Kitabı oku: «The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery», sayfa 5

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 constitutional 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 Constitution. It is, therefore, no precedent for mere legislative acts of Congress, prohibiting or permitting slavery in any territory.

4. The Constitution, 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 institution 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 Constitution 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 Constitution 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 class of domestic institutions, 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. Assuming 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 Constitution 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 Constitution.

Lastly – Compromise is demonstrated to be the principle of the Constitution 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 constitutional one, is not a question between freedom and slavery, but a question of constitutional authority, growing out of the clear and fundamental distinction in the Constitution, 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 circumstances 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 Constitutions 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 assent of the people, and if need be to accomplish this end, bound to legalize slavery under the Federal Constitution 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 Massachusetts, 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 Constitution 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 analysis of the records of Republican leaders and of the proceedings of the party.

It is vain to deny that with the masses 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 class 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 institutions, 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 Constitution, 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 noble 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 assailants, 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 Constitution, 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 pass 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 constitutional 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 passed 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 constitutional 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 assumes 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 constitutional sovereignty of the States. When that is slain, which God 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.

The organization headed by Bell and Everett seems to have no distinctive principle, except fidelity to the Union. It is a party of vague outlines, and without tangible substance.

Each of the three distinct parties (as do also the Bell and Everett party) assume to stand upon the common ground of the constitution and to justify their principles and measures by that sacred instrument, "the palladium of American liberty."

1st. The Breckinridge or Southern sectional theory, claiming the Dred Scott decision as its justification, is, that slavery is a benign national institution, to be fostered and protected by the Federal government "wherever its constitutional authority extends;" and the logical sequence from the Dred Scott decision, as construed in the South, is, that this national institution involves an inviolable right of property, and is carried by force of the constitution into all the States and Territories, and is there to be protected by the Federal government, and this idea is entirely consistent with the Breckinridge platform adopted at Baltimore on the 28th June last. A necessary result of the establishment of this theory will be the reopening of the African slave trade.

2d. The Lincoln and Seward or Northern sectional theory, is, that slavery is a relic of barbarism, antagonistic to the principles and policy of the nation, and is to be annoyed, assailed, and ultimately annihilated by the Federal government wherever its constitutional authority extends.

To sum up the two theories in a few words:

Slavery, according to Breckinridge and his school, is a national good, to be encouraged and protected by the national strong arm.

Slavery, according to Lincoln and Seward, is a national evil, gigantic and portentous, to be combatted and slain by the same strong arm.

That the South will permit slavery to be abolished in all the States by violence or starvation; or that the North will permit slavery to be established in all the States by judicial decision or otherwise, no man in his senses believes – hence looking to the legitimate results of their doctrines, both the Breckinridge and Lincoln parties are essentially disunion parties. Constant conflict and ultimate disunion are the natural sequents of their antagonism. As neither can hope to conquer the other, the Union, the common bond and roof tree of both, must be divided and fall.

3d. The Douglas or truly conservative theory, resting upon the limited powers of the Federal constitution, as a compact of confederation, among sovereign and independent States, assumes that so far as the United States, as a Nation, are concerned, domestic slavery is neither a national good to be protected, nor a national evil to be crushed out; it is a local domestic institution, existing at the formation of the confederacy, in all the States, "under the laws thereof," and its good or evil, concerns only the local sovereignties or people with whom it exists or may exist. The Federal government not having been ordained or established to form or control the domestic institutions of the people of the confederated States, is equally powerless to destroy or to extend slavery. Its destruction or extension must be the work of local law, not of the Federal constitution, nor of Federal law made under it.

Let us re-state the points:

The Breckinridge or slavery extension party would nationalize slavery, by making its existence commensurate with the obligations of the Federal constitution.

The Lincoln or abolition party would denationalize it, by destroying it by prohibition where it is not, and by starvation where it is.

The Douglas or non-intervention party would denationalize it, by leaving the people in the respective localities, be they States or territories, to deal with it as they see fit.

Therefore, Breckinridge would use the national government to force slavery on an unwilling people.

Lincoln and Seward would use the same power to prevent a people who may desire domestic slavery from having it.

Douglas would not use the same power, either to permit or destroy, but recognizing the right and capacity of the people to govern themselves, would leave them to decide for themselves as to what domestic institutions they would or would not have.

There can be no mistaking as to which of the three parties occupies the true democratic ground on this subject. To rightly decide that question, we have only to reach the central and fundamental idea of the nature of the Federal Constitution, upon which each party bases itself.

The political history of the United States, since the Confederation, shows that as well in the formation, as in the interpretation and administration of the Federal Constitution, two parties have existed, representing two different political ideas – the one, State Sovereignty – the other, National Sovereignty, or, Confederation against Consolidation; or, democratic government in the States against an Imperial government in the Nation.

The advocates of a consolidated National government, the leading mind among whom was Alexander Hamilton, were, until after the publication of the Federalist, known as the National party. After that publication, and about 1790, they took the name of Federalists. Their opponents, who favored a Federal Union of limited and clearly defined powers, in preference to a strong National Government, were at first called Federalists, but afterwards took the name of Republicans, or, Democrats. The master spirit of this party was Thomas Jefferson. Principles adverse to those of Hamilton prevailed in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Hamilton's plan of government was not adopted, and by express vote of the Convention the term, "United States Government," was adopted in lieu of "National Government," as originally proposed, to distinguish the system to be formed.

The men of the Convention were men of great intellectual power and lofty patriotism, but also men of concession and compromise, and it is not therefore surprising that their different views should be so far reflected in the Constitution, their common work, as to lead to occasional difficulty in its interpretation. The Constitution is not so clearly expressed, that he who runs may read its meaning. The wisest and best men of the nation have differed as to its true construction, and their differing interpretations are mainly the result of adherence to one or the other of the adverse principles already stated – the one aiming to amplify the jurisdiction of the Federal government by liberal or latitudinarian construction – the other aiming to limit it by strict construction.