The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery Part 3

But it was not at once so to be. Mr. Buchanan and Southern statesmen of ultra views, aided by a few Northern politicians, were infatuated enough to suppose that the two-edged sword of popular sovereignty that was sheathed in the Kansas bill, was to be wielded by the Federal administration, and not by the people of Kansas, and made to cut but one way and that way in favor of slavery. And they were equally infatuated when they found that they could not force upon the people of Kansas the fraudulent Lecompton Const.i.tution, to suppose that the power of self-government, which had been conceded to the people of the territories, could be nullified by the dogma of the sovereignty of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Buchanan and his compeers should have known before they pa.s.sed the Kansas bill, that when the people of an American State or territory once laid their hands upon the power to form and regulate their domestic inst.i.tutions in their own way, they held the power upon which free inst.i.tutions and slave inst.i.tutions alike rested in the American States, and that that power and its free exercise could never be taken from the people by any Supreme Court or the dogma of any political party, and any systematized attempt to take it away would be met by resistance that would shiver the Union to fragments. The sovereignty of the people or true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful sovereignty of the States, either in the Union or in the territories, has taken root and settled into a well-defined opinion in the popular mind, the courts must let it alone; it is for them then to follow the popular will, not to lead it. Law is the voice of the people. Let the courts that a.s.sume to be the oracles of the law, see to it that they mistake not the people's voice, especially on those great political questions that touch the fountains of a nation's life.

The attempt of Mr. Buchanan's administration to force slavery upon Kansas by means of the Lecompton Const.i.tution, against the real sentiment of the people, and against the true intent and meaning of the organic law of Kansas, and failing in that, the attempt to override the principle of popular sovereignty, by means of a false construction of the Dred Scott decision, roused to renewed zeal and combined all the Northern elements of opposition to slavery, and in the excitement of angry pa.s.sion that has followed, the great compromise of 1850, and the true character of that measure, and its legitimate consequent, the erasure of the Missouri compromise line, have been obscured in the public mind, and both have lost their hold upon the calm judgments of the people. Why is this? Are not the laws that now stand upon the statute book of the nation, as the compromise measures of 1850, the same as they were in 1852, when they were endorsed by nearly 3,000,000 of votes--almost the unanimous vote of the nation? Is the law of the Kansas and Nebraska act, annulling the Missouri compromise line, a different law from what it was in 1856, when it was triumphantly sustained against Fremont and the Philadelphia platform? No man can say the laws are not the same. As they were then, so are they now. If right in principle and good then, they are equally right and good now. Were the people senseless or did they mean nothing when they endorsed those laws? No man dare say that. Why is it then that the Democratic party, which triumphed in 1852 and in 1856 on these very measures, is now a divided and broken army and almost panic-stricken, and its opponents, the advocates of Congressional prohibition of slavery, with a man at their head without a record as a statesman and almost unknown to the nation, carrying in their train all the fiercest elements of anti-slavery agitation, are already boasting of sure success? No satisfactory answer can be given to these questions, except the fact that the administration of James Buchanan, false to the principles on which it was placed in power, has attempted by intervention in favor of slavery, to destroy the very principle which is the life of the compromise of 1850 and of the Kansas and Nebraska law of 1854. Those great measures and their ablest and most consistent champion, have alike been stabbed in the house of their friends. By the course of the Buchanan administration, the people of the North have been made to believe that the principle of non-intervention is a sham; that the compromise of 1850 and the erasure of the Missouri line in 1852 were fraudulent schemes to cheat the people into a consent to extend slavery all over the national territory; and the cry is echoed all through the North: the nation's plighted faith is broken, the landmarks of freedom are removed, the barbarism of slavery will spread over the land! Is there reason in this cry, for argument it cannot be called? There is none. Why the very fact that the acts of the Federal executive have had power to produce this strange delusion and wild commotion of the public mind, is itself a potent argument for holding fast to the principle of the compromise of 1850, and rallying the people again to its support, so that the President and the Congress may no longer disturb the people by tampering with the local question of slavery. Again I say, there is nothing in this cry of the extension of the barbarism of slavery; it is as senseless as it is dangerous to the nation's peace. All that is is done by the legislation of 1850 and 1854, is to establish a governing principle in regard to slavery in the territories, which is exactly the same as the principle which governs slavery in the States under the Const.i.tution. The laws of 1850 and 1854 plant slavery no where, nor do they extend it any where into the national domain. They leave the national territory _free_.

What better authority can we have on this point than that of Henry Clay, whose influence perhaps as much as that of any other man, helped to carry the compromise of 1850? Did he mean in voting for that compromise, by which the principle of non-intervention was adopted as to territory both North and South of the Missouri compromise line of 36 deg. 30 min., to extend slavery into such territory? Hear what he said on the question in the Senate of the United States. He said in answer to a demand of Jefferson Davis for a positive provision for the admission of slavery south of the Missouri compromise line:--"Coming as I do from a Slave State, it is my solemn, deliberate and well-matured determination that no power--no earthly power--shall compel me to vote for the positive introduction of slavery either south or north of that line. Sir, while you reproach, and justly too, our British ancestors for the introduction of this inst.i.tution upon the continent of America, I am, for one, unwilling that the posterity of the present inhabitants of California and New Mexico shall reproach us for doing just what we reproach Great Britain for doing to us. If the citizens of those territories choose to establish slavery, I am for admitting them with such provisions in their const.i.tutions; but then it will be their own work and not ours, and their posterity will have to reproach them and not us, for forming const.i.tutions allowing the inst.i.tution of slavery to exist among them."

In the same paragraph, Mr. Clay further says, "I believe that slavery no where exists within any portion of the territory acquired by us from Mexico." So much for the testimony of Henry Clay! Now, who shall say that the compromise of 1850 was a law to extend slavery over the free territory covered by it? and if not, then for the same reason, the Kansas and Nebraska act was not a law for extending slavery over the free territory north of the Missouri line. What the law of 1850 did for the territory acquired from Mexico, the same did the law of 1854 do for the Louisiana territory acquired from France. No man can show a substantial difference, except that the Kansas and Nebraska law more clearly recognizes the right of the people to decide the question of slavery. Again, I would ask of the men who make this cry of the extension of slavery, to answer in candor: If the Missouri line was a landmark for freedom, was it not also a landmark for slavery? Was not the country south of 36 deg. 30 min., under the law of March 6th 1820, as impliedly devoted to slavery as the country north of it was to freedom? Up to 1848, when California, to which northern men had been led, not more by the love of freedom than by the l.u.s.t of gold, had declared herself a Free State, had a Free State ever been made south of the Missouri line? Was it not the almost sure result of that line to prevent men who favor Free States from going south of it to demonstrate by experience that Free States could grow and prosper even in a southern clime? Had free labor a fair chance to raise its standard in the south, and try its strength beneath a burning sun, so long as Congress had virtually doomed the land of the south to slave labor, by declaring that the region of free land and free labor was north of the Missouri line?

Is it not slavery rather than freedom that needs the protection of positive law? Does the north, guarded as it is by nature's irrepealable law, and by the self-poised and self-reliant strength of its freeborn sons, need the Federal power to guard its soil from the feet of slaves?

Is slavery more progressive and expansive than freedom? and are the men who form Free States afraid to meet the men who form Slave States on common ground and take an even chance for control? In a word, do the men who build up free inst.i.tutions need any thing more from the Federal government than that it should place in their hands the ax and the sword of democracy, and let them alone?

It is astonishing to me that men who profess the sentiments expressed by conservative men of the Republican party, if they are sincere in their desire that slavery should die out, should fail to see that the compromise of 1850 and the Kansas and Nebraska law are alike based upon the only principle by which the ultimate extinction of slavery on this continent must take place. All that freedom needed, and all that it could const.i.tutionally claim, was the withdrawal of the national intervention in favor of slavery, which intervention existed so long as a geographical line marked out by Congress existed over the national domain to separate Free and Slave States; and the leaving of the question of slavery to the local legislatures; by them only had it been or could it be created, and by them only had it been or could it be abolished. When the national territory was made free by the law of non-intervention, slavery was left entirely to the local law, and as freedom is the rule and slavery the exception, the chances were three to one in favor of free inst.i.tutions in every new State.

And yet it is for bringing the slavery agitation to this result--a result of which the men of the South upon their own principles cannot complain, and of which their best men do not complain, and of which the North has no reason to complain, but rather to rejoice, that Stephen A.

Douglas, the ablest statesman of whom this nation can boast since the mighty intellect of Webster ceased to speak in words of power, has been covered all over with the vilest and bitterest denunciation--denunciation that would seem to be more the outpouring of personal malignity than the voice of mere partisan hostility. It is for this result that Douglas has been outlawed by a professedly Democratic administration, and the Democratic party itself broken up by Southern disunionists, aided by that same administration. BUT A NATION'S RETURNING JUSTICE WILL YET LIFT ALOFT HER SCALE, AND STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS CAN AFFORD TO ABIDE HIS TIME.

I have thus, I fear tediously to you, brought you to the last act of the great national drama of slavery agitation.

Let us now briefly review the ground, sum up the points, and see how we stand for the final struggle near at hand.

These are the propositions I have aimed to establish:

1. Slavery existed in all the States of the Union when it was formed, and no power was conceded to Congress, under the Confederation to interfere with it.

2. The Jefferson ordinance of 1784, the first act of Congress relating to the territory of the United States, conceded to the people of the territories as inchoate States, full power of internal legislation, and did not prohibit slavery.

3. The Dane ordinance of 1787, applied only to territory not adapted to negro slave labor; it was adopted under an implied power, if any, in the Congress of the Confederation. Viewed on strict const.i.tutional grounds, it was a usurpation, like many other powers exercised by the old Congress, but it was in terms a compact more than a legislative act, and as such by consent of all the States concerned, became binding on the government and the States under the Const.i.tution. It is, therefore, no precedent for mere legislative acts of Congress, prohibiting or permitting slavery in any territory.

4. The Const.i.tution, like the Union itself, is the result, as declared by its framers, of "a spirit of amity and of mutual deference and concession." It recognizes slavery as a lawful inst.i.tution under local law, in the basis of representation and taxation--in the right to continue the African slave trade until 1808, and in the right to reclaim fugitive slaves; but it concedes to Congress no express power to establish, or to prohibit, or abolish slavery in the States.

5. The territory acquired by the Federal government, has been acquired under the power to admit new States. The end of acquisition was to make new States, not colonies nor provinces. Hence, whether the power in Congress to govern such territory is derived from the power to make needful rules and regulations concerning the territory or other property of the United States, or the power to admit new States, or any other express power, the power must be exercised with reference to its only legitimate end, the formation and admission of new States, in all respects of internal sovereignty equal to the original States; and the Const.i.tution rightfully interpreted therefore, requires Congress to do no more as to legislation for the territories than to provide for territorial governments, through which the people may form and regulate their own internal affairs, subject only to the Const.i.tution of the United States, and to admit them as States whenever ripe for that event.

The object of providing territorial governments is to enable the territorial people to exercise self-government, and if fit for it as to one cla.s.s of domestic inst.i.tutions, they are fit for it as to another; if fit to define the relations and rights of husband and wife, of parent and child, of guardian and ward, they are equally fit to define them as to master and servant.

6. If there be precedents in the action of Congress for prohibiting slavery, there are equal precedents for permitting it or extending it.

Slavery was extended by acquiring Louisiana and Florida; it was extended by admitting Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida and Texas as Slave States; and the history of the Federal government in regard to slavery shows that the power of Congress to prohibit slavery has been exercised as to territory not adapted to slave labor, and the power to permit it has been exercised as to territory adapted to negro slave labor, and the criterion by which the question of prohibition or permission has been determined, has been the wants and consequent wishes of the white people of the territories.

The whole question, therefore, resolves itself into the consent or non-consent of the local authority; and herein lies the absurdity of both extreme sectional dogmas of Congressional power to prohibit and Congressional power to permit, both conceding ultimate power in the State legislatures to establish or prohibit slavery, and denying it to the territorial legislatures, in the face of the admitted fact that it is not the Congress, but the local authority that must ultimately decide.

7. a.s.suming that there is in Congress a discretionary or sovereign power to govern the territories, sound policy requires such government to be administered in that "spirit of amity and mutual deference and concession," in which the Const.i.tution itself was conceived and adopted; and the absolute prohibition of slavery in all the national territory in which Free States and Slave States have a common right and common interest, is in direct conflict with the spirit of the Const.i.tution.

Lastly--Compromise is demonstrated to be the principle of the Const.i.tution and the policy of the Federal government in regard to slavery. A Congressional geographical line is not the true mode of compromise, as such a line implies the right of slavery to exclusive possession on one side of the geographical line, and is therefore in favor of slavery and against freedom. The question as a const.i.tutional one, is not a question between freedom and slavery, but a question of const.i.tutional authority, growing out of the clear and fundamental distinction in the Const.i.tution, between the powers of legislation for local or domestic purposes and the like powers for national or Federal purposes. The true principle of compromise on the part of the Federal government is neutrality, non-interference, non-intervention, or the leaving of the question to be fairly determined in the local jurisdiction where it arises. A geographical line is arbitrary and not adapted to varying circ.u.mstances or events; the principle of local sovereignty involved in that of national non-intervention, is self-adjusting and of universal application; it applies to all cases and all times, and is in itself, the only principle consistent with the theory of the government, which is that the people of each State and community have the right and capacity to regulate their own internal affairs, subject only to their respective fundamental laws or Const.i.tutions of government and to the nation's organic law. This principle was the basis of the compromise laws of 1850, and of the erasure of the Missouri line in 1854, and has been endorsed by large majorities of the people both North and South.

Now, how do the parties and candidates seeking from the people the power to control the Federal government, stand on this great subject that divides the nation?

I shall not presume to weary your patience by dwelling on this question.

Men who read and think with calm unbiased minds, cannot fail to see how they stand.

I have now only to say:

1. Looking to the men who formed it, and who lead it, the platform on which it stands, and the end which it contemplates, I regard the organization headed by Breckinridge and Lane as essentially a sectional slavery extension party, bound through the Federal judiciary, backed by the Federal government, to extend slavery into all the territories of the United States, with or without the a.s.sent of the people, and if need be to accomplish this end, bound to legalize slavery under the Federal Const.i.tution in every State of the Union, and to open the floodgates of the African slave trade under the protection of the national banner.

This is the logical end of the Breckinridge and Lane platform. Its practical end will be the destruction of the American Union, for no man in his senses can believe that the Federal government, either through its President, or its Congress, or its Supreme Court, can ever make negro slavery lawful for one hour, where the free white people of any State will that it shall not be. If slaveholders are ever to reach the throne of national power on this continent, which the Breckinridge party are aiming to erect for them, they will wade to that throne through battle fields flowing with human blood.

This Breckinridge and Lane party holds within its bosom the rankest disunionists and most ultra advocates of the African slave trade. Its true watch cry, whatever it may pretend in the North, is "_National Slavery or Disunion_."

With this view of the Breckinridge party, I cannot therefore say that I admired the good taste or consistency of my Republican friends, when in this city a few nights ago, they encouraged by loud applause, the virulent harangue of Jesse D. Bright, the Indiana leader of the Breckinridge faction, not I presume because they approved his sentiments, but because he abused Stephen A. Douglas.

2. Looking to the men who formed it, and who now represent it as its leading oracles, Seward, Hale, Sumner, Wilson, Chase, Giddings, Wade, Lovejoy, not forgetting John A. Andrews of Ma.s.sachusetts, with his negro guard of wide-awakes, nor excepting John Brown, the martyr, nor excepting the comparatively unknown Abraham Lincoln, whom the crisis of the divided house has made famous--and looking also to the Philadelphia and Chicago platforms on which the party stands, with their logical inconsistencies, and the end which those platforms, as well as the public addresses and working machinery of their advocates contemplate--I regard the so-called Republican party, whose candidates are Lincoln and Hamlin, as essentially a sectional, slavery prohibition and slavery abolition party, bound by political action, through the power of the Federal government; _first_, to prohibit slavery in all the territories of the United States; _second_, to admit no more Slave States, and ultimately by State action and Federal action too, when the Free States have become three-fourths of the whole, and sufficiently powerful to make the Federal Const.i.tution what they please, to abolish slavery in all the States, so that, to use the language of William H. Seward at Chicago, on 2d October instant, "_Civilization may be maintained and carried on, on this continent by Federal States, based on the principles of free soil, free labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage_." This is _the creed_ of the Republican party as declared by Mr. Seward, and he affirms that it is _a positive party_ that will take no more compromises in geographical lines or squatter sovereignties.

This is the logical end of the platforms of the Republican party; the practical end, following the attempt to realize the other, will be disunion, with all the dire results portrayed by Daniel Webster, when in that great effort of his majestic intellect, his defence of the American Union, he prayed that when "his eyes should be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, he might not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood!"

I am conscious that many Republicans, whom I esteem and respect, may object to this opinion of their party and platforms. Be that as it may, the opinion is a sincere one, and I believe can be sustained by a fair a.n.a.lysis of the records of Republican leaders and of the proceedings of the party.

It is vain to deny that with the ma.s.ses of that party, Seward is their representative man, and that without the abolition strength, which he and Sumner, Hale, Greeley, Wade, Lovejoy, Giddings, and all that cla.s.s of politicians bring to the Republican ranks, they would not have a hope of success in the North. The cohorts of abolition are the Zouaves of the Republican camp. It is their enthusiasm, their fiery zeal, and intolerant hate of all southern inst.i.tutions, that give the Republican party no small amount of its power. The nomination of Lincoln over Seward was a trick of expediency, like the nomination of Fremont. The real leaders of the Republican organization have points too sharply defined to be trusted as candidates before the nation. Obscure men are sought, who from their very want of being known, fail to concentrate the deadly fire that would pour upon the real leaders if shown in the open field. The Republicans are shrewd enough to know that candidates sometimes win where principles would fail; hence if you would know their principles and real leaders, look _behind_, not _on_ their candidates.

3. Looking to the men who formed it, and who lead it, and to the platform on which it stands, I regard the Bell and Everett or Union party as it is called, as a very respectable and honorable party, mostly composed of men of the old Whig faith, who truly love the Union and the Const.i.tution, and will do all they can to preserve both, and who would manage the ship of state admirably well, so long as the sky was bright, the sea was calm, and nought but fair and gentle breezes filled the flowing sails; but who would be scarcely competent to guide that n.o.ble and richly laden ship in unknown seas, amid tropic or arctic storms, or when surrounded by the pirate crafts of the African slave trade, or the wildly drifting fire ships of political abolition. In such seas, amid such storms, and surrounded by such a.s.sailants, the ship of state wants men upon the quarter deck of far reaching thought, of iron wills, of hearts that know not fear; men whom storms cannot frighten and foes cannot conquer--such men as will nail "the Union" to the mast and die ere it comes down.

Lastly, my friends--Looking to the men who now compose and sustain it, and to the platform on which it stands, I regard the National Democratic party, lead by Stephen A. Douglas--I mean the party of the people, not of the politicians--as the truly democratic and national--not sectional--party of this country; a party that in the august presence of the nation and its Federal Const.i.tution, knows no North and no South, but the Union, the whole Union and nothing but the Union, and whose motto is not "_Liberty first and Union afterwards_," but that glorious motto, "LIBERTY AND UNION, NOW AND FOREVER, ONE AND INSEPARABLE."

Firmly convinced of the correctness of my opinions on the question dividing the nation, I appeal in all kindness to the Whigs and Democrats, now ranging under Republican banners, and perhaps under the uniform of Republican wide-awakes, and I ask them, Whigs and Democrats, who alike in 1852 and in 1856 sustained the compromise principle of Congressional non-intervention with slavery: why have they changed their ground? Why do they now support a party whose real motto is "No more slave territory--no more Slave States," and whose candidates are northern sectional men only? Is that the motto, or are these the candidates for a Union in which there are North States and South States, Free States and Slave States, all equal in the house of the nation, and in the nation's fundamental law?

A fearful responsibility rests on every citizen who, by his vote or his acts, aids in the first triumph of a party whose creed and whose men are sectional. On that rock will the Union, if ever, be wrecked, and towards that rock it is rapidly drifting now.

I ask again, where does the real National Democratic party of the people, headed by Douglas, now stand on the question of slavery? I answer, and no man can truthfully gainsay it, it stands where it stood in 1840-44-48, and 1852-56. It stands where it stood in 1850, when it aided to pa.s.s the great national compromise. It stands where it stood in 1854, when to carry out that compromise to its logical results, it erased the Missouri compromise line of 1820, because _that_ was not a const.i.tutional line of national brotherhood and peace, but a legislative line of division and sectional strife. It stands where it stood in 1856, when the sectional platform and the feeble candidate of the Philadelphia Convention fell before it. It stands where it will stand, with its banner of Union and national peace waving over it, until patriotic Whigs and patriotic Democrats, North and South, who in 1852 made up the 2,987,000 votes that endorsed the compromise of 1850, awaking from the delusion and misunderstanding which have gathered over that great measure of national peace, shall affirm it again as a permanent and enduring law that shall bind together the now divided house of the American Union. Then, indeed, will "the crisis" of Abraham Lincoln and "the irrepressible conflict" of William H. Seward be pa.s.sed in safety, and the Union again arise and shine in the full sunlight of permanent peace.

APPENDIX:

The following article from the Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel of September, 1861, is now reprinted on account of its relation to the subject discussed in the preceding pages, and as a further exposition of the views of the writer upon the position of parties in the last presidential election. The defeat of the Breckinridge party, on the one hand, has led to its attempt in the South, by armed rebellion to disintegrate the Republic, because its Federal power could not be used to nationalize slavery; the success of the Republican party, on the other hand, has led to what the preceding and following arguments foreshadowed as its result, the consolidation of a power in the Federal government that is rapidly undermining the glorious const.i.tutional fabric erected by our fathers, and paving the way for a central government, sustained not so much by the free, unbought love of the people, as by the strength of its military power to crush out resistance to its authority. The times demand of every true lover of his country TO READ AND THINK. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Let not the people be deceived! When the Federal government a.s.sumes the power by military or other force to blot out the sovereignty of Federal States, (a proposition already before the Federal Congress), it strikes a blow at the life of American democracy, which exists in the const.i.tutional sovereignty of the States.

When that is slain, which G.o.d forbid! over its dead body, surrounded by fields of carnage, after a perhaps brief reign of ANARCHY, will rise an IMPERIAL MONARCHIAL POWER, of whose dealings with _the people_ we have no better instructor than the great teacher, "History," which is "philosophy teaching by examples." Let us take heed!

THE QUESTION TRULY STATED.

Democracy and Anti-Democracy or, the Nation vs. the States and the People.

There are three distinct antagonistic parties now struggling for the control of the national government:

1st. A slavery extension party, ostensibly headed by Breckinridge.

2d. An abolition of slavery party, ostensibly headed by Lincoln, but more truly represented by Seward.

3d. A non-intervention with slavery party, headed by Douglas.

So far as relates to any possible political action in regard to slavery, in these three grand divisions are really merged all shades of opinion from the anti-slavery fanaticism of Garrison and Gerritt Smith, to the pro-slavery fanaticism of Yancey, Garlden and Keitt.