed duties on State magistrates, was unconstitutional and has been so decided ; but it committed the free States to the support of slavery, and gave important aid to the South daring the whole period named. Nor is this all. Most of the free States re-

20 THE SLAVERY QUESTION. .

enacted the substance of this act, as to the duty of State magistrates, and its provisions and penalties respecting the harboring or con- cealing of fugitives, — thus legislating in favor of slavery, and of course out of a tolerant spirit toward the South. There is no con- stitutional or moral obligation which required it. It was a bounty, a gratuity, bestowed by the North in token of sympathy for slave- holders ; for the recovery of fugitives, and the penalty for obstruct- ing their recapture, are matters of federal cognizance entirely, as I have already shown. Yet these enactments now stand unre- pealed on the statute books of several of the Northern States.

In my own State we have a lawr punishing, by a fine not exceed- ing five hundred dollars, the harboring of a fugitive slave, as " an offense against the peace and dignity of the State of Indiana." And this law is not a dead letter. Men are indicted and punished under it. Our courts and juries do not hesitate to regard it. Our Leg- islature, I know, is exceedingly well disposed toward it ; for all attempts to repeal our " black laws " (and some of them are much blacker, than this) have thus far signally failed. Is all this legisla- tion of the North in behalf of the slaveholders an aggression upon their rights ?

I have already stated that Florida was purchased because it was demanded by the slaveholding interest. I omitted the fact, that under the treaty by which it was acquired, and the laws of Con- gress enacted to carry it into effect, this government felt itself called upon to pay to the Florida slaveholders forty thousand dollars for slaves lost by the invasion of our troops in 1812. I have also passed over the inhuman slave code by which Florida was governed while a Territory, and which, of course, derived its validity from the sanction of Congress. I next observe that our first Seminole or Florida War received its birth in the jealous vigilance of the Federal Government in behalf of the interests of slavery. It was occasioned by the destruction of a negro fort on the Appalachicola River in 1816, by officers and troops in the service of the United States. About three hundred men, women, and children, were killed. It is true they were mostly fugitives ; but they were living peaceably in Spanish territory. Certairdy, the government was under no obligation to commit this wholesale murder, merely be- cause the slaveholders of Florida desired it. Yet Congress, in 1839, passed a law by which the sum of five thousand dollars was paid out of the common treasury of the government, to its officers and crew, for blowing up this fort. Was this, too, a Northern aggression ?

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 21

The second Florida War was likewise waged and carried on for the benefit of slaveholders. Of the necessity for this war at the time the nation saw fit to engage in it, I shall not speak. With its immediate cause or occasion I have nothing to do. I only assert (and this is sufficient for my purpose) that the war had its origin in the long-continued previous interference of the Federal Government in favor of the slaveholders of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Slaves fled from their masters in Georgia and took refuge among the Creek Indians, as far back as cur Revolutionary War- They continued to escape till the formation of the government ; and as early as 1790 the United States entered into a treaty with the Creeks, in which they agreed, in consideration of an annuity of fifteen hundred dollars, and certain goods mentioned, to deliver up the negroes then residing in their territory to the officers of the United States. And " during a period of more than thirty years was the influence of the Federal Government exerted for the pur- pose of obtaining these fugitive slaves, or in extorting from the Indians a compensation for their owners. The Senate was called upon to approve those treaties ; Congress was called on to pass laws, and to appropriate money to carry those treaties into effect, and the people of the free States to pay the money and bear the disgrace, in order that slavery may be sustained. But the consequences of these efforts still continue, and the government has, to this day, been unable to extricate itself from the difficulties into which these exertions in behalf of slavery precipitated it." A large portion of the fugitives from Georgia who fled prior to 1802, intermarried with the Seminoles or southern Creek Indians. The government, by treaty in 1821, compelled the Creeks to pay for these fugitives five or six times their value. The Creeks, supposing they had thus acquired a good title to them from the United States, claimed the wives and children of the Seminoles as their property. The latter, not being willing to part with their families, and being har- assed by the demands of the Creeks, agreed, by treaty, in 1832, to remove West, and reunite with the latter tribe ; the United States agreeing to have the claim of the Creeks investigated, and to liquidate it in behalf of the Seminoles if the amount did not exceed seven thousand dollars. The Seminoles, however, finally refused to remove West, preferring to remain and fight the whites, rather than hazard the loss of their wives and children by becoming again incorporated with the Creeks. The interests of the Florida slaveholders required that the Seminoles should be compelled to emigrate, and the government embarked in the undertaking.

22 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

Such is a brief summary of facts connected with the celebrated Florida War, and showing the action of this nation in favor of Southern slaveholders. The war was begun by the United States to drive the Seminoles from their country. They refused to go because the Creeks would rob them of their wives and children in their new home. And the government had by treaty forced these Creeks to pay the slaveholders an exorbitant price for these wives and children of the Seminoles, and thus laid the foundation of the claim which prevented them from removing West, and brought on the war. It was, I repeat, a war for the exclusive benefit of slavery. It was conceived and brought forth in the unjustifiable interference of the Federal Government in favor of an institution local to the States in which it exists, and to which the federal power does not extend. These facts are placed beyond all contro- versy by the documentary history of the country. And this war for the capture of fugitive slaves, and the massacre of Seminole Indians, with bloodhounds from Cuba as our auxiliaries, cost the nation the estimated sum of forty millions of dollars, drawn chiefly from the pockets of the people of the free States. We united with the South in its prosecution, and, without any common interest in its objects, furnished our full share of the men and money required in the inglorious struggle. Was all this a Northern ao-oression ?

I come next to our war with Mexico. This, so far as the slave- holding States were concerned, was carried on for the acquisition of territory, into which they designed to carry the institution of slavery. History has placed this remarkable fact beyond all cavil. It is proved by the avowals of Southern members of Congress, in their speeches in both houses, in 1847. It is proved by the mes- sages of Southern governors, the action of Southern Legislatures, and the language of the Southern people generally, assembled in their popular meetings, during the prosecution of the war. The motive of the South was not denied ; it was palpable and undis- guised. Other objects of the war were mentiQiied, but Southern politicians did not pretend that they were controlling, or that the extension of slavery was not the principle which governed them in its prosecution. But what was the conduct of the free States — the aggressive and overbearing North — in respect to this war ? Sir, we gave you our full share of the men and money required for its prosecution. Our Northern members of Congress, generally, united with the South in the acquisition of territory. I do not say they did this for the purpose of extending slavery ; but they did it ; and when, a few years before, our claim to the whole of Oregon

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 23

dwindled down as low as forty-nine degrees — mainly under the influence of Southern counsels, — the North acquiesced. We were willing, both in regard to our difficulty with Great Britain and with Mexico, to be governed somewhat by national considerations, whilst the policy of the South in both these cases was determined by her own sectional interests, that is, by the supposed effects which, in the one case or the other, would be produced upon the institution of slavery. In a war with Mexico our armies could not fail to be triumphant, and our booty must necessarily be territory. This would be adapted to slave labor, and would widen the platform of Southern power. On the other hand, the issue of a war with Great Britain would be different. The South would doubtless be the main point of attack ; and thus the very existence of slavery in its strongholds would be jeoparded. And should even the whole of Oregon be secured, it would only bring into the Union additional free States ; thus adding to the power of the North, instead of the South, as a section. Such, unquestionably, were the considerations which shaped the policy of Southern statesmen, and through theui, the policy of the government itself, in our relations with Mexico and Great Britain. The North, as I have already said, acquiesced in both instances. Did this acquiescence manifest an aggressive spirit toward the South?

In the month of May, 1836, this House adopted a resolution, which excluded from being read or considered " all petitions, me- morials, resolutions, and propositions, relating in any way, or to any extent tvhatever, to the subject of slavery." The substance of this resolution continued in force till 1845. Thus, while the govern- ment was spreading its flag over the peculiar institution in 'our in- tercourse with foreign powers, and whilst slavery in this District and in the Territory of Florida was upheld by the laws of Congress, we were denied the right to mention these grievances on this floor, or to petition for redress. So indulgent and conciliatory were the free States toward the slave power, that a large number of their representatives in Congress united with the slaveholding members in virtually suspending the right of petition and the freedom of speech in this House, for the period of nine years together. Was this a Northern acoression ?

In some of the Northern States, colored people enjoy equal political rights with the whites. In nearly all of them they are regarded as citizens. But they cannot visit South Carolina, Louis- iana, and I believe some three or four other Southern States, with- out being thrown into prison ; and if they are not removed from the

24 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

State by the persons in whose care or employ they came, they are sold into slavery. This is a most palpable violation of the Constitution of the United States, which provides that " the citi- zens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immu- nities of citizens of the several States." And when we send men among you to appeal peaceably to your own tribunals in behalf of such citizens, — men honored by their public standing, and clothed with official authority for their mission, they are driven out of your cities by mob menaces at the risk of their lives. Is this, too, a Northern aggression ?

I pass, in conclusion, to some kindred considerations.

The slave population of the Union in 1790, when the first census wras taken, was about seven hundred thousand ; it has now grown to three millions, covering fifteen States, and more than equals the whole voting population of the Union. This, by the way, surely cannot be Northern encroachment. The population of the United States in 1840 was seventeen millions. The white population of the South was four millions seven hundred and eighty-two thou- sand five hundred and twenty. The number of slaveholders does not appear to be capable of any exact ascertainment, and has been variously estimated at from one hundred thousand to three' hundred thousand. If we take into the account the actual number of slave owners, exclusive of their families, a fair estimate at present would probably be two hundred thousand ; and many of these, doubtless, are minors and women. The white population of the free States in 1840 was nine millions six hundred and fifty-four thousand eight hundred and sixty-five. By comparing the slaveholders with the non-slaveholders of the South, according to their number as here estimated, it will appear that the former constitute only about one twentieth of the white population of the slaveholding States. This is what we call the slave power. This is the force which is to dissolve the Union, and before which Northern men bow down to offer up their homage. These two hundred thousand slave- holders, composed in part of women and minors, lord it over three millions of slaves ; keep in subjection four or five millions of non- slaveholding whites of the South, besides the free blacks ; and at the same time control, at their will, from nine to ten millions of people in the free States, whose representatives tremble and turn pale at the impotent threats of their Southern overseers. Now, bear- ing in mind that the population of the free States is, and generally has been, about double that of the slave States, let us glance at the monopoly which this slave power has secured to itself of the offices

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 25

of the government. This may serve further to illustrate the sub- ject of Northern aggression.

Of the sixty-one years the government has been in operation, the Presidency, with its immense power and patronage, has been filled by slaveholders about forty-nine years, and by non-slavehold- ers only a little more than twelve years. Seven of our Presidents have been slave owners — four not ; and some of these had to give decided assurances to the South in order to be elected. The South has secured the important cabinet offices in the same way. Thus of nineteen Secretaries of State, fourteen have been slaveholders, and only five non-slaveholders. With the exception of the office of Secretary of the Treasury, the South has had more than her share of all the cabinet appointments. The slaveholding States have had the important office of Speaker of this House for more than thirty-eight years, the free States only about twenty-three years. The South has had twelve Speakers, the North only eight. The same inequality has prevailed in the foreign diplomacy of the government. More of our foreign ministers, by about one fourth, have been furnished by the South than the North. Turn to the Judiciary. The Chief Justice has been from the slave States about forty-nine years, and from the free States only twelve years, although much the larger portion of the business of the court origi- nates in the latter. And it is a remarkable fact, that at no period since the formation of the government has the North had a majority on the Supreme Bench. The South has received the appointment of thirteen judges of the court, the North only twelve ; and has, I repeat, always had the majority. Did the time allotted me permit, I might pursue this subject more in detail. It seems, however, un- necessary ; for a distinguished Southern gentleman [Mr. Meade] himself admits, that although the South has been in a numerical minority for fifty years, she " has managed during the greater part of that period to control the destinies of this nation." What more could she ask? Why, even now, whilst the cry of Northern aggression continually meets us, the South has a slaveholding Pres- ident elected by Northern votes, a slaveholding Cabinet, a slave- holding Supreme Court, a slaveholding Speaker of this House, with slaveholding committees in both Houses ; whilst slaveholding influ- ences are unceasingly at work in hushing the anti-slavery agitation, and buying up one after another Northern men, who are as mer- cenary in heart as they are bankrupt in moral principle. Sir, there is truth in the declaration of John Quincy Adams, that the "prop- agation, preservation, and perpetuation of slavery is the vital and animating spirit of the National Government."

26 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

Still, Southern gentlemen read us daily homilies here on the encroachments of the North ; and the threat of disunion is the thunder with which, as usual, we are to be driven from our pur- pose, and frightened into uncomplaining silence. Mr. Chairman, the time has come when representatives from the free States should speak plainly. Shall a blind fear of a dissolution of the Union make us slaves ourselves? The Federal Constitution was ordained, among other things, to secure the blessings of liberty. " The hour has come when we are to adopt or reject the degrading principle, that slavery and freedom are twin-sisters of the Constitution, joined in a Siamese union, one and inseparable ; that our fathers fought to build up a prison-house and a palace as the appropriate wings of the temple of liberty ; that in the flag they rallied under, the Stars were for the whites, and the Stripes for the blacks ; that the North is to have leave for a virtuous prosperity only by maintaining the South in a prosperity dependent on oppression and crime.'' This is the question forced upon us by the South, and it must be met. There can be no such thins as dodging it. If our view of the Constitution and its objects be correct, we have rights under it which the South should not withhold ; if her view is the true one, and slavery is the great concern of this nation, to be upheld and fostered by all its power, then we should understand it at once. Sir, I entertain no such opinion of the government under which we live. I have shown that our fathers entertained no such opin- ion. We mean to stand by the Constitution as they understood it. We only ask our constitutional rights. We simply demand a return of the government to its early policy in relation to slavery. I speak frankly. I am willing to submit to wrongs already in- flicted ; but if further submission be exacted as the price of the Union, I would say to our Southern friends, take the putrescent corpse of slavery into your embrace, and let your contemplated Southern Confederacy encircle it amid the hisses of the civilized world. During the last summer I told the people I now have the honor to represent that I would rather see the breaking up of the Union than the extension of slavery into our Territories either by the action or permission of the government. I reiterate that declaration here. Sir, this is the proper forum on which the South should be met in the discussion of the question of slavery ; and I despise the skulking and cowardly miscreant who, after having obtained his seat on this floor by his anti-slavery pledges, turns politely to the South and tells her that " when I want to talk about slavery I will go home among my own constituents, where

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 27

I have the right to speak upon it."1 Such men have been the curse of the nation. Had Northern politicians resisted the aggres- sions of the South, as it was their duty to do, in the onset, the unhappy crisis in which the country is now placed would have been averted. The great danger to the Union has always been in the North. The South has been much given to bluster, which in itself is harmless, but Northern men have been frightened by it into servility. Here lies the great peril now. I have no fears that the South will sunder the Union, notwithstanding the mad- ness of her politicians. The sober second thought of her people, underlying the froth of her representatives, will be proof against it. But let Northern men continue a little longer to cower before the threats of slaveholders, instead of meeting them with a manly firmness ; let them surrender one after another the rights of the free States, and make merchandise of their honor, until our degra- dation can no longer be concealed by the devices of politicians, and the dissolution of the Union will be inevitable. The disease in the body politic will have taken such deep root as to be incur- able by any other process. He is not the friend, but the real enemy of the Union, who smilingly tells the slaveholders that all is well, and raises the cry of "Peace, peace, when there is no peace." Sir, the contest between slavery and freedom has ripened. To talk of compromise is folly. That medicine has been tried, and has proved worse than the disease it was designed to cure. It is not within the power of Congress to compromise the moral senti- ment of the free States ; and any attempt to do so would only madden and increase the existing excitement, and multiply obsta- cles in the way of any pacific adjustment of the questions in dis- pute. Between slavery and freedom there is and can be no affinity ; nor can all the compromises in the world unite and har- monize what God, by his eternal law, has put asunder.

Mr. Chairman, it has become quite fashionable to denounce the anti-slavery agitation of the North. Gentlemen tell us it is dis- turbing the peace of the country, dividing the nation into " geo- graphical parties," and threatening to destroy the Union. Sir, let me ask at whose door lies the blame for all this?' What are the causes which have given birth to this agitation, and these so-called sectional parties ? The South, as I have already shown, by the help or permission of the North, has controlled the offices of the government and shaped its policy for the last fifty years. Through her agency slavery has been widening its power, and taking deeper 1 An ex-member of Congress.

28 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

and deeper root in the country every hour of that whole period. Instead of an institution barely to be tolerated in a few States, as their own exclusive concern, and that for a time only, it has be- come nationalized, and demands the protection of this government " wherever our flao- floats." It has grown to be the great interest of the Union, and subordinates all other questions to its unholy purposes. It has reversed the original policy of the government, disappointed the hopes and expectations of its founders, and to a great extent frustrated the ends of its formation. And when, after long years of unpardonable forbearance, a portion of the Northern people rise up and demand their just rights, refusing to be the absolute slaves of the South, they are denounced as "agitators," enemies of the Union, the builders up of geographical parties. Sir, I meet these charges, and I say to Southern gentlemen, that they have forced agitation upon us. It is the only alternative left us, unless we submit to be bound by them " in all cases whatso- ever." I know it is offensive to the South. I know that distin- guished gentlemen from that quarter have admitted that Northern agitation has prevented slavery from obtaining a foothold in Cali- fornia. They understand and dread its power. It is for this reason that I would encourage it. Agitation is a necessary fruit, an inevitable consequence of Southern aggression and Northern cowardice ; and slavery propagandists and doughfaces must answer for their own political sins. To charge the friends of freedom in the North with kindling up strife in the land, and thus endanger- ing the Union, is as unjust as to charge the blood shed in our Revo- lution upon the heads of those who counseled resistance to the mother country. Am I told that we should not wound the pride of the South? Sir, on what occasion has she exhibited any great tenderness for the pride of the North ? She has pursued toward us a policy of systematic selfishness from the beginning, uniformly disregarding our most cherished feelings when they have crossed her path. When we ask her respectfully to yield us our rights under the Constitution, wTe are met with browbeating and threats. And are the interests of freedom to be jeoparded over half a con- tinent, in order to avoid wounding the pride of men who thus treat us ? Sir, their pride is not worth saving at such a sacrifice. It is not the pride of principle, of justice, but the pride of^mere arro- gance, pampered into insolence by long indulgence ; and under no circumstances would I yield to it. The history of the world dem- onstrates that slavery, regardless of soil or climate, has existed wherever it has not been interdicted by positive legislation. It

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 29

always establishes itself in the first instance without law, and then suborns the law into its support. Without the aid of any legal sanction, it has at one time or another crept into every portion of the earth that has yet been inhabited. No "law of physical geog- raphy," no " ordinance of nature," has been found sufficient, in- dependent of human enactments, to prevent its spread over the globe. Every consideration, therefore, demands that Congress should exclude it from our Territories. We should thus imitate the example of our fathers by " reenacting the law of God," and at the same time restore their policy in relation to slavery. The North sliould demand this as her absolute right, and insist upon it at whatever hazard. Should the South take offense, let her be offended ; should her pride be wounded, let her own physicians heal it in their own way ; sliould she see fit to dissolve the Union, let her make the attempt, but let the North yield not a single hair's breadth to the further exactions of the slave power.

But suppose, Mr. Chairman, we resolve to compromise : I ask, what are the terms upon which alone the South is willing to meet us ? On this subject we are not left in doubt. We are to allow slavery to continue indefinitely in the District of Columbia ; we are to abandon the Territories of the United States to its inroads ; we are to engage actively in the business of slave-catching under the employ of our Southern masters ; and, finally, we must silence the anti-slavery agitation, obeying their imperious mandate, "Keep- your thoughts to yourselves." This is the very modest demand of the South, and we must allow her to make a compliance with it a qualification for political fellowship, a test of fitness for office, and the only tie which is hereafter to bind her to the free States. With Southern politicians this is the question of questions. It towers above every other consideration. Doughfaces are found only in the Northern States. The Whigs and Democrats of the South, laying aside minor differences, stand shoulder to shoulder in the maintenance of their great interest. In comparison with it, the questions of bank and tariff are not even respectable abstrac- tions. And shall the North be less loyal to freedom than the South is to slavery? Have we no paramount question ? Shall we surrender our political birthright in a quarrel about comparative trifles, or a mere scramble for place and power ? We have the strength to repel the further aggressions of slavery. Shall we waste it by our divisions, instead of declaring in one united voice, and with an inflexible purpose, " Thus far ; no farther ! " I know by experience something of the power of party. I know how

30 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

anxious are Northern Whigs and Democrats to maintain their national party organizations, in the discipline of which they have so long served. I know how repugnant it is to their feelings, when the old questions between them are rapidly losing their sig- nificance, to have newT ones thrust upon them, threatening discord and incurable divisions in their ranks. But should there be no bounds to our devotion to party ? Each of the political organiza- tions to which I have alluded consists of a Northern and Southern division, diametrically opposed to each other on the question of slavery. These divisions must be held together by some common bond of union, and this bond is subserviency to the slave interest. This fact can no longer be concealed. The submission of North- ern politicians to the behests of slavery is openly proclaimed by Southern gentlemen as the sole condition upon which existing party associations can be maintained. Are we prepared for this submission, to seal this bond of union ? We must either do this, or resist like men. The alternatives are presented, and there is no middle ground. We must choose our master; for it is as impossible to serve slavery and freedom at the same time, as to serve God and Mammon. We must ally ourselves to the growing spirit of freedom in the North, which, sooner or later, must be heeded, or we must link our political fortunes to the growing spirit of slavery in the South, which, sooner or later, must be borne down by the powers with which it is at war. We must organize our parties in reference to the increasing anti-slavery feeling of fifteen States of the Union, and ten or twelve millions of people, rein- forced by the sentiment of the civilized world ; or we must turn our backs upon the progress of free principles, in order to propitiate the smiles of an oligarchy of two or three hundred thousand slave- holders. We must sympathize with the spirit of liberty, which is now swelling the heart of Christendom, and causing even despotisms to tremble ; or we must hold no communion with that spirit, and spurn it from our thoughts, lest the dealers in human flesh should be offended, and refuse to aid us in the prosecution of our partisan schemes. Such, I repeat, are the alternatives to which our slave- holding brethren have invited our attention. For one, I am ready to choose between them. I will enter into no " covenant with death." I will agree to no truce with slaveholders so long as thev insist upon their unholy exactions. I will form no alliance with men who foreordain my submission to their will as the tenure of their friendship. And the party, in my judgment, that shall now seek to maintain its unity by yielding to these demands of slavery,

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 31

will dig for itself a political grave from which there will be no resurrection. It may survive for a time ; it may achieve a tem- porary triumph over its adversary; but it will array itself in hostil- ity to the rights of man, sacrifice its integrity and moral influence, and thus perish by its own suicidal hand. Sir, I can acknowledge no allegiance to any such party. Its conventions and caucus arrangements have no power over my action. Not servility to the South, but uncompromising resistance to her further encroach- ments, must determine my party associations. This, I have already said, is the paramount question, upon which all the parties of the North should band themselves together as one man. Most of the questions which have heretofore divided the American people have been settled. Is there any issue now on the subject of a United States Bank ? Experience has shown that this nation can prosper without such an institution. It is not demanded by the voice of the people nor the exigencies of the government. Years ago, it was declared by the highest Whig authority to be an " obsolete idea." .Is there any issue as to distributing the proceeds of the public lands ? It has been swept away by the tide of political events, and the beneficent doctrine of land reform is destined, I trust, at some time not far in the future, to receive the sanction of Congress. Is there any real question at present respecting a pro- tective tariff? Some faint efforts are being made to galvanize this question into life, and drag it from the grave into which it is sink- ing ; but these efforts will be fruitless. I have no belief that this government will return to the old-fashioned Whig policy of high protective duties. The spirit of the age, and the policy of the leading nations of the earth, are tending more and more in the direction of free trade ; whilst the restrictive systems of the past are perishing from the same causes that have originated and are carrying forward other reforms. The philanthropy which is elevat- ing the condition of the toiling million, mitigating the rigors of penal law, and breaking the chains of the slave, is at the same time removing the shackles from the commerce of the world. It is not protection to capital, but protection to man's rights, protection to the hand that labors, that should invoke the action of the govern- ment. It is not protection to American manufactures, but protec- tion to American men, that I would now advocate ; and, like the founders of the government, I would make it the starting point in politics, the great central truth in my political creed, to which questions of mere policy should be subordinate.

" Is the dollar only real ? God, and truth, and right, a dream ? Weighed against your lying ledgers, must our manhood kick the beam ? "

32 THE SLAVERY QUESTION.

Must we blink humanity itself in our loyalty to " regular nomina- tions," or our devotion or opposition to measures of policy that are dead and buried ? The Northern States have declared that Con- gress should prevent the introduction of slavery into the Territories of the government. The Southern States declare that this shall not be done. It is a contest between the two sections of the Union, as to whether slavery or freedom shall establish her altars in those Territories. It is a contest between liberty and despotism. It is not a quarrel about " goat's wool," or a mere punctilio, but a struggle in which great interests and great principles are at stake ; a strug- gle, the issue of which is to determine the weal or woe of millions, and addresses itself not to the judgments only, but to the con- sciences of Northern men. The Free Soil men in Congress desire the application of the ordinance of Jefferson, come what ma}r. in order to maintain their faithfulness to this principle, they have sundered their party allegiance, and for this cause they are branded as " fanatics," and denounced as traitors. The vocabulary of our language is ransacked for words strong enough to express their baseness and infamy as a party, and their depravity and reckless- ness as men. The gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Savage], who addressed the committee on yesterday, has already consigned them to their fate, among the outcasts and offscouring of the earth. The gentleman from Maryland [Mr. McLane] is so brimful of wrath at their iniquities, that he styles them " a pesti- lent set of vipers, that ought in God's name to be destroyed." Sir, it might be well for the honorable gentleman to try that experi- ment. I have yet to learn that Free Soil men have not the same rights in this country and on this floor as slave soil men. I have vet to learn that the doctrine of slavery restriction, which was a virtue in our fathers in 1787, is a crime in their descendants, which should doom them to destruction ; and I have yet to learn that the masses in the free States are not in favor of that doctrine, and will not. stand by it and its advocates to the last hour.

Mr. Chairman, it was my fortune last year, in the congressional district I have the honor to represent, to witness an effort to anni- hilate these " vipers," so heartily detested by the gentleman from Mainland. I would say to him, too, that the project was not set on foot by Democrats, but by Taylor Whig managers. What was the result of this experiment ? Sir, the Democrats made common cause with the Free Soil party, adopted the ordinance of Jefferson as a part of their platform, and thus achieved a triumph over their foe. And judging from such indications as 1 have seen of their

THE SLAVERY QUESTION. 33

present opinions and purposes, these Democrats have not receded, and are not likely to recede, from the principles which they in- dorsed a year ago in their county conventions, and by their political action ; whilst the organs of the Whig party in that same district are now discoursing sweet music to the tune of non-intervention. In 1848 these Whig leaders were for the Proviso against the world. It was their undoubted thunder, which the Free Soil men were feloniously endeavoring to purloin from them. They declared the Whigs to be the only true anti-slavery party. They denounced General Cass as a heartless and unmitigated doughface, for writing his non-intervention Nicholson Letter. Multitudes voted for Gen eral Taylor without pretending that he was in favor of Free Soil, but merely to crush, the non-intervention heresy, and " to beat Cass," who now seems, after all, in a fair way to be canonized as a political saint by these same anti-slavery Whig leaders. Sir, instead of annihilating the Free Soil party, they have been unconsciously playing their own game upon themselves. The rank and file of their party, I trust, will not follow them into the mire of " non- intervention by non-action " with slavery in the Territories. I trust that the great body of the people of all parties in that district will stand firmly upon the platform of freedom, swerving neither to the right nor the left, favoring no further concessions to slavery, and frowning upon the Northern recreant who shall be found doing battle for slaveholders against his own section of the Union.

But however this may be, my own course is clear. I shall take no backward step. I have thrown my fortunes into the scale of freedom, and I am willing to abide the issue. Holding the views I have honestly embraced, reared as I have been in a free State, and representing as I do a constituency of freemen, I trust there is no earthly temptation that could seduce me from the cause I have espoused. And that cause, whatever may for the time betide it or its votaries, will as certainly triumph as that truth is omnipo- tent, or that God governs the world.

"THE HEALING MEASURES."

IN COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE ARMY APPROPRIATION BILL, SEPTEMBER 25, 1850.

[Of "The Healing Measures" of 1850 (as the}' were then called), the Fugitive Slave Bill was by far the most infamous. On the 12th of September it was reached on the Speaker's table, and on motion of Mr. Thompson, of Pennsylvania, the previous question was seconded on its passage ; and thus, without reference to any committee, without even being printed, and with no opportunity whatever for debate, it. was passed. These circumstances called forth several speeches indignantly denouncing this and the other compromise measures, and predicting their utter failure to restore peace to the country. This speech is a specimen.]

Mr. Chairman, — Not having been able to obtain the floor at a more opportune period, I desire to submit a few observations upon the "healing measures" which have finally been carried through Congress. It is with unfeigned reluctance that I enfjaw in any general discussion at this late hour in the session, and in the face of so manifest an anxiety to proceed without delay in completing the business which yet demands our attention ; but when I con- sider the free use which has been made of the gag, in hurrying through this body some of the most important measures of the ses- sion, without any opportunity whatever for debate, to say nothing of the parliamentary adroitness by which the opponents of those measures have been vanquished, I feel in a measure justified in any use which I may see fit to make, under the rules provided for our government, of the hour to which I am entitled.

Before the passage of the Texas Boundary Bill, the assertion was .ao-ain and again made, that those who should vote against it would vote for civil war. It was so declared by the leading organ of the Executive in this city. Gentlemen in the support of the Adminis- tration, and those opposing it on other questions, united in this dec- laration. It went out through the country on the wings of the public press, and was echoed back to the Capitol with the obvious purpose of strengthening the hands of those who could find no other reason for giving the measure their support. Since the passage of the bill the charge has been repeatedly made, that those who voted against it did vote for civil Avar, and the country has been warned to hold them to a solemn accountability for the recklessness of their

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 35

course. Now, sir, I desire to state the grounds on which I felt it my duty to oppose that measure. I certainly do not feel called upon to defend myself against the senseless accusation to which I allude, nor do [ intend that those who make it shall place me in that attitude. I choose rather to be aggressive. I mean to assail this monstrous project, by which the rights of the free States have been sacrificed through the treachery of their representatives ; and I can best accomplish this purpose by referring, in the first place, to the reasons which governed my own action.

I hold that, by the bill under consideration, we surrender to Texas nearly one hundred thousand square miles of territory, to which she has no more right than I have to the property of my neighbor. Her want of title I regard as " clear and unquestion- able." I do not mean at this time to enter upon the discussion of the question, and I am fully aware of the wide differences of opin- ion which prevail in regard to it. I only state my own judgment, deliberately formed, after the best examination I have been able to give the subject. In addition to this large gift of territory, the bill obliges us to pay Texas ten millions of money, to which she has no better claim, as I conceive, than she has to the land. All this we yield to her, without any right on her part to demand it, or any merit in virtue of which she can claim it as a favor at the hands of the United States. The territory which she surrenders, and for which we pay her these ten millions, is situated about five hundred miles from the settled portions of the State, and is separated from them by vast wastes of uninhabitable and sterile country. There is no part of it of any value which is not already taken up by the old grants of the Spanish Government, and the vacant lands are not worth even the expense of surveying them. Besides, the country -is inhabited exclusively by Indians, Mexicans, and adven- turers from other States, all of whom are aliens to Texas in feelinc, and strangers to her jurisdiction. Such are the admitted facts, as given by a leading journal of the State. But I have not presented the worst feature in the bill. This large surrender of land and money, in itself considered, is not necessarily criminal. The nation is rich, and it may bestow its treasures without incurring any par- ticular guilt, except that of folly or prodigality. What I chiefly complain of is, that the land given to Texas by this bill is trans- formed from free territory into the soil of a slaveholding State. It is neither more nor less than the extension of slavery by an act of Congress. When the friends of the measure asked me to support it, they asked me to aid by my vote in spreading this vile system

36 "THE HEALING MEASURES."

over these millions of free acres, thus dooming botli the white and black race who may people them, perhaps for ages to come, to the innumerable woes which follow in its train. Mr. Chairman, not for all the land which this nation has acquired from Mexico by the sword of conquest, with all its glittering gold included ; not for all the offices and honors with which this government has the power to reward a traitor to freedom, would I steep my conscience in the guilt, the infamy, of planting on free soil this hell-born traffic in the bodies and souls of men, or call down upon me the blistering curses of my constituents, by so base and ignominious a betrayal of the trust which they have committed to my hands. No threat of civil war, no dread of consequences, no cowardly alarm aroused by the studied bluster of Texan slaveholders, could induce me thus to join hands with the oppressor, and wage war upon humanity itself.

But the bill has passed. Had there been votes enough to defeat it, it is possible that civil war would have followed, though I think it in the highest degree improbable. It is likewise possible that such a war might have produced consequences fatal to the perpet- uity of this Union. For aught I know, the passage of the bill may be attended with the same ultimate results. I cannot pretend to decide such questions with certainty, because Providence has not vouchsafed to me the gift of foreknowledge. The question of duty, and the consequences resulting from its performance, are often en- tirely distinct; the former maybe perfectly clear, whilst the latter may be impalpable or unknown. But the moral sense of every man, if not perverted, will tell him plainly that slavery is an out- rage upon humanity, and a crime against God ; and that he cannot justify himself in fastening it upon his fellow-men, in the hope of thereby averting a greater evil. It is true that in obscure or doubtful cases we may sometimes consider the supposed conse- quences of an act in determining upon its performance ; but we are never justified in perpetrating a deed that is palpably wicked, on the pretense that the end we design to accomplish will sanctify the means we employ. I have sufficient faith in the moral govern- ment of the world to believe that no right act is ever unattended, sooner or later, with an appropriate result ; whilst every wrong deed carries with it its own unfailing retribution. To act upon any other principle is practical atheism.

Mr. Chairman, I deprecate war as much as any gentleman on this floor. I claim to be an humble advocate of the great peace movement of the age. I stand opposed to the war spirit and the

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 37

war mania in all their popular manifestations, and quite as decid- edly, I trust, as any friend of the Texas Boundary Bill. And yet I will not deny that I think war sometimes necessary. I must say, too, that I believe there are things more to be dreaded. The be- trayal of sacred trusts is worse than war ; shrinking from a just responsibility, when necessaiy to encounter it, is worse than war ; the extension of slavery by the Federal Government, and with the approval of the nation, I would pronounce worse than war; and, to be more specific, war is less to be deplored than the dastardly and craven spirit which would prompt the representatives of twenty millions of people to cower and turn pale at the bandit threats of Texan slaveholders, and give them millions of acres and millions of gold as a peace-offering to the vandal spirit of slave holding aggres- sion. Sir, I can conceive of nothing more pitiably abject and humiliating than this. Why, who are these Texans who lately told this government that the time for argument had passed, and dictated to the United States the terms upon which their disputed boundary should be settled, under a menace of war ? Have North- ern gentlemen forgotten their history ? Texas was torn from the Mexican confederacy by citizens of the United States, who, in violation of their allegiance to their own country, raised the stand- ard of revolt against Mexican authority to which they had volun- tarily become subject. They found it a free province, but subjected it to the curse of American slavery ; and this was one of the main purposes of its settlement and conquest by our citizens. The Gov- ernment of the United States, moved and instigated by the same unholy lust for slavery, finally sought to sanctify this " robbery of a realm " by incorporating it into the Union. Annexation was the primary cause of the war with Mexico, whilst its immediate cause related to the very question of boundary which Congress has been laboring to adjust. Texas, by means of this war, has cost this government more than one hundred millions of money.

These are the prominent facts of her history ; and yet we are now called on to give her ten millions of dollars besides, and an immense territorj' to which she had not even the shadow of a title at the beginning of the contest with Mexico, because she threatens us with her military power if we refuse to yield to her insolent de- mands. Yes, Texas threatens ! With a voting population of only about thirty thousand, bankrupt in the means of raising a military force, or even paying her just debts, unable to protect herself against the savage tribes that infest her borders, and begging the United States to send a force to her rescue, she yet threatens to

38 "THE HEALING MEASURES."

raise an army and maintain it against the National Government ! Can anything be more preposterous? And yet I am charged with voting for civil war, because, under such circumstances, I am not willing to surrender to Texas the unquestionable rights of this government, for the purpose of buying her friendship.

Sir, the time will come, and I believe it draws nigh already, when the country will pronounce a just verdict upon those men who deny to Texas the right to a single dollar of the money, or a single foot of the land we have given her, and yet supported this bill, " with all its provisions, to the fullest extent," on the cowardly pretext of averting the calamities of wTar. I have no censure to cast upon those, if there be any such, who voted for the bill in the honest belief that Texas owned the whole of the disputed territory up to the Rio Grande, and that the money we have given her is a fair compensation for the surrender she has made. They acted in accordance with their judgment. But I despise the driveling, servile, mean-spirited policy which proclaims in one breath that Texas is without the semblance of a right to the territory for which she threatens us with war, thereby putting her in the attitude of the robber seeking to despoil us by force of property which does not belong to her, and in the next breath declares, that sooner than encounter her freebooting governor and his gang, the United States will cram their pockets with gold, and surrender to slaveholding rapacitv fully one half of our possessions lying on the east side of the Rio Grande.

It is not alone to the cowardice of such a policy that I object. Courage, considered apart from other qualities, stands the lowest on the list of virtues, if indeed it be a virtue. It is often found in alliance with the worst passions. In most men it pertains rather to the organization of the body than to the character. The high- wayman and the pirate often possess it in the highest degree. No evidence of character is more equivocal than that of mere physical courage ; and therefore I will not pronounce any har&h judgment upon those who have quailed before the military power of Texas. Their alarm is doubtless the result of a constitutional infirmity over which they have no control ; but I cannot justify this dread of Texan powder when I see it conjoined to what seems to me moral cowardice, in the support of a measure which curses with the blight of slavery soil enough for two States larger than that of In- diana. Sir, I asperse no man's motives, and I impeach no man's patriotism ; but when gentlemen charge me with voting for civil war, I point them, and I point the country, to the vile panacea by

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 39

which they have sought to avert it ; and I ask the people to judge whether the danger of a war with Texas was so imminent, or the mischiefs to be apprehended from it so incalculable, as to justify the monstrous remedy which has been resorted to by Congress? I am ready to meet the responsibility involved in the votes I have given, and to abide by the judgment which the country may pronounce upon the miserable and flimsy plea, that the peace of the country demanded of Northern representatives the sacrifices they have made. Sir, had we passed a law giving to Texas only one half the land and money she has received, she would have accepted it with gladness. It is folly, it is madness, to suppose that that State, fee- ble, bankrupt, powerless, as she is, would have undertaken to force the National Government into submission. Had she done so, the Constitution defines the punishment of treason ; and it would be equal folly to suppose that the federal arm would not have been strong enough to maintain the supremacy of the laws of the Union against the arrant project of Texan nullification. The peace of the country is scarcely worth maintaining, if civil war, clothed in all the horrors with which it has been contemplated, could arise from any such cause, and spread itself over these States. I will only add, that these views are corroborated by the recent action of Texas herself, her Legislature having indefinitely postponed the warlike gasconade of Governor Bell.

Mr. Chairman, the territorial bills for the government of New Mexico and Utah contain no prohibition against the introduction of slavery ; on the contrary, they seem to imply its legality in those territories, by the clause providing for the admission of additional slaveholding States. I beg the indulgence of the committee in a few observations which I desire to offer upon this subject.

On another occasion I have shown that the founders of the gov- ernment had no expectation that the boundaries of the United States, as established by the Treaty of 1788, would ever be enlarged ; that they interdicted the establishment of slavery in all the territory belonging to the government at the time of its formation ; that slavery, even in the States in which it then existed, was rapidly dwindling under the weight of its acknowledged evils : that both the statesmen and the people of that clay, instead of looking for- ward to its diffusion over new regions, confident!}' expected it to be swept from the country at no very distant period ; and finally, that the compromises on the subject of slavery to wdiich the Northern States assented, were formed in reference to these facts, and must be interpreted in the light which they reflect upon our path from

40 "THE HEALING MEASURES."

that early period. These facts entered into, and formed a part of, the understanding and agreement between the Northern and South- ern States, as embodied in the Federal Constitution. I do not mean to enlarge upon them now, vindicated as they are by the truth of history ; but I reiterate them here, as worthy of the consid- eration of those who seem bent on a total disregard of the principles and policy of the government at its beginning. Sir, the doctrine of " No more slave States, and no slave territory," was the doc- trine of the founders of the Republic. The clause on the subject of slave representation, was only applicable to slavery in the then slaveholding States ; and even there it was not undei'stood as a per- petual, but a temporary covenant. Yet now, after the government for the last fifty years has been drifting from its early landmarks, and violating the faith upon which the federal compact was formed, we not only repudiate the Jeffersonian policy of excluding slavery from our Territories, but, in framing governments for them, we ex- pressly stipulate that slaveholding States may be formed out of them and admitted into the Union if they shall demand it. We not only abandon the faith of our fathers, but we seem anxious to make our apostasy manifest, that all the world may behold it. So long has the slave power guided the ship of State, that we are de- termined that freedom shall either silently submit to its pilotage or be cast into the sea. What was politically orthodox in 1787, ac- cording to the authority of " the Fathers," is the rankest heresy in 1850.

My honorable colleague [Mr. Gorman] argued the other day that to insist on the prohibition of slavery in New Mexico and Utah by act of Congress, is to deny the capacity of the people for self-government. He says his motto is, to " trust the people with political power ; " that he wants the " free-soil abolition agitators " either to " affirm or deny the capacity of the people for self-govern- ment ; " and he declares that " there is no other issue in the whole principle of the Wilmot Proviso but this one." Sir, I am willing to go before the country on the issue which he tenders. I am for " trusting the people " of those territories with the general right to establish their own municipal regulations ; but I am not willing that one portion of them shall strip another portion of their human- ity by converting them into beasts of burden and articles of mer- chandise. That is not the sort of Democracy I believe in. I have no faith in any such " self-government." I am not willing to " trust the people " of our Territories " with political power " for any such purpose, and neither do thev demand it at the hands of

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 41

Congress. It was not the right of a people to make slaves of each other, but the denial of this right, in defense of which the War of our Revolution was waged. If, besides the Declaration of Inde- pendence, there is one thing in the public career of Mr. Jefferson which above all others adds lustre to his character and gives immor- tality to his fame, it is his paternity of the celebrated ordinance by which that institution branded by Wesley as " the sum of all vil- lainies," was, forever excluded from the territory northwest of the Ohio. He was unwilling to " trust the people " of that region with the power to fasten upon it so unmitigated a curse, and posterity has already vindicated his wisdom. Millions will hereafter rise up and call him blessed for the very deed which, according to my col- league, was equivalent to a denial of the capacity of the people to govern themselves. Sir, gentlemen may denounce the Wilmot Proviso, and stigmatize its advocates as the enemies of popular sov- ereignty ; but with the democracy of Jefferson and the patriots of 1787 to sustain me, I am willing to " trust the people " to decide between us.

My honorable colleague has discovered that the Wilmot Proviso was " conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity." Does he understand the import of the term ? Does he not know that it means simply the right of a whole people, whether of a State or Territory, to the common blessing of freedom ? In its application to our Territories, the Wilmot Proviso is the Declaration of Inde- pendence embodied in a fundamental law for their government. Our fathers declared that " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness," are among the inalienable rights of men, and that " govern- ments are instituted to (secure these rights, deriving their just pow- ers from the consent of the governed." Make these truths opera- tive in the Territories of the government, by the competent law- making power, and you have the Wilmot Proviso, call it by what- ever name you choose. Instead of being " conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity," it was conceived in the brains of such patriots as Sir Harry Vane and Algernon Sydney, in the time of the English Commonwealth, and finally "brought forth" in the glorious fruits of our own Revolution in 177b\ It is the very life-blood of our freedom ; and although for the present its friends are overpow- ered, they should stand by it, and maintain it, so long as they retain their faith in the rights of man and the duty of government to pro- vide guards for their security. And I desire to say, too, that did I feel as confident as some gentlemen profess to feel, that slavery, in any event, will not obtain a foothold in our Territories, I would

42 "THE HEALING MEASURES."

still insist on the Proviso, as a wholesome and needful reassertion, in the present crisis, of the principles on which the government was founded and was designed to be administered, — as a means of re- storing it to its early policy, and animating it anew with the breath of freedom which bore our fathers through their conflict, and made us an independent nation. It is peculiarly an American principle, and devotion to it should be as honorable to an American citizen as his abandonment of it should be disgraceful. And if there is one circumstance connected with my humble service in the present Congress to which, in after years, I shall look back with pleasure and with pride, it is, that in the midst of the false lights and false alarms and seductive influences by which the ranks of freedom have been thinned and the policy of Jefferson trampled under foot, I insisted to the last on the duty of Congress to protect our infant Territories from the inroads of slavery by positive law.

Passing from this topic, I proceed to notice briefly the Fugitive Slave Bill which recently passed this body and is now the law of the land. By the Act of 1793, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, the slaveholder may pursue his fugitive into the free States, and take him, either with or without legal process. If he sees fit to sue out a warrant, he must make his complaint before a federal officer, and he may have the aid of the federal power in accom- plishing his purpose. The States are not bound to assist him. They may not pass laws to discharge the fugitive from his service, or to prevent his recapture ; and this prohibition defines their whole duty under the Constitution. If any citizen of a free State is found guilty of aiding or abetting in the escape of a fugitive, or of obstructing his recapture, or of harboring or concealing him, he is liable to pay five hundred dollars, besides damages in a civil action equal to the value of the fugitive. This, in brief, is the substance, and these are the provisions of the act. Now, sir, I am willing to abide by this law thus expounded, and so, I believe, are my con- stituents. They mean to remain passive as between the slaveholder and his victim ; and this, in all conscience, is enough to ask at the hands of Christian men. It is all they mean to perform. I do not believe they will go one tithe of a hair beyond it, in obedience to any law of Congress, or to avoid any penalties which it may pre- scribe.

The law recently enacted empowers the circuit courts of the United States to appoint an indefinite number of commissioners within their respective circuits, whose duty it shall be, on applica- tion, to issue their warrants for the arrest of the fugitive, and to

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 43

hear and determine in a summary way the complaint of the claim- ant. It is made the duty of the marshal within his district to re- ceive and execute any warrant that may be delivered to him for that purpose ; and if he fails to do so he is liable to a fine of $1,000. If, after the arrest of the supposed fugitive, he shall escape, either with or without the assent of the marshal, the latter shall be liable on his official bond to pay the claimant the value of the fugitive thus escaping. In order to facilitate the execution of these pro- visions, it is further provided, that said commissioners may appoint an indefinite number of auxiliaries within their respective counties, whose duty it shall be to execute such process as shall be delivered to them, and who shall have the power to summon the posse comi- tatus to their assistance. It is likewise enjoined upon " all good citizens " to aid in the capture of the fugitive when thus called upon. For obstructing his arrest, or rescuing or attempting to res- cue him from his claimant, or aiding or abetting in his escape, or for harboring or concealing him, any person is liable to pay a fine not exceeding $1,000, and to be imprisoned not exceeding six months ; and shall, moreover, forfeit and pay to the claimant $1,000 for each slave so lost. The case between the claimant and the fugitive is to be heard and determined in a summary manner, on the ex-jjarte affidavit of the former, and, of course, without a trial by jury; thus taking it for granted that the party claimed is necessarily a fugitive slave, and jeoparding the liberty of our own citizens. After the certificate of the commissioner is granted, which is made final and conclusive upon all magistrates and courts, if the claimant will make oath that he has reason to fear the fugitive will be res- cued from him before he can be taken from the State, the officer who made the arrest shall take him again into his custody, and employ such force as may be thought necessary to remove him to the State from whence he fled ; and all the expenses of this pro- ceeding are to be paid out of the treasury of the United States.

These are the material provisions of the bill ; and I must say that a tissue of more heartless and cold-blooded enactments never dis- graced the legislation of a civilized people. On the one hand, every possible guard is thrown around the rights of the slaveholder, as if his institution had the stamp of divinity upon it, and must be cher- ished and fostered as the nation's life ; whilst on the other hand, the way of the poor fugitive, whose only crime is a desire to be free, is not only so hedged about with nets and snares as to leave him utterly without hope, but at the same time to expose the free colored man of the North to any Southern land-pirate who may

44 "THE HEALING MEASURES."

seize him as his prey. Not satisfied with the Act of 1793* it dupli- cates its penalties ; not content with the aid of the federal judiciary, it calls into the service of slavery legions of officers exercising con- current judicial functions, whose sole business is the hired service of slaveholders ; not content with compelling the North to surrender the fugitive, it taxes our people with the expense of conveying him to the State from whence he fled ; not content with all this unrighteous help, it commands the citizens of the free States to join in the hellish employment of capturing runaway slaves and sending them back to hopeless bondage and despair. Mr. Chairman, I tell these Southern gentlemen and their Northern brethren who have passed this bill, that for one, I would resist the execution of this latter provision, if need be, at the peril of my life. I am sure that my constituents will resist it. I repeat what I said on a former occasion, that there is no earthly power that can induce us thus to take sides with the oppressor. If I believed the people I represent were base enough to become the miserable flunkies of a God-for- saken Southern slave-hunter by joining him or his constables in the blood-hound chase of a panting slave, I would scorn to hold a seat on this floor by their suffrages, and would denounce them as fit sub- jects themselves for the lash of the slave-driver. Sir, they will do no such thing, and I give notice now to our Southern brethren that their newly-vamped fugitive bill cannot be executed in that portion of Indiana which I have the honor to represent. The moral sense of our people will revolt at its provisions and set them at defiance, while the man who shall attempt to enforce them will cover him- self with the infamy which belongs to the trade of a pirate. This is my judgment; and if Southern gentlemen think I am mistaken, the question between us may easily be tested. Slaves sometimes come among us from the South, and they will continue to do so ; and I should like to ascertain the strength of this law when op- posed by a public sentiment inveterately hostile to its provisions. I would like to know who will make himself the detestable scull- ion of slaveholders by accepting the office of fugitive slave commis- sioner in the county in which I reside. I should like to know who in that county will consent to act as his constable and bailiff; and when they summon the ''posse " to aid them in running down and reclaiming a slave I should like to know who will obey the sum- mons. There may be jjortions of Indiana where this law would be executed " with alacrity." Indeed, if I were to judge from what I have seen and heard on this floor, I could not doubt that such is the fact. For the honor of my native State I hope the evidence

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 45

to which I allude is deceptive. I will not believe, without the strongest proof, that this law will find favor with the people in any section of the State ; but if I am misled by the charity of my judg- ment I can only repeat that the Fourth Congressional District be- longs, I am sure, to quite a different stage of civilization.

The circumstances under which this law has been passed render it peculiarly degrading to the free States. It is adding insult to injury. When the free colored citizens of the North visit the ports of South Carolina, Louisiana, and some four or five other South- ern States, they are dragged from the vessels on which they are brought, and without any just cause whatever thrown into prison. If, when these vessels depart, they are not removed, and all costs paid by the persons in whose care or employ they came, they are sold into perpetual slavei'y. That this is a most shameless outrage upon the rights of Northern freemen, as well as a palpable violation of the Constitution of the United States, no sane man can deny. We have sent men to the Southern States to remonstrate, in the most respectful terms, against the laws by which these pro- ceedings are authorized, and to appeal peaceably to their own tribu- nals in order to test their constitutionality ; and our agents, thus deputed, have been driven by mob-violence from the country. Gentlemen from the South take fire at the bare mention of these grievances, and treat our complaints with scorn and derision. These police regulations, they tell us, are absolutely demanded by the security of their institutions, and our only alternative is sub- mission at all hazards. But slaveholding insolence does not stop here. Our colored citizens are not only seized on board our mer- chant vessels in Southern ports and sold into bondage, but they are seized on our own soil, and our police regulations, designed to se- cure the freedom of our people, are set at defiance. Police regu- lations in favor of slavery are sacred, and to be enforced at any cost to the non-slaveholding States ; whilst similar regulations in favor of freedom are but so many aggressions upon Southern rights, and therefore to be totally disregarded. And yet, under these circumstances, we have witnessed the humiliating spectacle of Northern Representatives uniting with the South in fastening this law, with all its infamous provisions, upon the people of the free States, in order to restore " concord " with our long-suffering Southern brethren, and heal the wounds of the nation ! Sir, con- cord is not the offspring of injustice and wrong. Submission to outrage cannot restore permanent peace. Discord, incurable, Avith all its ills, will hold empire in the land, until this foul blot upon our

46 « THE HEALING MEASURES."

legislation shall be wiped out. Repeal must be the fixed resolve of the non-slaveholding States, and the people of the South should distinctly understand that there can be no harmony with slave- holders until that resolve is consummated.

The outrage of such a measure, particularly in view of the cir- cumstances I have named, is heightened by the manner in which it was carried through this body. No opportunity whatever* was given to its opponents to examine or discuss its provisions. It passed the Senate only a few days before its passage here, after various amendments ; and when we were called on to vote upon it, I do not believe that ten of those Northern gentlemen who sup- ported it had looked into its provisions with any care, or knew what the bill contained. Although one of the most important measures of the session, it was neither printed so that members could examine it, nor referred to the Committee of the Whole. Under the operation of the gag it became a law; and the large vote it received seems to have been given because it was called a fugitive slave bill, and was understood to be included in the " cen- eral scheme of pacification," — a part of the bargain made by the high contracting parties. Such, in fact, were the reasons urged by Southern members why Northern ones should support it, whilst the out-and-out doughfaces acknowledged that good faith required them to do so.

Mr. Chairman, this memorable session of the Thirty-first Con- gress is rapidly hastening to a close. The people will judge whether it will hereafter be famous or infamous by reason of its leading measures. The Texas Boundary Bill, which so shamefully compro- mises Northern honor whilst it so completely gluts the demands of slavery, has become a law. The Wilmot Proviso has been sacri- ficed, and we are told that " its dead carcass has been carried to its unhallowed grave ; " whilst the faith of the nation has been plighted to the South, so far as Congress has the power to do so, that addi- tional slaveholding States may be admitted into the Union from the Territories for which governments have been provided. The Fugi- tive Slave Bill has been passed, which perils the freedom of every colored man in the North, and makes every white citizen of the free States a cons' able and jail-keeper for Southern slaveholders. These are the fruits of the protracted and unparalleled struggle which we have witnessed in both houses during the present season. These measures have been brought forth after a congressional in- cubation of more than nine months, to the great joy alike of poli- ticians and Texas bond-holders. These are the " healing measures "

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 47

which are to dry up the " gaping wounds " that have threatened to bleed the nation to death. Harmony and concord, we are told, will now resume their authority in this distracted land. " The country is safe," " The Union is saved," " Civil war is averted," whilst it is announced, with equal joy and the firing of one hun- dred guns in this city, that " agitation " is ended and the "fanatics " no longer in the land of the living.

Sir, let not the slaveholder nor the slaveholder's friend be de- ceived by the delusive hope that harmony is now to be restored between the two sections of the Union. The day of its restoration has been put far distant in the triumph of the very measures by which it was sought to hasten its advent. As I have already ob- served, harmony, permanent peace, cannot result from the triumph of wrong, unless the world is governed by demons. The funda- mental principle, the grand idea on which our government was founded, is Freedom, the sacredness of Human Rights ; and just in proportion as its policy has departed from this idea and sought to build up an opposing element, an alien and hostile interest, just in that same proportion has it sown the seeds of discord and weakness in the nation. Concessions to slavery have produced all the " agitation " and all the mischiefs by which the govern- ment is embarrassed. It is worse than folly, it is wickedness, to strive for lasting harmony in this great nation in any other way than by harmonizing its policy with the thought which gave it birth. It has been said truly, that slavery becomes more hideous in this country than in any other, by its contrast with our free in- stitutions. " It is deformity married to beauty ; it is as if a flame from hell were to burst forth in the regions of the blessed." " Can the liberties of a nation," said Mr. Jefferson, " be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God ? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever." And is it possible, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to heal the wounds of the country and save the Union by removing further and further " from the minds of the people the only firm basis of our liberties," " a conviction that they are the gift of God?" Is the salvation of the Union to be accom- plished by feeding and pampering an institution which in 178-1 made Jefferson "tremble?" The people of the South contend that slavery is a blessing, to be diffused and perpetuated for its own sake. They do not acknowledge it as an evil, which they continue

48 "THE HEALING MEASURES.*'

among them on account of the difficulty of escaping from it ; but they cling to it from choice, through the love of it, and desire to spread the curse over the country. And they are the propagan- dists of their opinions. By assuming this ground they array them- selves in hostility to the moral sense of the civilized world. They forfeit all just right to be regarded as a Christian community. To such a people the very atmosphere of Christendom is poison. And can concord be restored between them and the North by subjecting the National Government to their policy ? " Such a people," says a gifted writer, " should studiously keep itself from communion with the free part of the country. It should suffer no railroad from that section to cross its borders. It should block up intercourse with us by sea and land. Still more : it should abjure connection with the whole civilized world ; for from every country it would be in- vaded by an influence hostile to slavery. It should borrow the code of the Dictator of Paraguay, and seal itself hermetically against the infectious books, opinions, and visits of foreigners." In this way it is possible that agitation might be avoided ; but so long as two hundred thousand slaveholders keep in bondage three millions of their fellow-beings, and not only demand the control of the gov- ernment, but that the moral world shall stand still for their particu- lar accommodation, so long will the spirit of freedom wage war upon their pretensions. In the very nature of things, slavery and freedom are the irreconcilable foes of each other ; and therefore their con- flicts cannot cease until Justice shall assert her supremacy, in the overthrow of the former. " The world is against it, and the world's Maker." Its doom is sealed by the operation of a law as certain and as inevitable as that of gravitation.

You might as well attempt to reverse the current of the Missis- sippi, or change a decree of fate, as to attempt by an act of Con- gress to control those moral forces by which American slavery shall perish, or to restore harmony to the country by giving up the government to its unbridled sway. The suppression of agita- tion in the non-slaveholdino; States will not and cannot follow the " peace measures " recently adopted. The alleged death of the Wilmot Proviso will only prove the death of those who sought to kill it, whilst its advocates will multiply in every portion of the North. The covenant for the admission of additional slave States will be repudiated, whilst a renewed and constantly increasing agi- tation will spring up in behalf of the doctrine of " No more slave States." The outrage of surrendering free soil to Texan slavery cannot fail to be followed by the same results, and just as naturally

"THE HEALING MEASURES." 49

as fuel feeds the flame which consumes it. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill will open a fresh wound in the North, and it will continue to bleed just as long as the law stands unrepealed. The existence of slavery in the capital of the Republic, upheld by the laws of Congress, must of itself keep alive an agitation which will be swelled with the continuance of the evil. Sir, these questions are no longer within the control of politicians. Party discipline, presidential nominations, and the spoils of office, cannot stifle the free utterance of the people respecting the great struggle now going on between the free spirit of the North and a domineering oligarchy in the South. Gentlemen may quarrel about Pennsyl- vania iron, and New England manufactures, river and harbor im- provements, and the best disposition of the public lands ; but the question which more than all others comes home to the bosoms of men is, whether slavery or freedom shall have the ascendency in this government. " I never would have drawn my sword in de- fense of America," said General Lafayette, "if I had thought that I was thereby founding a land of slaves." Here, sir, lies the great question, and it must be met. Neither acts of Congress nor the devices of partisans can postpone or evade it. It will have itself answered. I am aware that it involves the bread and butter of whole hosts of politicians ; and I do not marvel at their attempts to escape it, to smother it, to hide it from the eyes of the people, and to dam up the moral tide which is forcing it upon them. Neither do I marvel at their firing of guns and bacchanalian liba- tions over " the dead body of the Wilmot." Such labors and rejoic- ings are by no means unnatural ; but they will be followed by dis- appointment. It is in vain to expect peace by continued concessions to an institution which is becoming every hour more and more a stigma upon the nation, and which instead of seeking new conquests and new life should be preparing itself with grave-clothes for a de- cent exit from the world ; concessions revolting to the humanity, the conscientious convictions, the religion and patriotism of the free States. When the action of the Federal Government shall be entirely withdrawn from the support of slavery, and the States in which it exists shall be content with the protection which their own laws shall afford, then agitation may cease. Sooner than that it cannot, and it ought not. 4

THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JANUARY 29, 1851.

[The doctrines of this speech, now so generally accepted, found very little favor in Congress when it was delivered. " Abolitionism " itself was scarcely more odious, while the few men who advocated the homestead policy were branded as " agrarians," '' revolutionists," and " levelers." Only eleven years later, however, the Homestead Bill became a law, and its wisdom and beneficence have already been fully vindicated. Its single radical fault was the lack of a provision forbidding the sale of the public lands in large bodies to non-residents for speculative purposes ; and for this supple- mental enactment Mr. Julian has labored zealously for years.]

Mr. Speaker, — The anxiety I feel for the success of the meas- ure now before us, and its great importance, as I conceive, to the whole country, have induced me to beg the indulgence of the House in a brief statement of the reasons which urge me to give it my support. I do this the more willingly, because there has been a manifest disposition here, during the whole of the session, to suppress entirely the discussion of this bill, and at the same time, by parliamentary expedients, to avoid any direct action upon it. It seems to be troublesome to gentlemen. Many who are opposed to its principles appear to be haunted by the suspicion that the people are for it, and hence they will not vote directly against it. They prefer not to face it in any way. The proceedings on yesterday prove this. The House then refused to lay the bill on the table ; but immediately afterwards, its reference to the Com- mittee of the Whole, which was substantially equivalent, was car- ried by a large majority. There was an opportunity of evading the responsibility of a direct vote, and of accomplishing, by indi- rection, what gentlemen did not dare do by their open and in- dependent action. I refer to these facts because I wish them to go before the people. I desire the country to understand the action of this body, in reference to the question under discussion.

Our present land system was established by act of Congress as far back as the year 1785. From that time to the 80th of last September the government has sold one hundred and two millions four hundred and eight thousand six hundred and forty acres. Within the same period it has donated about fifty millions of acres

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 51

for the purposes of education, for internal improvements, for the benefit of private individuals and companies, and for military ser- vices. This calculation does not include the land granted by the Mexican Bounty Law of 1847, which has not yet spent its force, and which will exhaust from twelve to fifteen millions of acres. The Bounty Law of 1850 will subtract from the public domain the further sum of probably about fifty millions of acres. Besides all this, there were very large grants of land made at the last session of Congress for internal improvements ; and there are at this time not less than sixty bills before us asking donations of land, larger or smaller, for various public and private purposes. Should the government, however, pause at the point we have now reached in the prosecution of our land policy, there will still remain, after deducting the sales and grants I have mentioned, the enormous sum of about fourteen hundred millions of acres. The manage- ment of this vast fund is devolved by the Constitution upon Con- gress, and its just disposition presents one of the gravest questions ever brought before the national legislature. The bill under con- sideration contemplates a radical change in the policy pursued by the government from its foundation to the present time. It aban- dons the idea of holding the public domain as a source of revenue ; it abandons, at the same time, the policy of frittering it away by grants to the States or to chartered companies for special and local objects ; and it makes it free, in limited portions, to actual settlers, on condition of occupancy and improvement. This, in my judg- ment, is the wisest appropriation of the public lands within the power of Congress to make, whether viewed in the light of econ- omy, or the brighter light of humanity and justice.

I advocate the freedom of our public domain, in the first place, on the broad ground of natural right. I go back to first princi- ples ; and holding it to be wrong for governments to make mer- chandise of the earth, I would have this fundamental truth recog- nized by Congress in devising measures for the settlement and improvement of our vacant territory. I am no believer in the doc- trines of Agrarianism, or Socialism, as these terms are generally understood. The friends of land reform claim no right to interfere with the laws of property of the several States, or the vested rights of their citizens. They advocate no leveling policy, designed to strip the rich of their possessions by any sudden act of legislation. They simply demand that, in laying the foundations of empire in the yet unpeopled regions of the great West, Congress shall give its sanction to the natural right of the landless citizen of the

52 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

country to a home upon its soil. The earth was designed by its Maker for the nourishment and support of man. The free and unbought occupancy of it belonged, originally, to the people, and the cultivation of it was the legitimate price of its fruits. This is the doctrine of nature, confirmed by the teachings of the Bible. In the first peopling of the earth, it was as free to all its inhabitants as the sunlight and the air ; and every man has, by nature, as per- fect a right to a reasonable portion of it, upon which to subsist, as he has to inflate his lungs with the atmosphere which surrounds it, or to drink of the waters which pass over its surface. This right is as inalienable, as emphatically God-given, as the right to liberty or life ; and government, when it deprives him of it, independent of his own act, is guilty of a wanton usurpation of power, a fla- grant abuse of its trust. In founding States, and rearing the social fabric, these principles should always have been recognized. Every man, indeed, on entering into a state of society, and partaking of its advantages, must necessarily submit the natural right of which I speak (as he must every other) to such regulations as may be established for the general good; yet it can never be understood that he has renounced it altogether, save by his own alienation or forfeiture. It attaches to him, and inheres in him, in virtue of his humanity, and should be sacredly guarded as one of those funda- mental rights to secure which " governments are instituted among men."'

The justness of this reasoning must be manifest to any one who will give the subject his attention. Man, we say, has a natural right to life. What are we to understand by this ? Surely, it will not be contended that it must be construed strictly, as a mere right to breathe, looking no farther, and keeping out of view the great purpose of existence. The right to life implies what the law books call a " right of way " to its enjoyment. It carries necessarily with it the right to the means of living, including not only the elements of light, air, fire, and water, but land also. Without this man could have no habitation to shelter him from the elements, nor raiment to cover and protect his body, nor food to sustain life. These means of living are not only necessary, but absolutely in- dispensable. Without them life is impossible ; and yet without land they are unattainable, except through the charity of others. They are at the mercy of the landholder. Does government then fulfill its mission when it encourages or permits the monopoly of the soil, and thus puts millions in its power, shorn of every right except the right to beg ? The right to life is an empty mockery,

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 53

if man is to be denied a place on the earth on which to establish a home for the shelter and nurture of his family, and employ his hands in obtaining the food and clothing necessary to his comfort. To say that God has given him the right to life, and at the same time that government may rightfully withhold the means of its enjovment, except by the permission of others, is not simply an absurdity, but a libel on his Providence. It is true there are mul- titudes of landless poor in this country, and in all countries, utterly without the power to acquire homes upon the soil, who, neverthe- less, are not altogether destitute of the essential blessings I have named ; but they are dependent for them upon the saving grace of the few who have the monopoly of the soil. They are helpless pensioners upon the calculating bounty of those by whom they have been disinherited of their birthright. Was it ever designed that men should become vagrants and beggars by reason of unjust legislation, stripped of their right to the soil, robbed of the joys of home, and of those virtues and affections which ripen only in the family circle ? Reason and justice revolt at such a conclusion. The gift of life, I repeat, is inseparable from the resources by which alone it can be made a blessing, and fulfill its great end. And this truth is beginning to dawn upon the world. The senti- ment is becoming rooted in the great heart of humanity, that the right to a home attaches of necessity to the right to live, inasmuch as the physical, moral, and intellectual well-being of each individ- ual cannot be secured without it ; and that government is bound to guarantee it to the fullest practicable extent. This is one of the most cheering signs of the times. " The grand doctrine, that every human being should have the means of self-culture, of prog- ress in knowledge and virtue, of health, comfort, and happiness, of exercising the powers and affections of a man, — this is slowly taking its place as the highest social truth."

But quitting the ground of right, I proceed to some considera- tions of a different character. I take it to be the clear interest of this government to render every acre of its soil as productive as labor can make it. More than one half the land already sold at the different land-offices, if I am not mistaken, has fallen into the cold grasp of the speculator, who has held it in large quantities for years without improvement, thus excluding actual settlers who would have made it a source of wealth to themselves and to the public revenue. This is not only a legalized robbery of the land- less, but an exceedingly short-sighted policy. It does not, as I shall presently show, give employment to labor, nor productiveness

54 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

to the soil, nor add to the treasury by increased returns in the shape of taxation. It is legislative profligacy. The true interest of agriculture is to widen the field of its operations as far as practi- cable, and then, by a judicious tillage, to make it yield the very largest resources compatible with the population of the country. The measure now before us will secure this object by giving inde- pendent homesteads to the greatest number of cultivators, thus imparting dignity to labor, and stimulating its activity. It may be taken for granted as a general truth, that a nation will be power- ful, prosperous, and happy, in proportion to the number of inde- pendent cultivators of its soil. All experience demonstrates that it is most favorable to agriculture to have every plantation culti- vated by its proprietor ; nor is it less conducive to the same object, or less important to the general welfare, that every citizen who desires it should be the owner of a plantation, and engaged in its cultivation. The disregard of these simple and just principles in the actual policy of nations, has been one of the great scourges of the world. We now have it in our power, without revolution or violence, to carry them into practice, and reap their beneficent fruits ; and a nobler work cannot engage the thoughts or enlist the sympathies of the statesman. No governmental policy is so wise as that which keeps constantly before the mind of the citizen the promotion of the public good, by a scrupulous regard for his private interest. This principle should be stamped upon all our legislation, since it will establish the strongest of all ties between him and the State. A philosophic writer of the last century, in sketching a perfectly-organized commonwealth, has the following : —

" As every man ploughed his own field, cultivation was more active, provis- ions more abundant, and individual opulence constituted the public wealth.

" As the earth was free, and. its possession easy and secure, every man was a proprietor, and the division of jiroperty, by rendering luxury impossible, pre- served the purity of manners.

" Every man finding his own well-being in the constitution of his country, took a lively interest in its preservation ; if a stranger attacked it, having his field, his house, to defend, he carried into the combat all the animosity of a personal quarrel, and, devoted to his own interests, he was devoted to his country."

Here, sir, are principles worthy to guide our rulers in the dispo- sition of the public lands. Give homes to the landless multitudes in the country, and you snatch them from crime and starvation, from the prison and the almshouse, and place them in a situation at once the most conducive to virtue, to the prosperity of the country, and to loyalty to its government and laws. Instead of

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 55

paupers and outcasts, they will become independent citizens and freeholders, pledged by their gratitude to the government, by self- interest, and by the affections of our nature, to consecrate to honest toil the spot on which the family altar is to be erected and the family circle kept unbroken. They will feel, as never before, the value of free institutions, and the obligations resting upon them as citizens. Should a foreign foe invade our shores, having their homes and their firesides to defend, they would rush to the field of deadly strife, carrying with them " all the animosity of a personal quarrel." " Independent farmers," said President Jackson, " are everywhere the basis of society, and true friends of liberty ; " and an army of such men, however unpracticed in the art of war, would be invincible. Carry out this reform of multiplying inde- pendent cultivators, and thus rendering labor at once honorable and gainful, and I verily believe more will be done than could be accomplished by any other means to break down our military establishments, and divert the vast sums annually expended in maintaining them to the arts of peace. It is emphatically a peace movement, since it will curb the war spirit by subsidizing to the public interest the " raw material," of which our armies are gen- erally composed. By giving homes to the poor, the idle, the vicious, it will attach them to the soil, and cause them to feel, as the producers of the country ought to feel, that upon them rest the burdens of war. The policy of increasing the number and inde- pendence of those who till the ground, in whatever light considered, commends itself to the government. England, and the countries of Western Europe, have risen in prosperity, just in proportion as freedom has been communicated to the occupiers of the soil. The work of tillage was at first carried on by slaves, then by villains, then by metayers, and finally by farmers ; the improvement of those countries keeping pace with these progressive changes in the condition of the cultivator. The same observations would doubt- less apply to other countries and to different ages of the world. But I need not go abroad for illustrations of this principle. Look, for example, at slave labor in this country. Compare Virginia with Ohio. In the former the soil is tilled by the slave. He feels no interest in the government, because it allows him the exercise of no civil rights. It does not even give him the right to himself. He has of course no interest in the soil upon which he toils. His arm is not nerved, nor his labor lightened by the thought of home, for to him it has no value or sacredness. It is no defense against outrage. His own offspring are the property

56 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

of another. He does not toil for his family, but for a stranger. His -wife and children may be torn from him at any moment, sold like cattle to the trader, and separated from him forever. Labor brings no new comforts to himself or his family. The motive from which he toils is the lash. He is robbed of his humanity by the system which has made him its victim. Can the cultivation of the soil by such a population add wealth or prosperity to the com- monwealth? The question answers itself. I need not point to Virginia, with her great natural advantages, her ample resources in all the elements of wealth and power, yet dwindling and dying under the curse of slave labor. But cross the River Ohio, and how changed the scene ! Agriculture is in the most thriving con- dition. The whole land teems with abundance. The owners of the soil are in general its cultivators, and these constitute the best portion of the population. Labor, instead of being looked upon as degrading, is thus rendered honorable and independent. The ties of interest, as well as the stronger ties of affection, animate the toils of the husbandman, and strengthen his attachment to the ffovernment; for the man who loves his home will love his country. His own private emolument and the public good are linked together in his thoughts, and whilst he is rearing a virtuous family on his own homestead, he is contributing wealth and strength to the State. Population is rapidly on the increase, whilst new towns are springing up almost as by magic. Manufactures and the mechanic arts, in general, are in a flourishing condition, whilst the country is dotted over with churches, school-houses, and smiling habitations. The secret of all this is the distribution of landed property, and its cultivation by freemen. But even in the virgin State of Ohio, the curse of land monopoly, or white slavery, is be- ginning to exhibit its bitter fruits, as it will everywhere, if un- checked by wise legislation. Let Congress, therefore, see to it, in the beginning, by an organic law for the public domain yet remain- ing unsold, that this curse shall be excluded from it. The enact- ment of such a law should not be delayed a single hour. Now is the " golden moment" for action. The rapidity with which our public lands have been melting away for the past few years under the prodigal policy of the government renders all-important the speedy interposition of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I have spoken, incidentally, of slavery. This, I am aware, may be considered a violation of the " final settlement," the remarkably sanative measures, ratified by Congress a few months since. I beg leave to say, however, that I think the

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 57

adoption of the policy for which I am contending will be a much better " settlement " of the slavery question than the one to which I refer. Donate the land lying within our Territories, in limited plantations, to actual settlers whose interest and necessity it will be to cultivate the soil with their own hands, and it will be a far more formidable barrier against the introduction of slavery than Mr. Webster's " ordinance of nature," or even the celebrated ordinance of Jefferson. Slavery only thrives on extensive estates. In a country cut up into small farms, occupied by as many inde- pendent proprietors who live by their own toil, it would be impos- sible, — there would be no room for it. Should the bill now under discussion become a law, the poor white laborers of the South, as well as of the North, will flock to our Territories ; labor will be- come common and respectable ; our democratic theory of equality will be realized ; closely associated communities will be established ; whilst education, so impossible to the masses where slavery and land monopoly prevail, will be accessible to the people through their common schools ; and thus physical and moral causes will combine in excluding slavery forever from the soil. The freedom of the public lands is therefore an anti-slavery measure. It will weaken the slave power by lending the official sanction of the gov- ernment to the natural right of man, as man, to a home upon the soil, and of course to the fruits of his own labor. It will weaken the system of chattel slavery, by making war upon its kindred system of wages slavery, giving homes and employment to its vic- tims, and equalizing the condition of the people. It will weaken it, by repudiating the vicious dogma of the slaveholder that the laborious occupations are dishonorable and degrading. And it will weaken it, as I have just shown, by confining it within its present limits, and thus forcing its supporters to seek some mode of deliv- erance from its evils. Pass this bill, therefore, and whilst the South can have no cause to complain of Northern aggression, it will shake her peculiar institution to its foundations. Her three millions of slaves, now toiling, not under the stars, but the stripes of our flag, robbed of their dearest rights, inventoried as goods and chattels, and plundered of their humanity by law, may look for- ward with new hope to their final exodus from bondage. A num- ber of Southern gentlemen, I am aware, view the subject differently. I am entirely willing that they should. I am satisfied to find them on the right side of the question. I speak only for myself, and claim no right to express any opinion but my own. Had this policy been adopted by the government in 1832, when General

58 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

Jackson first recommended it, it is highly probable that Texas, whether in or out of the Union, would never have been a slave country. She would have been compelled to exclude slavery by adopting the same landed policy in order to secure the settlement of her domain. The same cause would have prevented our Mexi- can War, and thus have saved to the country the millions of money and thousands of lives that were sacrificed in that unsanctified struggle for the extension of human bondage.

Mr. Speaker, there is one consideration pertaining to this bill which deserves a more distinct consideration than I have given it. I have already said that the right to life implies, of necessity, the right to a home upon the soil. Man cannot live without this, and therefore he has the same right to it that he has to life itself. This measure gives a new sanction to this right, a new sacredness to home. It throws the broad shield of the government over that greatest and most beneficent of all institutions, — the family. Home is the great school of virtue, the centre of the heart's best affections, " the birthplace of every good impulse, of every sacred thought." The grand interests of human life belong to it. It has been said, that just so far as the family is improved, its duties performed, and its blessings prized, all artificial institutions, including government itself, are superseded. The most important part of the education of every man and woman is received at home. The germs of character are there moulded and developed by the plastic power of the parent. The government, therefore, by every legitimate means, should favor the improvement, the security of the family, and the strength and purity of the domestic relations ; for by so doing it makes strong the most enduring foundations of our freedom. This should be the first object of its care. "It is idle," says a leading London newspaper, " to talk of secular education — it is idle to talk of religious instruction, whilst the great mass of the people have no homes. How are we to teach, how are we to instruct ; what can the schoolmaster achieve, what the preacher, when the intellects which the one would elevate, and the hearts which the other would teach, are left to the cruel training of the streets ? Thousands and tens of thousands of our children have no other education, no other Christianity, than the education and Christianity of the pave- ment. They have been turned adrift when scarcely able to walk unaided. Another infant has taken its place at the mother's breast ; and the child of two years has made acquaintance with the pavement. And so commences the out-of-door education which fills our streets with profligate women and thieves."

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 59

Not less in point here as an illustration, nor less truthful, is the following sketch of the education of a pauper child, by Harriet Martineau : —

" The infant is reared (if not in the work-house), in some unwholesome room or cellar, amidst damp and dirt, and the noises and sights of vice or folly. He is badly nursed and fed, and grows up feeble or in a state of bodily uneasiness which worries his temper, and makes his passions excitable. He is not soothed by the constant tenderness of a decent mother, who feels it a great duty to make him as good and happy as she can, and contrives to find time and thought for that object. He tumbles in the dust of the road or the mud of the gutter, snatches food wherever he can get it, quarrels with anybody who thwarts him if he be a bold boy, and sneaks and lies if he be naturally a coward. He indulges every appetite, as a matter of course, as it arises : for he has no idea that he should not. He hates everybody who interferes with his license, and has the best liking for those who use the same license with himself. He knows nothing of any place or people but those he sees, and never dreams of any world beyond that of his own eyes. He does not know what society is, or law, or duty ; and therefore, when he injures society, and comes under the inflictions of the law, for gross violations of duty, he understands no more of what is done to him than if he was carried through certain ceremonies conducted in an unknown tongue. He has some dim notion of glory in dying boldly before the eyes of the crowd ; so he goes to the gallows in a mocking mood, as ignorant of the true import of life and human faculties as the day he was born. Or, if not laid hold of by the law, he goes on toward his grave brawling and drinking, or half asleep in mind and inert or diseased in body, till at last he dies as the beast dies." *

Here, sir, we have a forcible exhibition of the evils of land monopoly, and the importance of homes for all. These evils can only be removed by removing their cause. We must strike at the root of so much wretchedness. The country has been flooded with discourses and essays on the subject of education. Statistics have been published in the United States, in Great Britain, and in other countries, showing the proportion of the population who are uned- ucated, and tracing the prevalence of crime to that source. This is all well enough, and no effort, certainly, should be spared by gov- ernments to educate the masses ; but their first and great want is homes, and bread. Without these, education, and temperance, and preaching, and praying, will fail in their purpose. They will be palliatives at best. Land monopoly brings into the country a sur- plus laboring population, whom it first deprives of their natural right to the soil, and then prescribes the terms upon which it will give them food and shelter. The price of labor, as of everything else, depends upon the supply and demand. Land monopoly, by its unholy exactions, makes sure of a large supply, and then pre

1 Household Education.

60 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

sents to the famishing laborer the alternatives of death by starva- tion, or life on such terms as its own mercy may dictate. Govern- ment should prevent this. It is false to its trust, a bastard to its true mission, if it will not. It was never designed that man should be wholly dependent upon his fellow for the bread and breath of life. It was never designed that he should be deprived of a homestead for himself and his family, as a defense against the cold-blooded rapacity of avarice. God never intended that the family bond should be broken when most needed, and that childhood should be turned naked upon the world, with no home but the street, and no moral training but " the education and Christianity of the pave- ment." In a world teeming with abundance, and " wrapped round with sweet air, and blessed by sunshine, and abounding in knowledge," all his intelligent creatures should be permitted to share the pleasures and attain the purposes of existence. In the countries referred to in the extracts I have quoted only about one person in every five hundred is a landholder. Starving millions, ignorant of the pleasures, and untaught in the virtues of home, crowded into stalls and markets, or turned into the streets of their cities as beggars, bear sad testimony to the horrors of land monop- oly. But Scotland and Ireland, and the countries of the Old World generally, which are annually disgorging their paupers upon our shores, are but a type of what this country will ultimately be, if the monopoly of the soil is allowed to have its way ; for the same causes are here in operation, and will produce the same effects. Famine in those countries is not the result of over popu- lation, but of their landed system. No country in Europe has as large a population as the soil is capable of supporting under a wise system of culture, and a just distribution of land among the people. It is for us now to say whether starvation, pauperism, and crime, shall be transplanted from the Old World to the yet unpeopled regions of the West. It is for us, if we please, to check the monopoly of the soil and the exactions of capital in the old States, by withdrawing the landless laborers of the country from their crushing power, and at the same time giving them homes and independence on the public lands. We have it in our power to foreordain the future lot of the millions who are to draw their subsistence from our wide-spread public domain ; and, I repeat, we shall prove recreant to our high trust as the representatives of the people, if we fail to exert it. Posterity will justly hold us answerable for evils which our timely action might have averted, but which, in a few years, may be beyond the reach of remedy.

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 61

Let the government, therefore, without delay, provide homes for the landless. Let it establish the family in our untamed forests, and let it spread its parental wing over it, and guard it as it would guard the life of the Republic. The bill before us makes the home which it secures to the settler free from execution for debt for the period of five years. I regret that it was not thought wise to make it thus inalienable forever. Our laws have abolished im- prisonment for debt as a relic of barbarous times. They have exempted from execution certain personal property of the debtor, on the score of its absolute necessity to the maintenance of his family, and on the principle that the life of the debtor is more important than the claim of the creditor. Let them go further, and exempt that which is the most needed and sacred of all earthly interests, — the homestead. No regulations on the subject of debtor and creditor should be permitted to take it away. The unity of the family should be maintained unbroken, till its inmates are fitted by its discipline for the duties of life. The family hearth-stone should be " hallowed ground." No vandal legislation should be allowed to invade it. No pretense of meting out pecuniary justice as between man and man can justify government in lacerating the cherished affections of the heart, the fond recollections of child- hood, which gather around the thought of home. Not humanity only, but the cause of public morality, the suppression of crimes, and the interests of religion, all plead for the inviolability of the homestead.

Mr. Speaker, the bill under consideration possesses one recom- mendation,' already partially noticed, which I think worthy of special consideration. It gives encouragement to a business which, more than any other, promotes the happiness of those engaged in it, whilst it favors the prosperity of the whole country. The life of a farmer is peculiarly favorable to virtue ; and both individuals and communities are generally happy in proportion as they are virtuous. His manners are simple, and his nature unsophisticated. If not oppressed by other interests, he generally possesses an abun- dance, without the drawback of luxury. His life does not impose excessive toil, and yet it discourages idleness. The farmer lives in rustic plenty, remote from the contagion of popular vices, and enjoys, in their greatest fruition, the blessings of health and con- tentment. The very consciousness he feels of the utility of his calling gives a pleasure to his labors. No other occupation, per- haps, is so well calculated to inspire trust in his Creator and charity toward his creatures. The pleasures and virtues of rural life have

62 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

been the theme of poets and philosophers in all ages. The tillage of the soil was the primeval employment of man. Of all arts, it is the most useful and necessary. It has justly been styled the nursing father of the State ; for in civilized countries all are equally dependent upon it for the means of subsistence, since hunger and nakedness are universal wants. It is estimated that nearly three fourths of the labor and capital of the country are employed in this single pursuit ; and that agriculturists are themselves a large majority of the voters, tax-payers, and consumers of all foreign and domestic goods. Is not such an employment deserving of the care of Congress ? The cultivation of the soil is an obligation imposed upon man by nature ; and this fact alone would seem to impose upon government the obligation to encourage it to the full extent of its power. When so much is done by direct legislation for other interests, is it not fair that the one paramount to them all should be aided ? We expend annually some seven or eight mill- ions of dollars in maintaining our navy, on the ground mainly that the protection of our commerce demands it. Our army costs us annually about the same amount, and these sums are drawn chiefly from the agriculturist. We have expended vast sums for harbors, fortifications, breakwaters, beacons, light-houses, dry-docks, and coast surveys, with particular reference to the growth and protec- tion of our commercial interest. With a view to the same object, we have made large grants, both of land and money, for the con- struction of roads and canals. We have been expending thou- sands of dollars in the improvement of our war-steamers, in the projection of missiles of death, and in maintaining military and naval schools. We have built up our manufactures by discriminat- ing duties in their favor, imposed chiefly upon the producer. We have granted, as I have already shown, from seventy-five to one hundred millions of acres of the public lands, in the shape of mili- tary bounty, to our soldiers, in addition to their lawful stipend. The public domain has been a common fund, to which the govern- ment has resorted for almost every variety of object ; but not a single acre has ever been granted for the benefit of agriculture. Such a phenomenon as an appropriation of land for experimental farms, or agricultural colleges, has never been known. Is the cul- tivation of the soil an occupation so contemptible, so useless to the State, as not to demand the attention of the government ? The encouragement of manufactures, of commerce, and of other less important interests, is to be commended ; but is not the encour- agement of agriculture, the parent of them all, at least equally important ?

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 63

The complaint is sometimes made, that if the public lands are given to actual settlers, it will in effect be taxing the remainder of the people to pay for their farms, since the public revenue will be diminished in proportion to those gifts, and would of course have to be supplied from other sources. But is not one class of the people taxed for the benefit of another, in the money raised from the agriculturist in the cases I have mentioned ? The cultivator has always been taxed for the support of other interests. I deny, however, that the public revenue would be diminished by making the public lands free. According to the report of the Secretary of the Treasury, these lands can no longer be looked to as a source of revenue, at least for many years to come, under our present system. He shows that our late bounty land acts will yet require about seventy-nine millions of acres, and that when they have finally exhausted themselves they will have diverted from the treas- ury the sum of more than $113,000,000. The warrants issued under these acts are made assignable, and will be bought at greatly reduced prices by speculators, who will pick and cull all the choice lands, hoard them up for their own selfish advantage, and thus exclude the settler from them, and at the same time drive the gov- ernment from the market which it has thus glutted by its own improvident policy. Besides, if the present system should be per- sisted in, Congress will continue, and probably multiply, its grants of land for internal improvements, and for other purposes, thus making large additional drains upon the revenue otherwise deriva- ble from this source. The old-fashioned project, therefore, of rais- ing a revenue from the public domain is perfectly chimerical, and must be abandoned. This is now very generally admitted. If adhered to, the government would realize from it but little, if any- thing, for the next quarter of a century, beyond the six or seven hundred thousand dollars annually required to defray the expense it occasions, as must be manifest, I think, from the calculations of the Secretary. It follows, therefore, that the sums heretofore raised from the sales of the public lands must be made up from other sources, whether we continue or abandon our present policy. The question of revenue is excluded.

But admitting that the passage of this bill would divert some two or three millions annually from the public treasury, for the direct benefit of actual settlers, it still would not follow that a tax of this amount would be imposed upon the rest of the community. Whilst the freedom of the public domain to actual settlers would be a measure emphatically for the benefit of the poor, all classes

64 THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

would share in the advantages resulting from it. It would decrease poverty, and the vices and crimes to which it gives birth, by with- drawing its victims from our crowded cities and the slavery of capital, and giving them homes upon the fertile acres of theWest. It would drain pauperism from the old States, and thus relieve them from the burden of a population of superabundant laborers, whilst enterprise, industry, and wealth, would abound in the new. Instead of diminishing, it would increase the public revenue. This, chiefly, is derived from duties on foreign imports. The amount of revenue thus obtained depends upon the number of consumers of imported articles. Increase the number of agricultural producers, therefore, and you increase the number of those who consume foreign imports, thus increasing the revenue derived from this source ; because, by giving a man a home upon the soil, you add to his ability to produce, and thereby increase his ability to buy articles of necessity or luxury which pay duty. If we export annually one hundred millions worth of agricultural products, we shall import at least an equal amount of foreign goods subject to duty. If our vacant lands are made free to actual settlers, and we are thus enabled by their products to export one hundred and fifty millions, our imports will of course increase in proportion, and so will the receipts at the custom-house. If revenue be the object, here is its true source ; and Congress, instead of madly endeavoring to raise money from the sale of the public lands, should adopt the policy that will promote their greatest productive- ness. Their settlement and improvement should be the paramount object. By this policy we shall thus accomplish the double object of giving homes and employment to the landless laborers of the country, and, at the same time, replenishing the national treasury. Humanity and the dollar will go together. The public lands in their wild state are yielding nothing. It is the obvious interest of the government, as I have before stated, that they should be ren- dered as productive as possible. Under our present system, selling as we do from two to three millions worth of land annually, it will require hundreds of years to dispose of the whole of our public do- main ; and as there is no law prohibiting land traffic, the sales that are made as often prevent as promote the settlement of the country. The millions of acres which this policy would continue in unpro- ductive idleness, slowly diminishing in quantity for centuries, should all the time be sustaining a hardy yeomanry, and filling the coffers of the nation ; and the government robs itself of wealth, to what- ever extent its policy fails to secure these objects. It acts like the

THE HOMESTEAD BILL. 65

miser, who buries his treasure so that it can yield nothing. On the other hand, make the public lands free on condition of occu- pancy and improvement, and the labor of our landless and home- less population, who have no capital but their muscles, will be united to the soil in the production of wealth. The public domain will thus be improved and the government enriched by giving homes and employment to the poor ; for it is as difficult to raise a revenue by taxing its paupers, as by preventing the settlement of its lands. The treasury will be filled by rescuing starving thou- sands from the jaws of land monopoly, and imparting to them happiness and independence. The degraded vassal of the rich, who is now confined to exhausting labor for a mere pittance upon which to subsist, or

" Who begs a brother of the earth To give hirn leave to toil,"

will find a home in the West ; and, stimulated by the favor of the government, the desire for independence, and the ties of the family, the wilderness will be converted into smiling landscapes, and wealth poured into the nation's lap. Humanity to the poor thus unites with the interest of the nation in making the public domain free to those who so much need it ; taking gaunt poverty into the fatherly keeping of the government, and giving it the home of which land monopoly has deprived it ; administering to it the blessings of exist- ence, and at the same time using it as an instrumentality for build- ing up the prosperity and wealth of the Republic. Sir, I ask gentlemen if these things are not so ? I ask those who mean to oppose this policy if any wiser or better one can be proposed with respect to our public lands ? Some disposition of them must be made. By some method or other they should be rendered a source of agricultural and financial wealth. The administration of them is costing us annually nearly three quarters of a million of dollars under our present system. The government, as I have shown by reference to the late treasury report, has already practically repu- diated the pledge which it made of these lands in 1847 for the payment of our public debt. The management of them, I repeat, presses upon us as a serious, practical question ; and I call upon those who denounce this measure to meet the views I have ad- vanced fairly, and, if they are untenable, to bring forward some plan for disposing of our public domain more conducive to the interest of the whole country, and more likely to command the favor of a majority of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I will detain the House no longer. "What may be

6Q THE HOMESTEAD BILL.

the ultimate fate of this bill I cannot pretend to decide. That some measure, however, substantially embodying its provisions, Avill receive the sanction of Congress, I have no doubt. This may not happen at the present session, but its postponement cannot be far in the future. The policy of making the public lands free will prevail, because, as I believe, the people have willed it, and their will cannot return to them void. It will prevail, because it appeals to the American pocket, and at the same time to the American heart. It will prevail, because, like the question of cheap postage, it comes home to the business and bosoms of the million, and lays humanity under contribution to its success. It will prevail, because it appeals to the democratic idea of the nation, and promises to make effective the right of the people to " life, liberty, and the pur- suit of happiness." Great names, eminent statesmen, are rang- ing themselves among its advocates ; but my reliance is upon the intelligence and integrity of the people, — upon the agricultural, mechanical, and laboring masses of the country. Politicians may denounce and revile it ; they may brand it as " agrarianism," and " demagogism," but they will be powerless to stay its progress, or prevent its final triumph. It is incarnate in the popular heart ; it rests upon the immutable principles of justice ; it forms an impor- tant part of the great reform movement of the age, — a link in the chain of the world's progress ; it is in harmony with " the power that moves the stars, and heaves the pulses of the deep."

THE

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF THE SLAVE

POWER — THE DUTY OF ANTI-SLAVERY MEN.

DELIVERED IN CINCINNATI, APRIL 27, 1852.

[This speech, delivered a few weeks before the National Conventions of the Whig and Democratic parties for 1852 were held, fitly deals with these organizations, and arraigns them as alike the allies of slavery. Its picture of the Free and Slave Power of the na- tion is well drawn, while its discussion of the morality of political action, and the rela- tions of the Church to Slavery, give it an exceptional character as a political speech.]

Mr. President, — In obedience to the call of our anti-slavery friends in this city, we have assembled from various sections of the country to consider what more can be done for the three millions of slaves in these United States ; what new labors and sacrifices the crisis demands at our hands ; and we desire, at all events, to lift up our voices in continued rebuke of the transcendent and over- shadowing iniquity of this nation.

The free power of the United States on the one hand, and the slave power on the other, are the parties to the great struggle in which we are engaged ; and I propose, in the outset, to glance at the position and relative strength of these contending forces, and thence to deduce such conclusions as facts may warrant, bearing upon the question of present duty.

What do we understand by the slave power of this country ? It is embodied, primarily, in the slaveholders of the country, numbering, say two hundred and fifty thousand, making a liberal estimate, and many of these are women and minors. The entire white population of the slave States, according to the late census, is six millions one hundred and sixty-nine thousand four hun- dred and thirty-eight. The slaveholders, therefore, constitute only about one twenty -fifth of this number, or in other words, for every slaveholder there are twenty-five non-slaveholders, or twenty-four twenty-fifths of the people having no direct connection with slav- ery. If we include the whole population of the South, white and colored, bond and free, the slaveholders will only amount to about one fortieth of the aggregate, thirty-nine fortieths of the whole being non-slaveholders. If we take into the calculation the entire present population of the Union, setting it down in round

68 STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OE THE SLAVE POWER.

numbers at twenty-five millions (which cannot be very far from the truth), the slaveholders will constitute only the one hundredth part of the same, leaving ninety-nine hundredths non-slaveholders, and deeply interested, socially, morally, and politically, in the over- throw of the peculiar institution.

Here then, in this small fraction of the people of the country, the slave power is lodged. This is the terrible presence before which our politicians and priests bend their cowardly backs, and seem- ingly glory in the abjectness of their humiliation. I am now talk- ing about the weakness, the apparent insignificance of this wicked and domineering oligarchy. I shall speak of its strength presently. Look, if you please, at the forces which stand opposed to this squad of despots. First, I mention the three millions and more whom they hold in bondage, and who, of course, are opposed from the very depths of their hearts to the system under which they suffer. Denied that principle of everlasting justice, a fair day's wages for a fair day's work, sold like merchandise to the highest bidder, de- spoiled of their dearest rights and the holiest relations of life, and plundered even of their humanity by law, is it not inevitable that they are brooding in secret over their wrongs, and nursing in their bosoms long-cherished, deep-seated, and implacable hatred of the rule of their tyrants ? Let no man regard lightly, either the moral or physical power of such a people ; for every ray of light which dawns upon their minds, every kindling passion which fires their hearts, is the sure prophecy 'of their deliverance. Well may the slaveholder tremble, when he reflects that " God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Next, let us remember, that these slaveholders have to struggle against a rapidly augmenting dislike of their institution among the millions of their own race in the South, who hold no slaves. Mul- titudes of these feel that they are crushed to the earth by this heartless aristocracy, degraded to a condition which slaves them- selves need not envy, and that all hope of bettering their lot is denied them, so long as the reigning order of things continues. This hostility to slavery will increase just in proportion as its hands are strengthened and its exactions multiplied, thus has- tening a fearful crisis, by the action of causes that must inevitably produce it, were the millions in bondage to continue quiet and submissive. We have good reasons for believing that at this time there are thousands among the non-slaveholders South, not only smarting under the relentless power of slavery, and meditating schemes of resistance, but looking forward with anxious hopes to

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF THE SLAVE POWER. 69

some movement in the free States which will embolden them to stand up in the midst of their oppressors, and make their power felt in the politics of the country.

Again, there is opposed to the handful of slaveholders a growing anti-slavery sentiment among the fourteen millions of people in the free States. It finds its life in the truths of the Declaration of In- dependence, the traditions and example of our political fathers, and the teachings of our Saviour and his Apostles. It will gradually and finally penetrate all hearts, and pervade all minds in the North. This, in fact, is the great dread of the slaveholder and the dough- face, notwithstanding the pretended " finality " of their compro- mises. They lack faith in their own devices. The spirit of free- dom, " crushed to earth " by external forces, " will rise again," and in more effectual ways make itself understood. Even now, in this dark and despondent hour of anti-slavery progress, I doubt not it is silently darting its light into the minds of the multitude, soften- ing the inhumanity of their hearts, quickening the irinsensibility into resolves, and thus preparing the ground for a rich harvest for freedom in future years.

Lastly, the voice of the civilized world is against slavery. Pub- lic opinion, according to Mr. Webster, is the strongest power on earth. " We think," says he, " that nothing is strong enough to stand before autocratic, monarchical, or despotic power. There is something strong enough, quite strong enough, and if properly exerted will prove itself so, and that is the power of intelligent pub- lic opinion in all the nations of the earth. There is not a monarch on earth whose throne is not liable to be shaken to its foundations by the progress of opinion, and the sentiment of the just and intel- ligent part of the community." This terrible power is arrayed against the slaveholders, and we need not wonder at their alarm. It should not surprise us that they labor so unremittingly to guard against domestic foes, when the moral power of the world is threat- ening to shake their despotic power to its foundations. A hostile in- fluence is wafted to our shores upon every gale from abroad. And the great fountain and source of opinion, the literature