Showing posts with label Mexican War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mexican War. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Lecture of Wendell Phillips: “The Lesson of the Hour,” Delivered at Brooklyn, New York, Tuesday Evening, November 1, 1859

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Of course I do not expect—speaking from this platform, and to you— to say any thing on the vital question of the hour, which you have not already heard. But, when a great question divides the community, all men are called upon to vote, and I feel to-night that I am simply giving my vote. I am only saying "ditto" to what you hear from this platform day after day. And I would willingly have avoided, ladies and gentlemen, even at this last moment, borrowing this hour from you. I tried to do better by you. Like the Irishman in the story, I offered to hold the hat of Hon. Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, (enthusiastic applause,) if he would only make a speech, and, I am sorry to say, he declines, most unaccountably, this generous offer. (Laughter.) So I must fulfil my appointment, and deliver my lecture myself.

"The Lesson of the Hour?" I think the lesson of the hour is insurrection. (Sensation.) Insurrection of thought always precedes the insurrection of arms. The last twenty years have been an insurrection of thought. We seem to be entering on a new phase of this great American struggle. It seems to me that we have never accepted, as Americans, we have never accepted our own civilization. We have held back from the inference which we ought to have drawn from the admitted principles which underlie our life. We have all the timidity of the old world, when we think of the people; we shrink back, trying to save ourselves from the inevitable might of the thoughts of the millions. The idea on the other side of the water seems to be, that man is created to be taken care of by somebody else. God did not leave him fit to go alone; he is in everlasting pupilage to the wealthy and the educated. The religious or the comfortable classes are an ever-present probate court to take care of him. The Old World, therefore, has always distrusted the average conscience—the common sense of the millions.

It seems to me the idea of our civilization, underlying all American life, is, that men do not need any guardian. We need no safeguard. Not only the inevitable, but the best, power this side of the ocean, is the unfettered average common sense of the masses. Institutions, as we are accustomed to call them, are but pasteboard, and intended to be against the thought of the street. Statutes are mere milestones, telling how far yesterday's thought had travelled; and the talk of the sidewalk to-day is the law of the land. You may regret this; but the fact stands; and if our fathers foresaw the full effect of their principles, they must have planned and expected it. With us, Law is nothing unless close behind it stands a warm living public opinion. Let that die or grow indifferent, and statutes are waste paper—lack all executive force. You may frame them strong as language can make, but once change public feeling, and through them or over them rides the real wish of the people. The good sense and conscience of the masses are our only title-deeds and police force. The Temperance cause, the Anti-Slavery movement, and your Barnburner party prove this. You may sigh for a strong government, anchored in the convictions of past centuries, and able to protect the minority against the majority; able to defy the ignorance, the mistake, or the passion, as well as the high purpose, of the present hour. You may prefer the unchanging terra firma of despotism; but still the fact remains, that we are launched on the ocean of an unchained democracy, with no safety but in those laws of gravity that bind the ocean in its bed—the instinctive love of right in the popular heart—the divine sheet-anchor, that the race gravitates towards right, and that the right is always safe and best.

Somewhat briefly stated, such is the idea of American civilization; uncompromising faith—in the average selfishness, if you choose—of all classes, neutralizing each other, and tending towards that fair play that Saxons love. But it seems to me that, on all questions, we dread thought; we shrink behind something; we acknowledge ourselves unequal to the sublime faith of our fathers; and the exhibition of the last twenty years and of the present state of public affairs is, that Americans dread to look their real position in the face.

They say in Ireland that every Irishman thinks that he was born sixty days too late, (laughter,) and the world owes him sixty days. The consequence is, when a trader says such a thing is so much for cash, the Irishman thinks cash means to him a bill of sixty days. (Laughter.) So it is with Americans. They have no idea of absolute right. They were born since 1787, and absolute right means the truth diluted by a strong decoction of the Constitution of '89. They breathe that atmosphere; they do not want to sail outside of it; they do not attempt to reason outside of it. Poisoned with printer's ink, or choked with cotton dust, they stare at absolute right, as the dream of madmen. For the last twenty years, there has been going on, more or less heeded and understood in various States, an insurrection of ideas against the limited, cribbed, cabined, isolated American civilization, interfering to restore absolute right. If you said to an American, for instance, any thing in regard to temperance, slavery, or any thing else, in the course of the last twenty years—any thing about a principle, he ran back instantly to the safety of such a principle, to the possibility of its existing with a particular sect, with a church, with a party, with a constitution, with a law. He had not yet raised himself to the level of daring to trust justice, which is the preliminary consideration to trusting the people; for whether native depravity be true or not, it is a truth, attested by all history, that the race gravitates towards justice, and that making fair allowance for differences of opinion, there is an inherent, essential tendency to the great English principle of fair play at the bottom of our natures. (Loud applause.) The Emperor Nicholas, it is said, ordered his engineers to lay down for him a railway from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and presently the engineers brought him a large piece of card-paper, on which was laid down, like a snake, the designed path for the iron locomotive between the two capitals. "What's that?" said Nicholas. "That's the best road," was the reply. "What do you make it crooked for?" Why, we turn this way to touch this great city, and to the left to reach that immense mass of people, and to the right again to suit the business of that district." "Yes." The emperor turned the card over, made a new dot for Moscow, and another for St. Petersburg, took a ruler, made a straight line, and said, "Build me that road." (Laughter.)

"But what will become of this depot of trade?—of that town?" "I don't know; they must look out for themselves." (Cheers.) And omnipotent democracy says of Slavery, or of a church, "This is justice, and that is iniquity; the track of God's thunderbolt is a straight line from one to the other, and the Church or State that cannot stand it must get out of the way. (Cheers.) Now our object for twenty years has been to educate the mass of the American people up to that level of moral life, which shall recognize that free speech carried to this extent is God's normal school, educating the American mind, throwing upon it the grave responsibility of deciding a great question, and by means of that responsibility, lifting it to a higher level of intellectual and moral life. Responsibility educates, and politics is but another name for God's way of teaching the masses ethics, under the responsibility of great present interest. To educate man is God's ultimate end and purpose in all creation. Trust the people with the gravest questions, and in the long run you educate the race; while, in the process, you secure not perfect, but the best possible, institutions. Now scholarship stands on one side, and, like your Brooklyn Eagle, says, "This is madness!" Well, poor man, he thinks so! (Laughter.) The very difficulty of the whole matter is, that he does think so, and this normal school that we open is for him. His seat is on the lowest end of the lowest bench. (Laughter and applause.) But he only represents that very chronic distrust which pervades all that class, specially the timid, educated mind of these Northern States. Anacharsis went into the forum at Athens, and heard a case argued by the great minds of the day, and saw the vote. He walked out into the streets, and somebody said to him, "What think you of Athenian liberty?" "I think," said he, "wise men argue causes, and fools decide them." Just what the timid scholar two thousand years ago said in the streets of Athens, that which calls itself the scholarship of the United States, says to-day of popular agitation, that it lets wise men argue questions, and fools decide them. But that unruly Athens, where fools decided the gravest questions of polity, and right, and wrong, where it was not safe to be just, and where property, which you had garnered up by the thrift and industry of to-day, might be wrung from you by the prejudices of the mob to-morrow; that very Athens probably secured the greatest human happiness and nobleness of its era, invented art, and sounded for us the depths of philosophy; God lent to it the noblest intellects, and it flashes to-day the torch that gilds yet the mountain peaks of the old world; while Egypt, the hunker conservative of antiquity, where nobody dared to differ from the priest, or to be wiser than his grandfather; where men pretended to be alive, though swaddled in the grave clothes of creed and custom as close as their mummies in linen, is hid in the tomb it inhabited; and the intellect which Athens has created for us digs to-day those ashes to find out what hunkerism knew and did. (Cheers.) Now my idea of American civilization is, that it is a second part, a repetition of that same sublime confidence in the public conscience and the public thought that made the groundwork of Grecian Democracy.

We have been carrying on this insurrection of thought for thirty years. There have been various evidences of growth in education; I will tell you of one. The first evidence that a sinner, convicted of sin, and too blind or too lazy to reform, the first evidence he gives that his nature has been touched, is, that he becomes a hypocrite; he has the grace to pretend to be something. Now, the first evidence that the American people gave of that commencing grace of hypocrisy was this: in 1831, when we commenced the Anti-Slavery agitation, the papers talked about Slavery, Bondage, American Slavery, boldly, frankly, and bluntly. In a few years it sounded hard; it had a grating effect; the toughest throat of the hardest Democrat felt it as it came out. So they spoke of the "patriarchal institution," (laughter,) then of the "domestic institution," (continued laughter,) and then of the "peculiar institution," (laughter,) and in a year or two it got beyond that. Mississippi published a report from her Senate, in which she went a stride further, and described it as "economic subordination." (Renewed laughter.) A Southern Methodist bishop was taken to task for holding slaves in reality, but his Methodist brethren were not courageous enough to say "slaves" right out in meeting, and so they advised the bishop to get rid of his "impediment," (loud laughter;) and the late Mr. Rufus Choate, in the last Democratic Canvass in my own State, undertaking and obliged to refer to the institutions of the South, and unwilling that his old New England lips, that had spoken so many glorious free truths, should foul their last days with the hated word, phrased it "a different type of industry." Now, hypocrisy—why, "it is the homage that vice renders to Virtue." When men begin to weary of capital punishment, they banish the gallows inside the jail-yard, and let nobody see it without a special card of invitation from the sheriff. And so they have banished Slavery into pet phrases and fancy flash-words. If, one hundred years hence, you should dig our Egyptian Hunkerism up from the grave into which it is rapidly sinking, we should need a commentator of the true German blood to find out what all these queer, odd, peculiar, imaginative paraphrases mean in this middle of the Nineteenth Century. This is one evidence of progress.

I believe in moral suasion. The age of bullets is over. The age of ideas is come. I think that is the rule of our age. The old Hindoo dreamed, you know, that he saw the human race led out to its varied fortune. First, he saw men bitted and curbed, and the reins went back to an iron hand. But his dream changed on and on, until at last he saw men led by reins that came from the brain, and went back into an unseen hand. It was the type of governments; the first despotism, palpable, iron; and the last our government, a government of brains, a government of ideas. I believe in it—in public opinion.

Yet, let me say, in passing, I think you can make a better use of iron than forging it into chains. If you must have the metal, put it into Sharpe's rifles. It is a great deal better used that way than in fetters; types are better than bullets, but bullets a thousand times rather than a clumsy statue of a mock great man, for hypocrites to kneel down and worship in a state-house yard. (Loud and renewed cheers, and great hissing.) I am so unused to hisses lately, that I have forgotten what I had to say. (Laughter and hisses.) I only know I meant what I did say.

My idea is, public opinion, literature, education, as governing elements.

But some men seem to think that our institutions are necessarily safe, because we have free schools and cheap books, and a public opinion that controls. But that is no evidence of safety. India and China had schools for fifteen hundred years. And books, it is said, were once as cheap in Central and Northern Asia, as they are in New York. But they have not secured liberty, nor a controlling public opinion to either nation. Spain for three centuries had municipalities and town governments, as independent and self-supporting, and as representative of thought, as New England or New York has. But that did not save Spain. De Tocqueville says that fifty years before the great revolution, public opinion was as omnipotent in France as it is to-day, but it did not make France free. You cannot save men by machinery. What India, and France, and Spain wanted, was live men, and that is what we want to-day; men who are willing to look their own destiny, and their own responsibilities, in the face. "Grant me to see, and Ajax asks no more," was the prayer the great poet put into the lips of his hero in the darkness that overspread the Grecian camp. All we want of American citizens is the opening of their own eyes, and seeing things as they are. The intelligent, thoughtful, and determined gaze of twenty millions of Christian people, there is nothing—no institution wicked and powerful enough to be capable of standing against it. In Keats's beautiful poem of "Lamia," a young man had been led captive by a phantom girl, and was the slave of her beauty, until the old teacher came in and fixed his thoughtful eye upon the figure, and it vanished.

You see the great commonwealth of Virginia fitly represented by a pyramid standing upon its apex. A Connecticut born man entered at one corner of her dominions, and fixed his cold gray eye upon the government of Virginia, and it almost vanished in his very gaze. For it seems that Virginia, for a week, asked leave "to be" of John Brown at Harper's Ferry. (Cheers and applause.) Connecticut has sent out many a schoolmaster to the other thirty States; but never before so grand a teacher as that Litchfield born schoolmaster at Harper's Ferry, writing as it were upon the Natural Bridge in the face of nations his simple copy: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." (Loud cheers.)

I said that the lesson of the hour was insurrection. I ought not to apply that word to John Brown of Osawatomie, for there was no insurrection in his case. It is a great mistake to call him an insurgent. This principle that I have endeavored so briefly to open to you, of absolute right and wrong, states what? Just this: "Commonwealth of Virginia!" There is no such thing. Lawless, brutal force is no basis of a government, in the true sense of that word. Quæ est enim civitas? asks Cicero. Omnis ne conventus ettam ferorum el immanium? Omnis ne etiam fugitivorum ac latronum congregata unum in locum multitudo? Certe negabis. No civil society, no government, can exist except on the basis of the willing submission of all its citizens, and by the performance of the duty of rendering equal justice between man and man.

Whatever calls itself a government, and refuses that duty, or has not that assent, is no government. It is only a pirate ship. Virginia, the commonwealth of Virginia! She is only a chronic insurrection. I mean exactly what I say. I am weighing my words now. She is a pirate ship, and John Brown sails the sea a Lord High Admiral of the Almighty, with his commission to sink every pirate he meets on God's ocean of the nineteenth century. (Cheers and applause.) I mean literally and exactly what I say. In God's world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God's side, is a majority. You have often heard here, doubtless, and I need not tell you the ground of morals. The rights of that one man are as sacred as those of the miscalled commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia is only another Algiers. The barbarous horde who gag each other, imprison women for teaching children to read, prohibit the Bible, sell men on the auction-blocks, abolish marriage, condemn half their women to prostitution, and devote themselves to the breeding of human beings for sale, is only a larger and blacker Algiers. The only prayer of a true man for such is, "Gracious Heaven! unless they repent, send soon their Exmouth and Decatur." John Brown has twice as much right to hang Gov. Wise, as Gov. Wise has to hang him. (Cheers and hisses.) You see I am talking of that absolute essence of things that lives in the sight of the Eternal and the Infinite; not as men judge it in the rotten morals of the nineteenth century, among a herd of States that calls itself an empire, because it raises cotton and sells slaves. What I say is this: Harper's Ferry was the only government in that vicinity. Look at the trial. Virginia, true to herself, has shown exactly the same haste that the pirate does when he tries a man on deck, and runs him up to the yard-arm. Unconsciously she is consistent. Now, you do not think this to-day, some of you, perhaps. But I tell you what absolute History shall judge of these forms and phantoms of ours. John Brown began his life, his public life, in Kansas. The South planted that seed; it reaps the first fruit now. Twelve years ago the great men in Washington, the Websters and the Clays, planted the Mexican war; and they reaped their appropriate fruit in Gen. Taylor and Gen. Pierce pushing them from their statesmen's stools. The South planted the seeds of violence in Kansas, and taught peaceful Northern men familiarity with the bowie-knife and revolver. They planted nine hundred and ninety-nine seeds, and this is the first one that has flowered; this is the first drop of the coming shower. People do me the honor to say, in some of the western papers, that this is traceable to some teachings of mine. It is too much honor to such as me. Gladly, if it were not fulsome vanity, would I clutch this laurel of having any share in the great resolute daring of that man who flung himself against an empire in behalf of justice and liberty. They were not the bravest men who fought at Saratoga and Yorktown, in the war of 1776. O, no! it was rather those who flung themselves, at Lexington, few and feeble, against the embattled ranks of an empire, till then thought irresistible. Elderly men, in powdered wigs and red velvet, smoothed their ruffles, and cried, "Madmen!" Full-fed custom-house clerks said, "A pistol shot against Gibraltar!" But Captain Ingraham, under the stars and stripes, dictating terms to the fleet of the Cæsars, was only the echo of that Lexington gun. Harper's Ferry is the Lexington of to-day. Up to this moment, Brown's life has been one unmixed success. Prudence, skill, courage, thrift, knowledge of his time, knowledge of his opponents, undaunted daring he had all these. He was the man who could leave Kansas, and go into Missouri, and take eleven men and give them to liberty, and bring them off on the horses which he carried with him, and two which he took as tribute from their masters in order to facilitate escape. Then, when he had passed his human proteges from the vulture of the United States to the safe shelter of the English lion, this is the brave, frank, and sublime truster in God's right and absolute justice, that entered his name in the city of Cleveland, "John Brown, of Kansas," advertised there two horses for sale, and stood in front of the auctioneer's stand, notifying all bidders of — what some would think — the defect in the title. (Laughter.) But he added, with nonchalance, when he told the story, "They brought a very excellent price." (Laughter.) This is the man who, in the face of the nation, avowing his right, and laboring with what strength he had in behalf of the wronged, goes down to Harper's Ferry to follow up his work. Well, men say he failed. Every man has his Moscow. Suppose he did fail, every man meets his Waterloo at last. There are two kinds of defeat. Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but Liberty dates from it, though Warren lay dead on the field. Men say the attempt did not succeed. No man can command success. Whether it was well planned, and deserved to succeed, we shall be able to decide when Brown is free to tell us all he knows. Suppose he did fail, in one sense, he has done a great deal still. Why, this is a decent country to live in now. (Laughter and cheers.) Actually, in this Sodom of ours, twenty-two men have been found ready to die for an idea. God be thanked for John Brown, that he has discovered or created them. (Cheers.) I should feel some pride, if I was in Europe now, in confessing that I was an American. (Applause.) We have redeemed the long infamy of sixty years of subservience. But look back a bit. Is there any thing new about this? Nothing at all. It is the natural result of Anti-slavery teaching. For one, I accept it; I expected it. I cannot say that I prayed for it; I cannot say that I hoped for it. But at the same time, no sane man has looked upon this matter for twenty years, and supposed that we could go through this great moral convulsion, the great classes of society crashing and jostling against each other like frigates in a storm, and that there would not come such scenes as these.

In 1835 it was the other way. Then it was my bull that gored your ox. Then ideas came in conflict, and men of violence, men who trusted in their own right hands, men who believed in bowie-knives—such sacked the city of Philadelphia; such made New York to be governed by a mob; Boston saw its mayor suppliant and kneeling to the chief of a broadcloth mob in broad daylight. It was all on that side. The natural result, the first result of this starting of ideas, is like people who get half awaked, and use the first weapons that lie at hand. The first show and unfolding of national life, were the mobs of 1835. People said it served us right; we had no right to the luxury of speaking our own minds; it was too expensive; these lavish, prodigal, luxurious persons walking about here, and actually saying what they think. Why, it was like speaking loud in the midst of the avalanches. To say "Liberty" in a loud tone, the Constitution of 1789 might come down—it would not do. But now things have changed. We have been talking thirty years. Twenty years we have talked every where, under all circumstances; we have been mobbed out of great cities, and pelted out of little ones; we have been abused by great men and by little papers. (Laughter and applause.) What is the result? The tables have been turned; it is your bull that has gored my ox now. And men that still believe in violence, the five points of whose faith are the fist, the bowie-knife, fire, poison, and the pistol, are ranged on the side of Liberty, and, unwilling to wait for the slow but sure steps of thought, lay on God's altar the best they have. You cannot expect to put a real Puritan Presbyterian, as John Brown is—a regular Cromwellian dug up from two centuries—in the midst of our New England civilization, that dare not say its soul is its own, nor proclaim that it is wrong to sell a man at auction, and not have him show himself as he is. Put a hound in the presence of a deer, and he springs at his throat if he is a true bloodhound. Put a Christian in the presence of a sin, and he will spring at its throat if he is a true Christian. Into an acid we may throw white matter, but unless it is chalk, it will not produce agitation. So, if in a world of sinners you were to put American Christianity, it would be calm as oil. But put one Christian, like John Brown of Osawatomie, and he makes the whole crystallize into right and wrong, and marshal themselves on one side or the other. God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to the American people that, whether that old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were a mob of murderers that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. The banks of the Potomac, doubly dear now to History and to Man! The dust of Washington rests there; and History will see forever on that river-side the brave old man on his pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the Father of his country would be proud to make room for beside his own. But if Virginia tyrants dare hang him, after this mockery of a trial, it will take two more Washingtons at least to make the name of the State any thing but abominable in time to come. (Applause and hisses.) Well, I say what I really think, (cheers, and cries of "good, good.") George Washington was a great man. Yet I say what I really think. And I know, ladies and gentlemen, that, educated as you have been by the experience of the last ten years here, you would have thought me the silliest as well as the most cowardly man in the world, if I should have come, with my twenty years behind me, and talked about any thing else to-night except that great example which one man has set us on the banks of the Potomac. You expected, of course, that I should tell you my real opinion of it.

I value this element that Brown has introduced into American politics. The South is a great power—no cowards in Virginia. (Laughter.) It was not cowardice. (Laughter.) Now, I try to speak very plain, but you will misunderstand me. There is no cowardice in Virginia. The South are not cowards. The lunatics in the Gospel were not cowards when they said, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" (Laughter.) They were brave enough, but they saw afar off. They saw the tremendous power that was entering into that charmed circle; they knew its inevitable victory. Virginia did not tremble at an old gray-headed man at Harper's Ferry; they trembled at a John Brown in every man's own conscience. He had been there many years, and, like that terrific scene which Beckford has drawn for us in his Hall of Eblis, where the crowd runs around, each man with an incurable wound in his bosom, and agrees not to speak of it; so the South has been running up and down its political and social life, and every man keeps his right hand pressed on the secret and incurable sore, with an understood agreement, in Church and State, that it never shall be mentioned, for fear the great ghastly fabric shall come to pieces at the talismanic word. Brown uttered it; cried, "Slavery is sin! come, all true men, help pull it down," and the whole machinery trembled to its very base.

I value this movement for another reason. Did you ever see a blacksmith shoe a restless horse? If you have, you have seen him take a small cord and tie the upper lip. Ask him what he does it for, he will tell you to give the beast something to think of. (Laughter.) Now, the South has extensive schemes. She grasps with one hand a Mexico, and with the other she dictates terms to the Church, she imposes conditions on the State, she buys up Webster with a little or a promise, and Everett with nothing. (Great laughter and applause.) John Brown has given her something else to think of. He has turned her attention inwardly. He has taught her that there has been created a new element in this Northern mind; that it is not merely the thinker, that it is not merely the editor, that it is not merely the moral reformer, but the idea has pervaded all classes of society. Call them madmen if you will. Hard to tell who's mad. The world says one man is mad. John Brown said the same of the Governor. You remember the madman in Edinburgh. A friend asked him what he was there for. "Well," cried he, "they said at home that I was mad; and I said I was not; but they had the majority." (Laughter.) Just so it is in regard to John Brown. The nation says he is mad. I appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober; I appeal from the American people, drunk with cotton, and the New York Observer, (loud and long laughter,) to the American people fifty  years hence, when the light of civilization has had more time to penetrate, when self-interest has been rebuked by the world rising and giving its verdict on these great questions, when it is not a small band of Abolitionists, but the civilization of the nineteenth century, in all its varied forms, interests, and elements, that undertakes to enter the arena, and discuss this last great reform. When that day comes, what will be thought of these first martyrs, who teach us how to live and how to die?

Has the slave a right to resist his master? I will not argue that question to a people hoarse with shouting ever since July 4, 1776, that all men are created equal, that the right to liberty is inalienable, and that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." But may he resist to blood— with rifles? What need of proving that to a people who load down Bunker Hill with granite, and crowd their public squares with images of Washington; ay, worship the sword go blindly that, leaving their oldest statesmen idle, they go down to the bloodiest battle field in Mexico to drag out a President? But may one help the slave resist, as Brown did? Ask Byron on his death-bed in the marshes of Missolonghi. Ask the Hudson as its waters kiss your shore, what answer they bring from the grave of Kosciusko. I hide the Connecticut Puritan behind Lafayette, bleeding at Brandywine, in behalf of a nation his rightful king forbade him to visit.

But John Brown violated the law. Yes. On yonder desk lie the inspired words of men who died violent deaths for breaking the laws of Rome. Why do you listen to them so reverently? Huss and Wickliffe violated laws, why honor them? George Washington, had he been caught before 1783, would have died on the gibbet, for breaking the laws of his sovereign. Yet I have heard that man praised within six months. Yes, you say, but these men broke bad laws. Just so. It is honorable, then, to break bad laws, and such law breaking History loves and God blesses! Who says, then, that slave laws are not ten thousand times worse than any those men resisted? Whatever argument excuses them, makes John Brown a saint.

Suppose John Brown had not staid at Harper's Ferry. Suppose on that momentous Monday night, when the excited imaginations of two thousand Charlestown people had enlarged him and his little band into four hundred white men and two hundred blacks, he had vanished, and when the gallant troops arrived there, two thousand strong, they had found nobody! The mountains would have been peopled with enemies; the Alleghanies would have heaved with insurrection! You never would have convinced Virginia that all Pennsylvania was not armed and on the hills. Suppose Massachusetts, free Massachusetts, had not given the world the telegraph to flash news like sunlight over half the globe. Then Tuesday would have rolled away, while slow-spreading through dazed Virginia crawled the news of this event. Meanwhile, a hundred men having rallied to Brown's side, he might have marched across the quaking State to Richmond and pardoned Governor Wise. Nat Turner's success, in 1831, shows this would have been possible. Free thought, mother of invention, not Virginia, baffled Brown. But free thought, in the long run, strangles tyrants. Virginia has not slept sound since Nat Turner led an insurrection in 1831, and she bids fair never to have a nap now. (Laughter.) For this is not an insurrection; this is the penetration of a different element. Mark you, it is not the oppressed race rising. Recollect history. There never was a race held in actual chains that vindicated its own liberty but one. There never was a serf nor a slave whose own sword cut off his own chain but one. Blue-eyed, light-haired Anglo-Saxon, it was not our race. We were serfs for three centuries, and we waited till commerce, and Christianity, and a different law, had melted our fetters. We were crowded down into a villanage which crushed out our manhood so thoroughly that we had not vigor enough left to redeem ourselves. Neither France nor Spain, neither the Northern nor the Southern races of Europe have that bright spot on their escutcheon, that they put an end to their own slavery. Blue-eyed, haughty, contemptuous Anglo-Saxons, it was the black the only race in the record of history that ever, after a century of oppression, retained the vigor to write the charter of its emancipation with its own hand in the blood of the dominant race. Despised, calumniated, slandered San Domingo is the only instance in history where a race, with indestructible love of liberty, after bearing a hundred years of oppression, rose up under their own leader, and with their own hands wrested chains from their own limbs. Wait, garrulous, ignorant, boasting Saxon, till you have done half as much, before you talk of the cowardice of the black race!

The slaves of our country have not risen, but, as in most other cases, redemption will come from the interference of a wiser, higher, more advanced civilization on its exterior. It is the almost universal record of history, and ours is a repetition of the same drama. We have awakened at last the enthusiasm of both classes—those that act from impulse, and those that act from calculation. It is a libel on the Yankee to think that it includes the whole race, when you say that if you put a dollar on the other side of hell, the Yankee will spring for it at any risk, (laughter;) for there is an element even in the Yankee blood that obeys ideas; there is an impulsive, enthusiastic aspiration, something left to us from the old Puritan stock; that which made England what she was two centuries ago; that which is fated to give the closest grapple with the Slave Power to-day. This is an invasion by outside power. Civilization in 1600 crept along our shores, now planting her foot, and then retreating; now gaining a foothold, and then receding before barbarism, till at last came Jamestown and Plymouth, and then thirty States.

Harper's Ferry is perhaps one of Raleigh's or Gosnold's colonies, vanishing and to be swept away; by and by will come the immortal one hundred, and Plymouth Rock, with "manifest destiny" written by God's hand on their banner, and the right of unlimited "ANNEXATION" granted by Heaven itself.

It is the lesson of the age. The first cropping out of it is in such a man as John Brown. Grant that he did not measure his means; that he was not thrifty as to his method; he did not calculate closely enough, and he was defeated. What is defeat? Nothing but education—nothing but the first step to something better. All that is wanted is, that our public opinion shall not creep around like a servile coward, corrupt, disordered, insane public opinion, and proclaim that Governor Wise, because he says he is a Governor, is a Governor; that Virginia is a State, because she says she is so.

Thank God, I am not a citizen. You will remember, all of you, citizens of the United States, that there was not a Virginia gun fired at John Brown. Hundreds of well-armed Maryland and Virginia troops rushed to Harper's Ferry and—went away! You shot him! Sixteen marines, to whom you pay eight dollars a month—your own representatives. When the disturbed State could not stand on her own legs for trembling, you went there and strengthened the feeble knees, and held up the palsied hand. Sixteen men, with the Vulture of the Union above them—(sensation)— your representatives! It was the covenant with death and agreement with hell, which you call the Union of thirty States, that took the old man by the throat with a pirate hand; and it will be the disgrace of our civilization if a gallows is ever erected in Virginia that bears his body. "The most resolute man I ever saw," says Governor Wise, "the most daring, the coolest. I would trust his truth about any question. The sincerest!" Sincerity, courage, resolute daring, beating in a heart that feared God, and dared all to help his brother to liberty—Virginia has nothing, nothing for those qualities but a scaffold! (Applause.) In her broad dominion she can only afford him six feet for a grave! God help the Commonwealth that bids such welcome to the noblest qualities that can grace poor human nature! Yet that is the acknowledgment of Governor Wise himself! I will not dignify such a horde with the name of a Despotism; since Despotism is sometimes magnanimous. Witness Russia, covering Schamyl with generous protection. Compare that with mad Virginia, hurrying forward this ghastly trial.

They say it cost the officers and persons in responsible positions more effort to keep hundreds of startled soldiers from shooting the five prisoners, sixteen marines had made, than it cost those marines to take the Armory itself. Soldiers and civilians both alike—only a mob fancying itself a government! And mark you, I have said they were not a government. They not only are not a government, but they have not even the remotest idea of what a government is. (Laughter.) They do not begin to have the faintest conception of what a civilized government is. Here is a man arraigned before a jury, or about to be. The State of Virginia, as she calls herself, is about to try him. The first step in that trial is a jury; the second is a judge; and at the head stands the Chief Executive of the State, who holds the power to pardon murder; and yet that very Executive, who, according to the principles of the sublimest chapter in Algernon Sydney's immortal book, is bound by the very responsibility that rests on him, to keep his mind impartial as to the guilt of any person arraigned, hastens down to Richmond, hurries to the platform, and proclaims to the assembled Commonwealth of Virginia, "The man is a murderer, and ought to be hung." Almost every lip in the State might have said it except that single lip of its Governor; and the moment he had uttered these words, in the theory of the English law, it was not possible to impannel an impartial jury in the Commonwealth of Virginia; it was not possible to get the materials and the machinery to try him according to even the ugliest pattern of English jurisprudence. And yet the Governor does not know that he has written himself down non compos, and the Commonwealth that he governs supposes itself still a Christian polity. They have not the faintest conception of what goes to make up government. The worst Jeffries that ever, in his most drunken hour, climbed up a lamp-post in the streets of London, would not have tried a man who could not stand on his feet. There is no such record in the blackest roll of tyranny. If Jeffries could speak, he would thank God that at last his name might be taken down from the gibbet of History, since the Virginia Beach has made his worst act white, set against the blackness of this modern infamy. (Applause.) And yet the New York press daily prints the accounts of the trial. Trial! In the names of Holt and Somers, of Hale and Erskine, of Parsons, Marshall, and Jay, I protest against the name. Trial for life, in Anglo-Saxon dialect, has a proud, historic meaning. It includes indictment by impartial peers; a copy of such indictment and a list of witnesses furnished the prisoner, with ample time to scrutinize both; liberty to choose, and time to get counsel; a sound body and a sound mind to arrange one's defence; I need not add, a judge and jury impartial as the lot of humanity will admit; honored bulwarks and safeguards, each one the trophy and result of a century's struggle. Wounded, fevered, lying half unconscious on his pallet, unable to stand on his feet, the trial half finished before his first request for aid had reached his friends,—no list of witnesses or knowledge of them till the crier, calling the name of some assassin of his comrades, wakes him to consciousness; the judge a tool, and the prosecutor seeking popularity by pandering to the mob; no decent form observed, and the essence of a fair trial wholly wanting, our History and Law alike protest against degrading the honored name of Jury Trial by leading it to such an outrage as this. The Inquisition used to break every other bone in a man's body, and then lay him on a pallet, giving him neither counsel nor opportunity to consult one, and wring from his tortured mouth something like a confession, and call it a trial. But it was heaven-robed innocence compared with the trial, or what the New York press call so, that has been going on in crazed and maddened Charlestown.

I wish I could say any thing worthy of the great deed which has taken place in our day—the opening of the sixth seal, the pouring out of the last vial but one on a corrupt and giant Institution. I know that many men will deem me a fanatic for uttering this whosesale vituperation, as it will be called, upon a State, and this indorsement of a madman. I can only say that I have spoken on this Anti-slavery question before the American people thirty years; that I have seen the day when this same phase of popular feeling—rifles and force—was on the other side. You remember the first time I was ever privileged to stand on this platform by the magnanimous generosity of your clergyman, when New York was about to bully and crush out the freedom of speech at the dictation of Capt. Rynders. From that day to this, the same braving of public thought has been going on from here to Kansas, until it bloomed in the events of the last three years. It has changed the whole face of the sentiment in these Northern States. You meet with the evidence of it every where. When the first news from Harper's Ferry came to Massachusetts, if you were riding in the cars, if you were walking in the streets, if you met a Democrat, or a Whig, or a Republican, no matter what his politics, it was a singular circumstance that he did not speak of the guilt of Brown, of the atrocity of the deed, as you might have expected. The first impulsive expression, the first outbreak of every man's words was, "What a pity he did not succeed! (Laughter.) What a fool he was for not going off Monday, when he had all he wanted! How strange that he did not take his victory, and march away with it!" It indicated the unconscious leavening of a sympathy with the attempt. Days followed on; they commenced what they called their trial; you met the same classes again; no man said he ought to be hung; no man said he was guilty; no man predicated any thing of his moral position; every man voluntarily and inevitably seemed to give vent to his indignation at the farce of a trial, indicative again of that unheeded, potent, unconscious, but widespread sympathy on the side of Brown.

Do you suppose that these things mean nothing? What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, as Emerson says, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the charter of nations. The American people have begun to feel. The mute eloquence of the fugitive slave has gone up and down the highways and byways of the country; it will annex itself to the great American heart of the North, even in the most fossil state of its hunkerism, as a latent sympathy with its right side. This blow, like the first gun at Lexington, "heard around the world,"—this blow at Harper's Ferry reveals men. Watch those about you, and you will see more of the temper and unconscious purpose and real moral position of men than you would imagine. This is the way nations are to be judged. Be not in a hurry; action will come soon enough from this sentiment. We stereotype feeling into intellect, and then into statutes, and finally into national character. We have now the first stage of growth. Nature's live growths crowd out and rive dead matter. Ideas strangle statutes. Pulse-beats wear down granite, whether piled in jails or Capitols. The people's hearts are the only title-deeds after all. Your Barnburners said, "Patroon titles are unrighteous." Judges replied, "Such is the law." Wealth shrieked, "Vested rights!" Parties talked of Constitutions; still, the people said, "Sin." They shot a sheriff. A parrot press cried, "Anarchy!" Lawyers growled, "Murder!"—still, nobody

was hung, if I recollect aright. To-day, the heart of the Barnburner beats in the statute-book of your State. John Brown's movement against Slavery is exactly the same. Wait a while, and you'll all agree with me. What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed to-morrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.

John Brown has stirred those omnipotent pulses—Lydia Maria Childs is one. She says, "That dungeon is the place for me," and writes a letter in magnanimous appeal to the better nature of Gov. Wise. She says in it, "John Brown is a hero; he has done a noble deed. I think he was all right; but he is sick; he is wounded; he wants a woman's nursing. I am an Abolitionist; I have been so thirty years. I think Slavery is a sin, and John Brown a saint; but I want to come and nurse him; and I pledge my word that if you will open his prison door, I will use the privilege, under sacred honor, only to nurse him. I enclose you a message to Brown; be sure and deliver it." And the message was, "Old man, God bless you! You have struck a noble blow; you have done a mighty work; God was with you; your heart was in the right place. I send you across five hundred miles the pulse of a woman's gratitude." And Gov. Wise has opened the door, and announced to the world that she may go in. John Brown has conquered the pirate. (Applause.) Hope! there is hope every where. It is only the universal history:

“Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne;

But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.”

SOURCE: James Redpath, Editor, Echoes of Harper’s Ferry, p. 43-66

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Senator John C. Calhoun: The Address of the Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents, January 15, 1849

We, whose names are hereunto annexed, address you in discharge of what we believe to be a solemn duty, on the most important subject ever presented for your consideration. We allude to the conflict between the two great sections of the Union, growing out of a difference of feeling and opinion in reference to the relation existing between the two races, the European and African, which inhabit the southern section, and the acts of aggression and encroachment to which it has led.

The conflict commenced not long after the acknowledgment of our independence, and has gradually increased until it has arrayed the great body of the North against the South on this most vital subject. In the progress of this conflict, aggression has followed aggression, and encroachment encroachment, until they have reached a point when a regard for your peace and safety will not permit us to remain longer silent. The object of this address is to give you a clear, correct, but brief account of the whole series of aggression and encroachments on your rights, with a statement of the dangers to which they expose you. Our object in making it is not to cause excitement, but to put you in full possession of all the facts and circumstances necessary to a full and just conception of a deep-seated disease, which threatens great danger to you and the whole body politic. We act on the impression, that in a popular government like ours, a true conception of the actual character and state of a disease is indispensable to effecting a cure.

We have made it a joint address, because we believe that the magnitude of the subject required that it should assume the most impressive and solemn form.

Not to go further back, the difference of opinion and feeling in reference to the relation between the two races, disclosed itself in the Convention that framed the Constitution, and constituted one of the greatest difficulties in forming it. After many efforts, it was overcome by a compromise, which provided in the first place, that representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the States according to their respective numbers; and that, in ascertaining the number of each, five slaves shall be estimated as three. In the next, that slaves escaping into States where slavery does not exist, shall not be discharged from servitude, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom their labor or service is due. In the third place, that Congress shall not prohibit the importation of slaves before the year 1808; but a tax not exceeding ten dollars may be imposed on each imported. And finally, that no capitation or direct tax shall be laid, but in proportion to federal numbers; and that no amendment of the Constitution, prior to 1808, shall affect this provision, nor that relating to the importation of slaves.

So satisfactory were these provisions, that the second, relative to the delivering up of fugitive slaves, was adopted unanimously, and all the rest, except the third, relative to the importation of slaves until 1808, with almost equal unanimity. They recognize the existence of slavery, and make a specific provision for its protection where it was supposed to be the most exposed. They go further, and incorporate it, as an important element, in determining the relative weight of the several States in the Government of the Union, and the respective burden they should bear in laying capitation and direct taxes. It was well understood at the time, that without them the Constitution would not have been adopted by the Southern States, and of course that they constituted elements so essential to the system that it never would have existed without them. The Northern States, knowing all this, ratified the Constitution, thereby pledging their faith, that faith has been kept and that pledge redeemed we shall next proceed to show.

With few exceptions of no great importance, the South had no cause to complain prior to the year 1819—a year, it is to be feared, destined to mark a train of events, bringing with them many, and great, and fatal disasters, on the country and its institutions. With it commenced the agitating debate on the question of the admission of Missouri into the Union. We shall pass by for the present this question, and others of the same kind, directly growing out of it, and shall proceed to consider the effects of that spirit of discord, which it roused up between the two sections. It first disclosed itself in the North, by hostility to that portion of the Constitution which provides for the delivering up of fugitive slaves. In its progress it led to the adoption of hostile acts, intended to render it of non-effect, and with so much success that it may be regarded now as practically expunged from the Constitution. How this has been effected will be next explained.

After a careful examination, truth constrains us to say, that it has been by a clear and palpable evasion of the Constitution. It is impossible for any provision to be more free from ambiguity or doubt. It is in the following words: "No person held to service, or labor, in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another State, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." All is clear. There is not an uncertain or equivocal word to be found in the whole provision. What shall not be done, and what shall be done, are fully and explicitly set forth. The former provides that the fugitive slave shall not be discharged from his servitude by any law or regulation of the State wherein he is found; and the latter, that he shall be delivered up on claim of his owner.

We do not deem it necessary to undertake to refute the sophistry and subterfuges by which so plain a provision of the Constitution has been evaded, and, in effect, annulled. It constitutes an essential part of the constitutional compact, and of course of the supreme law of the land. As such it is binding on all, the Federal and State Governments, the States and the individuals composing them. The sacred obligation of compact, and the solemn injunction of the supreme law, which legislators and judges, both Federal and State, are bound by oath to support, all unite to enforce its fulfilment, according to its plain meaning and true intent. What that meaning and intent are, there was no diversity of opinion in the better days of the Republic, prior to 1819. Congress, State Legislatures, State and Federal Judges and Magistrates, and people, all spontaneously placed the same interpretation on it. During that period none interposed impediments in the way of the owner seeking to recover his fugitive slave; nor did any deny his right to have every proper facility to enforce his claim to have him delivered up. It was then nearly as easy to recover one found in a Northern State, as one found in a neighboring Southern State. But this has passed away, and the provision is defunct, except perhaps in two States.1

When we take into consideration the importance and clearness of this provision, the evasion by which it has been set aside may fairly be regarded as one of the most fatal blows ever received by the South and the Union. This cannot be more concisely and correctly stated, than it has been by two of the learned judges of the Supreme Court of the United States. In one of his decisions2 Judge Story said: "Historically it is well known that the object of this clause was to secure to the citizens of the slaveholding States the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves, as property, in every State of the Union, into which they might escape, from the State wherein they were held in servitude." "The full recognition of this right and title was indispensable to the security of this species of property, in all the slaveholding States, and, indeed, was so vital to the preservation of their interests and institutions, that it cannot be doubted, that it constituted a fundamental article without the adoption of which the Union would not have been formed. Its true design was to guard against the doctrines and principles prevalent in the non-slaveholding States, by preventing them from intermeddling with, or restricting, or abolishing the rights of the owners of slaves."

Again: "The clause was therefore of the last importance to the safety and security of the Southern States, and could not be surrendered by them without endangering their whole property in slaves. The clause was accordingly adopted in the Constitution by the unanimous consent of the framers of it—a proof at once of its intrinsic and practical necessity."

Again: "The clause manifestly contemplates the existence of a positive unqualified right on the part of the owner of the slave, which no State law or regulation can in any way regulate, control, qualify, or restrain."

The opinion of the other learned judges was not less emphatic as to the importance of this provision and the unquestionable right of the South under it. Judge Baldwin, in charging the jury, said:3 "If there are any rights of property which can be enforced, if one citizen have any rights of property which are inviolable under the protection of the supreme law of the State, and the Union, they are those which have been set at nought by some of these defendants. As the owner of property, which he had a perfect right to possess, protect, and take away—as a citizen of a sister State, entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of any other States—Mr. Johnson stands before you on ground which cannot be taken from under him—it is the same ground on which the Government itself is based. If the defendants can be justified, we have no longer law or government." Again, after referring more particularly to the provision for delivering up fugitive slaves, he said: "Thus you see, that the foundations of the Government are laid, and rest on the right of property in slaves. The whole structure must fall by disturbing the corner-stone."

These are grave and solemn and admonitory words, from a high source. They confirm all for which the South has ever contended, as to the clearness, importance, and fundamental character of this provision, and the disastrous consequences which would inevitably follow from its violation. But in spite of these solemn warnings, the violation, then commenced, and which they were intended to rebuke, has been full and perfectly consummated. The citizens of the South, in their attempt to recover their slaves, now meet, instead of aid and co-operation, resistance in every form; resistance from hostile acts of legislation, intended to baffle and defeat their claims by all sorts of devices, and by interposing every description of impediment—resistance from judges and magisrates—and finally, when all these fail, from mobs, composed of whites and blacks, which, by threats or force, rescue the fugitive slave from the possession of his rightful owner. The attempt to recover a slave, in most of the Northern States, cannot now be made without the hazard of insult, heavy pecuniary loss, imprisonment, and even of life itself. Already has a worthy citizen of Maryland lost his life4 in making an attempt to enforce his claim to a fugitive slave under this provision.

But a provision of the Constitution may be violated indirectly as well as directly; by doing an act in its nature inconsistent with that which is enjoined to be done. Of the form of violation, there is a striking instance connected with the provision under consideration. We allude to secret combinations which are believed to exist in many of the Northern States, whose object is to entice, decoy, entrap, inveigle, and seduce slaves to escape from their owners, and to pass them secretly and rapidly, by means organized for the purpose, into Canada, where they will be beyond the reach of the provision. That to entice a slave, by whatever artifice, to abscond from his owner, into a non-slaveholding State, with the intention to place him beyond the reach of the provision, or prevent his recovery, by concealment or otherwise, is as completely repugnant to it, as its open violation would be, is too clear to admit of doubt or to require illustration. And yet, as repugnant as these combinations are to the true intent of the provision, it is believed, that, with the above exception, not one of the States, within whose limits they exist, has adopted any measure to suppress them, or to punish those by whose agency the object for which they were formed is carried into execution. On the contrary, they have looked on, and witnessed with indifference, if not with secret approbation, a great number of slaves enticed from their owners, and placed beyond the possibility of recovery, to the great annoyance and heavy pecuniary loss of the bordering Southern States.

When we take into consideration the great importance of this provision, the absence of all uncertainty as to its true meaning and intent, the many guards by which it is surrounded to protect and enforce it, and then reflect how completely the object for which it was inserted in the Constitution is defeated by these two-fold infractions, we doubt, taking all together, whether a more flagrant breach of faith is to be found on record. We know the language we have used is strong, but it is not less true than strong.

There remains to be noticed another class of aggressive acts of a kindred character, but which instead of striking at an express and specific provision of the Constitution, aims directly at destroying the relation between the two races at the South, by means subversive in their tendency of one of the ends for which the Constitution was established. We refer to the systematic agitation of the question by the Abolitionists, which, commencing about 1835, is still continued in all possible forms. Their avowed intention is to bring about a state of things that will force emancipation on the South. To unite the North in fixed hostility to slavery in the South, and to excite discontent among the slaves with their condition, are among the means employed to effect it. With a view to bring about the former, every means are resorted to in order to render the South, and the relation between the two races there, odious and hateful to the North. For this purpose societies and newspapers are everywhere established, debating clubs opened, lecturers employed, pamphlets and other publications, pictures and petitions to Congress, resorted to, and directed to that single point, regardless of truth or decency; while the circulation of incendiary publications in the South, the agitation of the subject of abolition in Congress, and the employment of emissaries are relied on to excite discontent among the slaves. This agitation, and the use of these means, have been continued with more or less activity for a series of years, not without doing much towards effecting the object intended. We regard both object and means to be aggressive and dangerous to the rights of the South, and subversive, as stated, of one of the ends for which the Constitution was established. Slavery is a domestic institution. It belongs to the States, each for itself to decide, whether it shall be established or not; and if it be established, whether it should be abolished or not. Such being the clear and unquestionable right of the States, it follows necessarily that it would be a flagrant act of aggression on a State, destructive of its rights, and subversive of its independence, for the Federal Government, or one or more States, or their people, to undertake to force on it the emancipation of its slaves. But it is a sound maxim in politics, as well as law and morals, that no one has a right to do that indirectly which he cannot do directly, and it may be added with equal truth, to aid, or abet, or countenance another in doing it. And yet the Abolitionists of the North, openly avowing their intention, and resorting to the most efficient means for the purpose, have been attempting to bring about a state of things to force the Southern States to emancipate their slaves, without any act on the part of any Northern State to arrest or suppress the means by which they propose to accomplish it. They have been permitted to pursue their object and to use whatever means they please, if without aid or countenance, also without resistance or disapprobation. What gives a deeper shade to the whole affair, is the fact, that one of the means to effect their object, that of exciting discontent among our slaves, tends directly to subvert what its preamble declares to be one of the ends for which the Constitution was ordained and established: "to insure domestic tranquillity," and that in the only way in which domestic tranquillity is likely ever to be disturbed in the South. Certain it is, that an agitation so systematic—having such an object in view, and sought to be carried into execution by such means—would, between independent nations, constitute just cause of remonstrance by the party against which the aggression was directed, and if not heeded, an appeal to arms for redress. Such being the case where an aggression of the kind takes place among independent nations, how much more aggravated must it be between confederated States, where the Union precludes an appeal to arms, while it affords a medium through which it can operate with vastly increased force and effect? That it would be perverted to such a use, never entered into the imagination of the generation which formed and adopted the Constitution, and, if it had been supposed it would, it is certain that the South never would have adopted it.

We now return to the question of the admission of Missouri into the Union, and shall proceed to give a brief sketch of the occurrences connected with it, and the consequences to which it has directly led. In the latter part of 1819, the then territory of Missouri applied to Congress, in the usual form, for leave to form a State Constitution and Government, in order to be admitted into the Union. A bill was reported for the purpose, with the usual provisions in such cases. Amendments were offered, having for their object to make it a condition of her admission, that her Constitution should have a provision to prohibit slavery. This brought on the agitating debate, which, with the effects that followed, has done so much to alienate the South and North, and endanger our political institutions. Those who objected to the amendments, rested their opposition on the high grounds of the right of self-government. They claimed that a territory, having reached the period when it is proper for it to form a Constitution and Government for itself, becomes fully vested with all the rights of self-government; and that even the condition imposed on it by the Federal Constitution, relates not to the formation of its Constitution and Government, but its admission into the Union. For that purpose, it provides as a condition, that the Government must be Republican.

They claimed that Congress has no right to add to this condition, and that to assume it would be tantamount to the assumption of the right to make its entire Constitution and Government; as no limitation could be imposed, as to the extent of the right, if it be admitted that it exists at all. Those who supported the amendment denied these grounds, and claimed the right of Congress to impose, at discretion, what conditions it pleased. In this agitating debate, the two sections stood arrayed against each other; the South in favor of the bill without amendment, and the North opposed to it without it. The debate and agitation continued until the session was well advanced; but it became apparent, towards its close, that the people of Missouri were fixed and resolved in their opposition to the proposed condition, and that they would certainly reject it, and adopt a Constitution without it, should the bill pass with the condition. Such being the case, it required no great effort of mind to perceive, that Missouri, once in possession of a Constitution and Government, not simply on paper, but with legislators elected, and officers appointed, to carry them into effect, the grave questions would be presented, whether she was of right a Territory or State; and, if the latter, whether Congress had the right, and, if the right, the power, to abrogate her Constitution, disperse her legislature, and to remand her back to the territorial condition. These were great, and, under the circumstances, fearful questions—too fearful to be met by those who had raised the agitation. From that time the only question was, how to escape from the difficulty. Fortunately, a means was afforded. A Compromise (as it was called) was offered, based on the terms, that the North should cease to oppose the admission of Missouri on the grounds for which the South contended, and that the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787, for the government of the Northwestern Territory, should be applied to all the territory acquired by the United States from France under the treaty of Louisiana lying North of 36° 30', except the portion lying in the State of Missouri. The Northern members embraced it; and although not originating with them, adopted it as their own. It was forced through Congress by the almost united votes of the North, against a minority consisting almost entirely of members from the Southern States.

Such was the termination of this, the first conflict, under the Constitution, between the two sections, in reference to slavery in connection with the territories. Many hailed it as a permanent and final adjustment that would prevent the recurrence of similar conflicts; but others, less sanguine, took the opposite and more gloomy view, regarding it as the precursor of a train of events which might rend the Union asunder, and prostrate our political system. One of these was the experienced and sagacious Jefferson. Thus far, time would seem to favor his forebodings. May a returning sense of justice and a protecting Providence, avert their final fulfilment.

For many years the subject of slavery in reference to the territories ceased to agitate the country. Indications, however, connected with the question of annexing Texas, showed clearly that it was ready to break out again, with redoubled violence, on some future occasion. The difference in the case of Texas was adjusted by extending the Missouri compromise line of 36° 30', from its terminus, on the western boundary of the Louisiana purchase, to the western boundary of Texas. The agitation again ceased for a short period.

The war with Mexico soon followed, and that terminated in the acquisition of New Mexico and Upper California, embracing an area equal to about one half of the entire valley of the Mississippi. If to this we add the portion of Oregon acknowledged to be ours by the recent treaty with England, our whole territory on the Pacific and west of the Rocky Mountains will be found to be in extent but little less than that vast valley. The near prospect of so great an addition rekindled the excitement between the North and South in reference to slavery in its connection with the territories, which has become, since those on the Pacific were acquired, more universal and intense than ever.

The effects have been to widen the difference between the two sections, and to give a more determined and hostile character to their conflict. The North no longer respects the Missouri compromise line, although adopted by their almost unanimous vote. Instead of compromise, they avow that their determination is to exclude slavery from all the territories of the United States, acquired, or to be acquired; and, of course, to prevent the citizens of the Southern States from emigrating with their property in slaves into any of them. Their object, they allege, is to prevent the extension of slavery, and ours to extend it, thus making the issue between them and us to be the naked question, shall slavery be extended or not? We do not deem it necessary, looking to the object of this address, to examine the question so fully discussed at the last session, whether Congress has the right to exclude the citizens of the South from immigrating with their property into territories belonging to the confederated States of the Union. What we propose in this connection is, to make a few remarks on what the North alleges, erroneously, to be the issue between us and them.

So far from maintaining the doctrine, which the issue implies, we hold that the Federal Government has no right to extend or restrict slavery, no more than to establish or abolish it; nor has it any right whatever to distinguish between the domestic institutions of one State, or section, and another, in order to favor the one and discourage the other. As the federal representative of each and all the States, it is bound to deal out, within the sphere of its powers, equal and exact justice and favor to all. To act otherwise, to undertake to discriminate between the domestic institutions of one and another, would be to act in total subversion of the end for which it was established—to be the common protector and guardian of all. Entertaining these opinions, we ask not, as the North alleges we do, for the extension of slavery. That would make a discrimination in our favor, as unjust and unconstitutional as the discrimination they ask against us in their favor. It is not for them, nor for the Federal Government to determine, whether our domestic institution is good or bad; or whether it should be repressed or preserved. It belongs to us, and us only, to decide such questions. What then we do insist on, is, not to extend slavery, but that we shall not be prohibited from immigrating with our property, into the Territories of the United States, because we are slaveholders; or, in other words, that we shall not on that account be disfranchised of a privilege possessed by all others, citizens and foreigners, without discrimination as to character, profession, or color. All, whether savage, barbarian, or civilized, may freely enter and remain, we only being excluded.

We rest our claim, not only on the high grounds above stated, but also on the solid foundation of right, justice, and equality. The territories immediately in controversy—New Mexico and California—were acquired by the common sacrifice and efforts of all the States, towards which the South contributed far more than her full share of men,5 to say nothing of money, and is, of course, on every principle of right, justice, fairness, and equality, entitled to participate fully in the benefits to be derived from their acquisition. But as impregnable as is this ground, there is another not. less so. Ours is a Federal Government—a Government in which not individuals, but States, as distinct sovereign communities, are the constituents. To them, as members of the Federal Union, the territories belong; and they are hence declared to be territories belonging to the United States. The States, then, are the joint owners. Now it is conceded by all writers on the subject, that in all such Governments their members are all equal—equal in rights and equal in dignity. They also concede that this equality constitutes the basis of such Government, and that it cannot be destroyed without changing their nature and character. To deprive, then, the Southern States and their citizens of their full share in territories declared to belong to them, in common with the other States, would be in derogation of the equality belonging to them as members of a Federal Union, and sink them, from being equals, into a subordinate and dependent condition. Such are the solid and impregnable grounds on which we rest our demand to an equal participation in the territories.

But as solid and impregnable as they are in the eyes of justice and reason, they oppose a feeble resistance to a majority, determined to engross the whole. At the last session of Congress, a bill was passed, establishing a territorial government for Oregon, excluding slavery therefrom. The President gave his sanction to the bill, and sent a special message to Congress assigning his reasons for doing so. These reasons presupposed that the Missouri compromise was to be, and would be, extended west of the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean. And the President intimated his intention in his message to veto any future bill that should restrict slavery south of the line of that compromise. Assuming it to have been the purpose and intention of the North to extend the Missouri compromise line as above indicated, the passage of the Oregon bill could only be regarded as evincing the acquiescence of the South in that line. But the developments of the present session of Congress have made it manifest to all, that no such purpose or intention now exists with the North to any considerable extent. Of the truth of this, we have ample evidence in what has occurred already in the House of Representatives, where the popular feelings are soonest and most intensely felt.

Although Congress has been in session but little more than one month, a greater number of measures of an aggressive character have been introduced, and they more aggravated and dangerous, than have been for years before. And what clearly discloses whence they take their origin, is the fact, that they all relate to the territorial aspect of the subject of slavery, or some other of a nature and character intimately connected with it.

The first of this series of aggressions is a resolution introduced by a member from Massachusetts, the object of which is to repeal all acts which recognize the existence of slavery, or authorize the selling and disposing of slaves in this District. On question of leave to bring in a bill, the votes stood 69 for and 82 against leave. The next was a resolution offered by a member from Ohio, instructing the Committee on Territories to report forthwith bills for excluding slavery from California and New Mexico.6 It passed by a vote of 107 to 80. That was followed by a bill introduced by another member from Ohio, to take the votes of the inhabitants of this District, on the question whether slavery within its limits should be abolished.

The bill provided, according to the admission of the mover, that free negroes and slaves should vote. On the question to lay the bill on the table, the votes stood, for 106, against 79. To this succeeded the resolution of a member from New York, in the following words:

"Whereas the traffic now prosecuted in this metropolis of the Republic in human beings, as chattels, is contrary to natural justice and the fundamental principles of our political system, and is notoriously a reproach to our country, throughout Christendom, and a serious hinderance to the progress of republican liberty among the nations of the earth. Therefore,

 

"Resolved, That the Committee for the District of Columbia be instructed to report a bill, as soon as practicable, prohibiting the slave trade in said District."

On the question of adopting the resolution, the votes stood 98 for, and 88 against. He was followed by a member from Illinois, who offered a resolution for abolishing slavery in the Territories, and all places where Congress has exclusive powers of legislation, that is, in all forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings, purchased by Congress with the consent of the Legislature of the State.

This resolution was passed over under the rules of the House without being put to vote.

The votes in favor of all these measures were confined to the members from the Northern States. True, there are some patriotic members from that section who voted against all of them, and whose high sense of justice is duly appreciated; who in the progress of the aggressions upon the South have, by their votes, sustained the guaranties of the Constitution, and of whom we regret to say many have been sacrificed at home by their patriotic course.

We have now brought to a close a narrative of the series of acts of aggression and encroachment, connected with the subject of this address, including those that are consummated and those still in progress. They are numerous, great, and dangerous, and threaten with destruction the greatest and most vital of all the interests and institutions of the South. Indeed, it may be doubted whether there is a single provision, stipulation, or guaranty of the Constitution, intended for the security of the South, that has not been rendered almost perfectly nugatory. It may even be made a serious question, whether the encroachments already made, without the aid of any other, would not, if permitted to operate unchecked, end in emancipation, and that at no distant day. But be that as it may, it hardly admits of a doubt that, if the aggressions already commenced in the House, and now in progress, should be consummated, such in the end would certainly be the consequence.

Little, in truth, would be left to be done after we have been excluded from all the territories, including those to be hereafter acquired; after slavery is abolished in this District and in the numerous places dispersed all over the South, where Congress has the exclusive right of legislation, and after the other measures proposed are consummated. Every outpost and barrier would be carried, and nothing would be left but to finish the work of abolition at pleasure in the States themselves. This District, and all places over which Congress has exclusive power of legislation, would be asylums for fugitive slaves, where, as soon as they placed their feet, they would become, according to the doctrines of our Northern assailants, free, unless there should be some positive enactments to prevent it.

Under such a state of things the probability is, that emancipation would soon follow, without any final act to abolish slavery. The depressing effects of such measures on the white race at the South, and the hope they would create in the black of a speedy emancipation, would produce a state of feeling inconsistent with the much longer continuance of the existing relations between the two. But be that as it may, it is certain, if emancipation did not follow, as a matter of course, the final act in the States would not be long delayed. The want of constitutional power would oppose a feeble resistance. The great body of the North is united against our peculiar institution. Many believe it to be sinful, and the residue, with inconsiderable exceptions, believe it to be wrong. Such being the case, it would indicate a very superficial knowledge of human nature, to think that, after aiming at abolition, systematically, for so many years, and pursuing it with such unscrupulous disregard of law and Constitution, that the fanatics who have led the way and forced the great body of the North to follow them, would, when the finishing stroke only remained to be given, voluntarily suspend it, or permit any constitutional scruples or considerations of justice to arrest it. To these may be added an aggression, though not yet commenced, long meditated and threatened to prohibit what the abolitionists call the internal slave trade, meaning thereby the transfer of slaves from one State to another, from whatever motive done, or however effected. Their object would seem to be to render them worthless by crowding them together where they are, and thus hasten the work of emancipation. There is reason for believing that it will soon follow those now in progress, unless, indeed, some decisive step should be taken in the mean time to arrest the whole.

The question then is, Will the measures of aggression proposed in the House be adopted?

They may not, and probably will not be this session. But when we take into consideration, that there is a majority now in favor of one of them, and a strong minority in favor of the other, so far as the sense of the House has been taken; that there will be in all probability a considerable increase in the next Congress of the vote in favor of them, and that it will be largely increased in the next succeeding Congress under the census to be taken next year, it amounts almost to a certainty that they will be adopted, unless some decisive measure is taken in advance to prevent it.

But, if even these conclusions should prove erroneous—if fanaticism and the love of power should, contrary to their nature, for once respect constitutional barriers, or if the calculations of policy should retard the adoption of these measures, or even defeat them altogether, there would be still left one certain way to accomplish their object, if the determination avowed by the North to monopolize all the territories, to the exclusion of the South, should be carried into effect. That of itself would, at no distant day, add to the North a sufficient number of States to give her three fourths of the whole; when, under the color of an amendment of the Constitution, she would emancipate our slaves, however opposed it might be to its true intent.

Thus, under every aspect, the result is certain, if aggression be not promptly and decidedly met. How it is to be met, it is for you to decide.

Such then being the case, it would be to insult you to suppose you could hesitate. To destroy the existing relation between the free and servile races at the South would lead to consequences unparalleled in history. They cannot be separated, and cannot live together in peace, or harmony, or to their mutual advantage, except in their present relation. Under any other, wretchedness, and misery, and desolation would overspread the whole South. The example of the British West Indies, as blighting as emancipation has proved to them, furnishes a very faint picture of the calamities it would bring on the South. The circumstances under which it would take place with us, would be entirely different from those which took place with them, and calculated to lead to far more disastrous results. There the Government of the parent country emancipated slaves in her colonial possessions—a Government rich and powerful, and actuated by views of policy (mistaken as they turned out to be), rather than fanaticism. It was besides, disposed to act justly towards the owners, even in the act of emancipating their slaves, and to protect and foster them afterwards. It accordingly appropriated nearly $100,000,000 as a compensation to them for their losses under the act, which sum, although it turned out to be far short of the amount, was thought at the time to be liberal. Since the emancipation, it has kept up a sufficient military and naval force to keep the blacks in awe, and a number of magistrates, and constables, and other civil officers, to keep order in the towns and on plantations, and enforce respect to their former owners. To a considerable extent these have served as a substitute for the police formerly kept on the plantations by the owners and their overseers, and to preserve the social and political superiority of the white race. But, notwithstanding all this, the British West India possessions are ruined, impoverished, miserable, wretched, and destined probably to be abandoned to the black race.

Very different would be the circumstances under which emancipation would take place with us. If it ever should be effected, it will be through the agency of the Federal Government, controlled by the dominant power of the Northern States of the Confederacy, against the resistance and struggle of the Southern. It can then only be effected by the prostration of the white race; and that would necessarily engender the bitterest feelings of hostility between them and the North. But the reverse would be the case between the blacks of the South and the people of the North. Owing their emancipation to them, they would regard them as friends, guardians, and patrons, and centre, accordingly, all their sympathy in them. The people of the North would not fail to reciprocate and to favor them, instead of the whites. Under the influence of such feelings, and impelled by fanaticism and love of power, they would not stop at emancipation. Another step would be taken—to raise them to a political and social equality with their former owners, by giving them the right of voting and holding public offices under the Federal Government. We see the first step toward it in the bill already alluded to—to vest the free blacks and slaves with the right to vote on the question of emancipation in this District. But when once raised to an equality, they would become the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this political union between them, holding the white race at the South in complete subjection. The blacks, and the profligate whites that might unite with them, would become the principal recipients of federal offices and patronage, and would, in consequence, be raised above the whites of the South in the political and social scale. We would, in a word, change conditions with them—a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people, and one from which we could not escape, should emancipation take place (which it certainly will if not prevented), but by fleeing the homes of ourselves and ancestors, and by abandoning our country to our former slaves, to become the permanent abode of disorder, anarchy, poverty, misery, and wretchedness.

With such a prospect before us, the gravest and most solemn question that ever claimed the attention of a people is presented for your consideration: What is to be done to prevent it? It is a question belonging to you to decide. All we propose is, to give you our opinion.

We, then, are of the opinion that the first and indispensable step, without which nothing can be done, and with which every thing may be, is to be united among yourselves, on this great and most vital question. The want of union and concert in reference to it has brought the South, the Union, and our system of government to their present perilous condition. Instead of placing it above all others, it has been made subordinate, not only to mere questions of policy, but to the preservation of party ties and ensuring of party success. As high as we hold a due respect for these, we hold them subordinate to that and other questions involving our safety and happiness. Until they are so held by the South, the North will not believe that you are in earnest in opposition to their encroachments, and they will continue to follow, one after another, until the work of abolition is finished. To convince them that you are, you must prove by your acts that you hold all other questions subordinate to it. If you become united, and prove yourselves in earnest, the North will be brought to a pause, and to a calculation of consequences; and that may lead to a change of measures, and the adoption of a course of policy that may quietly and peaceably terminate this long conflict between the two sections. If it should not, nothing would remain for you but to stand up immovably in defence of rights, involving your all—your property, prosperity, equality, liberty, and safety.

As the assailed, you would stand justified by all laws, human and divine, in repelling a blow so dangerous, without looking to consequences, and to resort to all means necessary for that purpose. Your assailants, and not you, would be responsible for consequences.

Entertaining these opinions, we earnestly entreat you to be united, and for that purpose adopt all necessary measures. Beyond this, we think it would not be proper to go at present.

We hope, if you should unite with any thing like unanimity, it may of itself apply a remedy to this deep-seated and dangerous disease; but, if such should not be the case, the time will then have come for you to decide what course to adopt.

R. M. T. HUNTER,Virginia.

JAMES M. MASON, “

ARCHIBALD ATKINSON, “

THOMAS H. BAYLY, “

R. L. T. BEALE, “

HENRY BEDINGER, “

THOMAS S. BOCOCK, “

WILLIAM G. BROWN, “

R. K. MEADE, “

R. A. THOMPSON, “

J. R. J. DANIEL, North Carolina.

A. W. VENABLE, N. Carolina.

A. P. BUTLER, South Carolina.

 J. C. CALHOUN, “

ARMISTEAD BURT, “

I. E. HOLMES, “

R. B. RHETT, “

R. F. SIMPSON, “

D. WALLACE, “

J. A. WOODWARD, “

H. V. JOHNSON, Georgia.

ALFRED IVERSON, “

HUGH A. HARALSON, “

DAVID L. YULEE, Florida.

S. U. DOWNS, Louisiana.

J. H. HARMANSON, “

EMILE LA SERE, “

I. E. MORSE, “

T. PILSBURY, Texas.

DAVID S. KAUFMAN, “

SOLON BORLAND, Arkansas.

J. K. SEBASTIAN, “

R. W. JOHNSON, “

HOPKINS L. TURNEY, Tennessee.

F. P. STANTON, “

D. R. ATCHISON, Missouri.

WILLIAM R. KING, Alabama.

B. FITZBATRICK, “

JOHN GAYLE, “

F. W. BOWDON, “

S. W. HARRIS, “

S. W. INGE, “

JEFFERSON DAVIS, Mississippi.

HENRY S. FOOTE, “

P. W. TOMPKINS, “

A. G. BROWN, “

W. S. FEATHERSTON, “

JACOB THOMPSON, “

P. S. Since this address was prepared a motion to reconsider Mr. GOTT's resolutions has passed the House of Representatives, and they are now the subject of further proceedings.
_______________

1 Indiana and Illinois.

2 The case of Prigg vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

3 The case of Johnson vs. Tompkins and others.

4 Mr. Kennedy, of Hagerstown, Maryland.

5 Being nearly two on the part of the South to one on the part of the North. But taking into consideration that the population of the North is two thirds greater than the South, the latter has furnished more than three times her due proportion of volunteers.

Total number of volunteers from the South—Regiments

33

Battalions

14

Companies

120

Total number of volunteers from the South,

45,640

Total number of volunteers from the North-Regiments

22

Battalions

2

Companies

12

Total number of volunteers from the North,

23,084

6 Since reported to the House.

SOURCES: Richard Crallé, Editor, The Works of John C. Calhoun: Volume VI: Reports and Public Letters of John C. Calhoun, p. 290-313; James Stryker, Editor, The American Quarterly Register and Magazine, Volume 3, No. 1, p. 276-87; The American Review: A Whig Journal, Devoted to Politics and Literature, New Series Vol. III.—Whole Vol. IX, No. XV March 1849, p. 313 for the date of the address.