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 I. HORACE MI, OF MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY. 
 
 Representatives, August LI 
 
 The House being in Committee of the Whole 
 en the state of the Union — 
 Mr. MANX said: 
 
 Mr. Chairman : On former rceasions, T have 
 expressed myself so much at h ngth on the re- 
 lations which the free States are made to bear 
 to slavery, that I did not propose at this ses- 
 sion to present any further views upon that 
 subject. But the ban which the bite Haiti- 
 more Conventions have haughtily proclaimed 
 against bee discussion ; the recent, though, as 
 I believe it will be found, the temporary silen- 
 cing of my friend, Mr. Sumner, at the other 
 end of this Capitol, who has long desired to 
 speak, and the still later choking down of the 
 gentleman from Connecticut, [Mr. Cleve- 
 land,] on this floor, have induced me to recon- 
 sider and to change my determination. 1 am 
 willing to be reasoned with, and always grate- 
 ful, when, for good cause. I am convinced ; but 
 when an attempt is made to take from mo all 
 option in regard to my exercise of a clear 
 right, I find a sufficient motive for exercising 
 that right in the mere act of disobedience. 
 
 I must begin by taking a brief retrospect. 
 The war against Mexico was waged to rob 
 that sister Republic of her free territory, for 
 the sake of widening the domain and confirm- 
 ing the despotism ol slavery. On the subject 
 of the robbery the country w:^ divided into 
 Whigs and Democrats. On the wicked uses 
 to which the territory robbed was to bo not. 
 it was divided into North an 1 ^ ■'■ ■ Four- 
 
 n out of the fiftoen. Northern States passed 
 
 dons, most of them unanimously, or 
 
 nearly so, in favor of excluding slavery by 
 
 from whatever territory we n li 
 
 South did not then ask for any 
 
 ' >n to extend slavery th< -v 
 
 he doctrine of the great 
 
 te North demanded Legis- 
 
 lali Everybody at once for- 
 
 that this question would be involved in the 
 then next Presidential election. It wM re- 
 markable, and certainly the 'Historian will re- 
 member it. that no leading man of the South 
 came out in favor of the Northern doctrine ; 
 for the principles of universal liberty are |o 
 congenial to the human heart, that it is diffi- 
 cult to conceive of five or six millions of peo- 
 ple, in any age or country of the world, with- 
 out a single man among them ready to assume 
 the championship bf freedom. It is still more 
 remarkable that any Northern man should 
 have ventured to espouse the cause of slavery. 
 One. however, was found, capable of doing it 
 It was strange that he should have been of 
 New England lineage. It was thrice strange, 
 that a man educated, enriched, honored, by a 
 people who had themselves been rescued from 
 all the curses of slavery, and blessed with all 
 the exuberant blessings of freedom, by the Or- 
 dinance of 1787. should have proposed to open 
 half a continent to all the curses he and his 
 people had escaped, and to shut it from all the 
 blessings he and they had enjoyed. Hut such 
 a man was found. General C\s S thougl 
 basely of his party at the North, that he sup- 
 posed he could carry them against slavery-re- 
 striction. If so, then their union with the 
 pro-slavery South would make a triumphant 
 majority; and hence the well-known Nichol- 
 son letter. But that letter recoiled upon him, 
 and in the canvass »f 1848 overthrew him. 
 T>. original temptation, however, still re- 
 mained, and acted with increased f >rce. The 
 South stood firm. They were a compact body 
 of Abolitionists, though the thing they desired 
 to abolish was human freedom. The si 1 
 out plainly, and offered their support and their 
 votes to the Northern man. Whig i 
 erat, wbo would most thori ughly bend or 
 -°ak himself to their purposes. Under tie 
 'General Cass, many of tl I 1 
 
 lea a 
 
 party 
 
 a lured, and thev 'le-erted. But 
 
■TTI 
 
 M 
 
 until the 7th of March, 1850, no Northern more, milting pro-slavery letters and speeches 
 Whig yielded to their enticements. On that -wherever he went. Certainly the reason 
 day, however, Mr. Webster, in the Senate of why any of the above-named parties did not 
 
 the United States, offered to abandon the Ordi- 
 nance of 1787 — then known as the "Wilmot 
 Proviso/' He offered to give an additional 
 slave State to Texas beyond w r hat she could 
 claim under the unconstitutional resolutions 
 of annexation. He offered to support, "to the 
 fullest extent," that most atrocious Fugitive 
 Slave bill, then before the Senate, by which all 
 custom-house officers, and the seventeen thou- 
 
 get a nomination at Baltimore, was not be- 
 cause of what the law calls laches, or " want 
 of reasonable diligence" on their part. 
 
 I come now to the Baltimore Conventions 
 themselves, which were held in June last. 
 Every one knows that the great question of 
 human slavery had a controlling influence in 
 those bodies, and determined their results. 
 With a vast majority of their members, pro- 
 
 sand postmasters of the United States, were to slavery or anti-slavery was the one overmaster- 
 
 be made judges, and to be invested with power 
 over human liberty, and to have, each one of 
 them, not local, but unlimited jurisdiction 
 throughout the United States; and he offered 
 to give $200,000,000 to fortify and perpetuate 
 the institution of slavery, by removing from 
 
 w motive and end. In the Democratic Con- 
 vention, the pro-slavery sentiment was nearly 
 unanimous. Its members had been sold into 
 that perdition by the lust of money or the am- 
 bition for office. Yet even they were held in 
 check by the apprehended thunders of the 
 
 the Southern States the dreaded element of voice of the people behind them. If they did 
 
 the free colored population. Two hundred 
 millions of dollars — a profusion and a prodi- 
 gality magnificently Websterian ! I am here 
 only referring to facts which, as everybody 
 knows, have become history. 
 
 Here, then, we see that two conspicuous 
 leaders of the Northern Democrats and Whigs 
 planted themselves upon Southern ground. 
 When the race for the Presidency consisted in 
 adhesion to the Slave Power alone, it was not 
 
 not recoil from the crime, they feared its pun- 
 ishment. In the Whig Convention, the men 
 who were ready to sacrifice honor, duty, reli- 
 gion, to the demands of slavery, were a large 
 majority, and might have nominated their 
 most ultra pro-slavery candidate on the first 
 ballot. They could have effected this just as 
 easily as they effected their pro-slavery organi- 
 zation, and appointed a committee on creden- 
 tials who excluded anti-slavery men, and 
 
 to be expected that the competitors would be committee on resolutions who accepted a 
 
 few. Mr. Buchanan forthwith caused it to 
 be understood, that, on his part, he was will- 
 ing to run the line of 36 deg. 30 min. — the 
 Missouri Compromise line, so-called — through 
 to the Pacific ocean, and surrender to slavery 
 all upon its southern side. Mr. Dallas, late 
 Vice President under Mr. Polk, in his letter to 
 Mr. Bryan, of Texas, went further, and pro- 
 
 Southern platform, prepared for them before- 
 hand by Southern hands. But these Bel«haz- 
 zars, too, like him of old, saw the handwriting 
 upon the wall, aud they knew that, with such 
 a candidate, they were doomed to utter and 
 remorseless defeat before the people. In both 
 Conventions, however, the spirit of slavery was 
 so strong and so badly brave, as to carry the 
 
 posed to incorporate the Compromise measures resolutions I am about to read. The Demo- 
 
 and the Fugitive Slave Law itself, into the 
 Constitution, so as to put their repeal beyond 
 the power of a Northern majority. Senator 
 Douglas followed. He sugared his pill. He 
 told the South, that we have cotton lands, and 
 rice lands, and tobacco lands enough ; but 
 alas! said he, we want more lands for sugar; 
 by which the South perfectly understood that 
 if they would make him President, the annex- 
 ation of Cuba should be their reward. This 
 is the same gentleman who has lately said, in 
 a secret session of the Senate, that if the Sand- 
 wich Islands should bo annexed to this country, 
 and a question should arise about excluding 
 
 cratic Convention resolved to 
 
 " — abide by and adhere to a faithful oxecution of 
 the acts known as the Compromise measures, settled 
 by the last Congress — the act for reclaiming fugitive 
 slaves from service or labor included." 
 
 And further, they 
 
 " Resolved, That the Democratic party will resist 
 all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it. the 
 agitation of the slavery question, under whatever 
 shape or color the attempt may be made." 
 
 And the Whig Convention 
 
 " Resolved, That the series of acts of the Thirty- 
 first Congress, commonly known as the Compromise 
 or adjustment, (the act for the recovery of fugitives 
 from labor included,) are received and acquiesced in 
 
 slavery from them by law. he would vote against by tu. Whi^s of the United States, as a final settle 
 it During all this time affairs were ripen- m °?^ *9 P^r^w^ubsfance, of the subjects t< 
 . Z , S D ,,- • mt t rm - m,. TT;il which they relate. * * " And we dom-ccnte a 
 
 in°- for the Baltimore nominations. Mr. Fill- 
 more offered to the South the Army and Navy, 
 to catch a poor fugitive, where only a consta- 
 
 ble's posse was needed. Mr. Webster trumped 
 up false treasons by scores against Northern 
 
 Anti-Slavery men. The President travel'^ ^uussuhjhoii provide a 
 
 North and South, making speeches red'f nt °f freedom of speech or ot the part ' Why se- 
 
 aled still cure this freedom in the organic law, if the 
 
 to 
 „ all 
 further agitation of the questions thus settled, as dan- 
 gerous to our peace, and will discouatonance all ef- 
 forts to continue or renew such agitation, when 
 wherever, or however made." 
 
 .Now, what an outrage is this ! Does not our 
 Constitution provide against ' abridging the 
 
 pro slavery. The Secretary tr* 
 
tyranny of a social law can abolish it? Of what gloom and bondage of the dark ages of the 
 
 value is that provision in the Constitution, 
 which secures the free exercise of religion, if 
 social intolerance and bigotry, acting in an un- 
 legalized way, can destroy it ? Yet, here are 
 two Conventions, utterly unknown to any of 
 our Constitutions, whether State or National, 
 . invested with no powers. Legislative, Judicial, 
 or Executive, coming together for a day, and 
 then scattered and sunk in individual obscuri- 
 •• ty; yet lifting thsir pigmy voices against the 
 mightiest impulses of the human heart, against 
 history and providence, against the fiat and the 
 Spirit of God himself; resolving that mankind 
 shall be dumb in regard to the greatest of hu- 
 man wrongs ; und resolving, also, that a law 
 passed by a Republican Government, yet as 
 barbarous and tyrannical as was ever made by 
 any despotism, shall lie consecrated in its wick- 
 edness, and remain eternal. 
 
 Two Baltimore Conventions, assuming to 
 quench the eternal spirit of liberty — that spirit 
 which was a part of the inspiration of the 
 prophets of old, when they commanded the ty- 
 rants of the earth to -undo the heavy burdens 
 and let the oppressed go free;" that spirit 
 which gave all its heroism and splendor to the 
 classic land of Greece, and made its memories 
 immortal: that spirit which gave to Rome its 
 colossal proportions of physical and intellectual 
 grandeur; that spirit which, in the darkest 
 night of the worlds history, climbed Alpine 
 heights and sheltered itself in the fastnesses of 
 Alpine mountains, inaccessible to tyrants; 
 which, at another time, found protection with- 
 in the dykes of Holland, barring out the rage 
 of the ocean, and the more remorseless rage of 
 despotic men : that spirit which has given to 
 England, and to English history, all their un- 
 disputed claims to renown and to the gratitude 
 of mankind, and which, when persecuted and 
 driven from England, crossed the Atlantic, 
 spread itself over this open continent, and hav- 
 ing been nursed by more than two hundred 
 years of struggle and discipline, now bids defi- 
 ance to the world — this Godlike spirit of liber- 
 ty, immortal, invulnerable, and indestructible, 
 two ephemeral Baltimore Conventions under- 
 take to ban! Xerxes chaining the Hellespont 
 was wisdom personified compared with them ; 
 aye, it would be too dignified and honorable 
 an illustration to compare them to two old 
 male Mrs. Partingtons, mopping out the At- 
 lantic! 
 
 Why did not these insane men propose to do 
 something which is at least conceivable ? Why 
 did they not propose to turn back the order of 
 physical events, rather than to violate the more 
 infrangible and irresistible laws of moral pro- 
 gress? Why did they not order the oak back 
 into the acorn, or the bird back into its shell, 
 or the earth itself back into its first geological 
 epoch, rather than to order the enfranchised 
 spirit of the niueteenth century back into the 
 
 world ? Why did they not lift up the wand of 
 their arrogance and audacity towards Arcturus 
 and the Pleiades, and attempt to move round 
 the constellations of the heavens as you would 
 move round the hands on the dial-plate of a 
 clock? Such hallucinations would be at least 
 within the limits of human conception, and 
 would therefore be free from the folly and 
 atheism of attempting to stifle the voice of 
 freemen discussing freedom. 
 
 Sir, to resolve that the slavery question shall 
 be discussed nevermore, is to resolve the mem- 
 ories of all the heroes, and martyrs, and saints, 
 whose names make all the bright pages of 
 human history, into eternal oblivion. It is to 
 resolve the history of the American Revolution. 
 and of all its actors, into forgetfuhaess. It is to 
 resolve the noblest faculties and aspirations of 
 the human soul into non-existence. Under any 
 fail and legitimate construction of such a re- 
 solve, it embraces the whole meaning and force 
 of that infamously celebrated decree of the 
 French Convention, that -There is no God. y 
 I do not say this by way of rhetorical embel- 
 lishment, or to impart greater emphasis to a 
 period. I say it because it is literally and 
 strictly true; for the just and benevolent God 
 who sits upon the throne of the Universe must 
 Himself be silenced, before the cry against the 
 cruelty and injustice of slavery can be quelled. 
 Let us see, for a moment, what is the nature 
 of the burden these Baltimore Conventions 
 have taken upon themselves. By forbidding us 
 to speak upon a given subject, they compel us 
 to examine that subject, and see if duty does 
 not require us to speak upon it. They leave us 
 no option : and if the discussion shall prove un- 
 palatable, they may thank themselves for pro- 
 voking it. Let me inquire, then, whether it be 
 not demonstrable that the relation of slavery 
 between man and man comprehends, perpetu- 
 ates, multiplies, and aggravates, all forms of 
 crime which it is possible for a human being 
 to commit. Is the stealing, even of a shilling^ 
 a crime ? Slavery steals all that man can call 
 his own ; and is not the whole greater than a 
 part? Is robbery, which is defined to be the 
 taking of any part of a man's goods, "from his 
 person, or in his presence, against his will, by 
 violence, or putting him in fear," a crime? 
 Slavery answers the exact definition of the 
 law books; for it is by violence and by putting 
 in bodily fear that a master ravishes from his 
 slave all his earnings, and all his ability to 
 earn, from birth till death. And again, I say, 
 is not the whole greater than a part ?* Is the 
 destruction of any one man's house by fire a 
 crime? How much greater the crime of pre- 
 venting millions of men from having a house 
 
 * President Edwards said: "While vou hold ne- 
 gvoc* in slavery vou do exceeding wrong, and that in 
 a highoi degree than if you committed common. job- 
 bery or theft » 
 
they can call their own? Is concubinage a 
 crime ? In this Union, all the adult portion of 
 more than three millions of people are now 
 forced to live in a state of concubinage. Is it 
 a crime to abandon innocent females to the 
 lusts of guilty men, without the slightest pro- 
 tection of law ? In this country, a million and 
 a half of females constantly are so abandoned, 
 and the rearing of dark-skinned beauties for 
 the harems of republican sultans; is a systema- 
 tized and legalized business. Is it a crime to 
 break asunder all the ties of human affection, 
 to tear children from the arms of their parents, 
 and parents from each other? There is no 
 conjugal or parental or filial affection among 
 more than three millions of people in this land 
 which is sacred from such violation. Is it a 
 crime to let murder and all other offences go 
 unpunished f There is no form of crime which 
 a white man may not commit against a slave 
 with entire impunity, if he will take the pre- 
 caution to let none but slaves witness it. The 
 darkening of the intellect, the shrouding of a 
 soul in the gloom of ignorance, the forbidding 
 of a spirit which God made in His own image 
 to commune with its Maker, is _ more than a 
 common crime— it is sacrilege— it is the sacri- 
 lege of sacrileges. It is a crime which no other 
 nation on this earth— civilized, heathen, or 
 barbarian— ever committed to the extent that 
 it is committed here. And yet this locking of 
 the temple of knowledge against a whole race, 
 this drawing of an impenetrable veil between 
 the soul of man and his Maker, this rebellion 
 against all that God has done to reveal Him- 
 self to His offspring through the works of na- 
 ture and the revelations of His providence, is 
 enacted into laws, guarded by terrible penal- 
 ,il»s, and administered by men who call thein- 
 .' selves Christians, as though Jesus Christ could 
 have subscribed or executed such laws. It is 
 a crime unspeakable to deprive men Oi the 
 Gospel M& of freedom to interpret it ; but the 
 slave code ,does this, by withholding letters 
 from the slave, and thus postpones the true 
 enfranchisement and salvation of his soul to 
 another life, when he can no longer be of any 
 use to his earthly master. Would it be a 
 crime to practice some demoniac art, by which 
 the growth of body and limbs should be arrest- 
 ed in childhood, and the victims should be left 
 with only infantile powers to conteud with 
 cold, nakedness, hunger, and all the hosts of 
 min* Then it is an infinitely greater crime 
 to inflict weakness and ignorance upon those 
 SoriouB faculties of the mind, by which alone 
 its possessor can solve the mighty problems of 
 future destiny, of otermty, and ot the souls 
 weal or woe/ I repeat, then, that the worst 
 forms of all the crimes which a human being 
 can eommit— theft, robbery, murder, adu.tevy, 
 ScUt sacrilege, and whatever else Acre is 
 Edicts wide-wasting ruin W* Mjeg* 
 and brings the souk of men * petition tne 
 
 word slavery is the synonym of them all. Ana- 
 lyze slavery, and you will find its ingredients 
 to consist of every crime. Define any crime, 
 and you will find it to be incorporated in sla- 
 very, and aggravated by it. 
 
 As the complex and infinite meaning of the 
 word God cannot be adequately understood, 
 until you analyze it, and divide and subdivide 
 it, and give to it the thousand names of om- 
 nipotence, and omniscience, and omnipresence, 
 of infinite justice, and holiness, and benevo- 
 lence, of all sanctities, and verities, and benig- 
 nities, of all energies and beauties, of all wis- 
 dom and all law; so when you penetrate and 
 lay open the infinite meaning of the word Sla- 
 very, it resolves itself into all crimes and all 
 cruelties, all debasements and all horrors. The 
 telescope of the astronomer resolves the star- 
 dust of the universe into refulgent systems that 
 glorify their Maker ; the telescope of the mor- 
 alist resolves the Tartarean cloud of slavery 
 into all the impieties and wickednesses that de- 
 form humanity. 
 
 Now. between these two great antagonisms, 
 between God and the Right on one side, and 
 Slavery and the Wrong on the other, these two 
 Baltimore Conventions have chosen the latter. 
 They have said to Evil, be thou my Good, 
 They have voted to annul God's laws. They 
 have resolved that discussions on the great 
 question of human freedom, which involves the 
 whole question of free agency and human ac- 
 countability, and the entire plan and order of 
 the Divine government, shall be silenced. 
 
 So much for the intrinsic nature of slavery, 
 which the Baltimore Conventions have wedded 
 as their bride. Now let us look at some of the 
 collateral wrongs, the self-stultification and 
 atheism, for which slavery in this country is 
 responsible, and which those Conventions, 
 therefore, have sanctioned and ratified, and de- 
 clared their purpose to continue. 
 
 When a nation is born into the world, pos- ; 
 sessing the attributes and prerogatives of na- 
 tionality, it is the moral duty of existing na- 
 tions to welcome it into the brotherhood of the 
 human family. Such recognition of a new 
 sovereignty tends to increase commerce, to 
 forefend war, and to diffuse the blessings of 
 knowledge, science, and the arts. It becomes, 
 therefore, a duty. Yet, what is the posture in 
 which this Government stands to Liberia and 
 Hayti? Great Britain, with France, Prussia, 
 and other continental nations, has acknowl- 
 edged their existence. We refuse, and stand 
 aloof. And this for no other reason than to 
 gratify a colorophobia, which dreads equity as 
 the hydrophobia docs water. Writers on na- 
 tional law call nations a moral entity. We 
 find color in a moral entity, and repudiate its 
 claims. Contrast the alacrity of this Govern- j 
 ment in recognising slaveholding Texas, with 
 its utter refusal, for a quarter of a century in 
 one case, and for half a century in the other 
 
to recognise the Free Soil Governments of Li- 
 beria and Hayti. This is one of the collateral 
 wrongs growing out of the repugnance of sla- 
 very to do justice to the colored man any- 
 where; and the taint of this moral disease at 
 the South spreads its infection over tlie North. 
 Mark a great Bign and proof of depravation 
 in tho public intelli ct; originating in the same 
 prolific source of wrong. The Ma-;.]) 
 argument has I sen put forth, that God 
 ordained and instituted African slavery am 
 us for the ultimate and consequential purpose 
 of carrying civilization and Chribtianity 'into 
 Africa. Not only have the logic of the pi !i- 
 tiuian and the ethics of the moralist heen cor- 
 rupted into this falsity, hut even the divine. 
 with the preservative power of the Gospel of 
 Jesus Christ, in Ins hands, baa endeavored to 
 reconcile our people to tlie crimes and the 
 curses of slavery by tins impious argument. 
 They maintain that God has looked with, com- 
 placency upon all the atrocities of the African 
 slave trade: that the groans and agonic.- - 
 Middle Passage have ascended as a sweet- 
 smelling savor before His throne; that He has 
 seen with approval, within the last three cen- 
 turies, forty millions of native Africans — ye;-, 
 sir, forty millions, for that is the estimated 
 number — almost douhle the entire population 
 of this country, ami more than one-third more 
 than the present population of Great Britain 
 and Ireland put together — of native Africans, 
 torn from their homes and driven through 
 gates of lire and realms of torture, to bondage 
 and to death : that, during all this period. He 
 has looked with delight upon the most fright- 
 ful forms of war, the pillage and conflagration 
 of cities, and wholesale murder, and man-steal- 
 ing worse than murder, not only raging along 
 the eastern and the western shores of that de- 
 voted continent, but at times extending their 
 ravages and havoc twelve or thirteen hundred 
 
 miles inland; and that His benign providence and crimes of civilization rpon that bar 
 is still fulfilled by the successful prosecution of stock. The sins of the white races crea 
 the slave trade; though for every thousand 
 human victims in Africa, it is estimated that 
 only three hundred finally reach their earth- 
 born hell of Cuban or Brazilian sugar or cotton 
 fields. Now, that God sent out slaves from 
 Africa to America, at this inconceivable cost of 
 crime on the one hand, and of suffering on the 
 other: that His providence has raised up hosts 
 of fiends in the shape of men. century after cen- 
 tury, for the roundabout purpose of carrying 
 Christianity and civilization into Africa, in 
 some remote age. Ave know not when: th ; s is 
 the blasphemous doctrine we are made to hear 
 from the political rostrum, the lecture-room, 
 and. incredible to relate, from the pulpit itself] 
 Now, I say. sir, that to impute any such 
 cruel-heart -d and simpleton-minded scheme to 
 
 our All-wise and benignant Father in Heaven, 
 is wild and wanton impiety and blasphemy. 
 No parallel can be found in heathen mythology 
 
 where such short-sighted folly and crime have 
 been charged upon any of the bloody go 
 all their pantheons. The very hypothesis is 
 founded on an inversion of history, and it pre- 
 supposes for its conception a | erversion of the 
 human intellect. 
 
 Tho system of enslaving Africans was com- 
 menced in ancient times by thi and 
 tic Arabs, and carried on in later periods by 
 tlie Moors. Was that fir tin- -ike of carrying 
 Christianity into Africa? In modern times, 
 the same system, with unspeakable aggrava- 
 tions, has been prosecuted bj all the a imner- 
 cial nations of Europe a' continei t. 
 From time immemorial, (J Africa has 
 been made the hunting ground of the man 
 stealer. For thirty or forty centuries i 
 and mammon have wreaked their vengeance 
 
 upon thai devoted land. All crimes and < a- 
 
 Iamities — conflagration, pestilence, brutality, 
 and havoc — have been poured over it in crim- 
 son floods. To confine our view within the last 
 three centuries alone, who can a', quat< ly con- 
 ceive the effects of robbing a continent of forty 
 millions of people in so brief a period, with all 
 the wars, devastations, cruelties, and treach- 
 eries, which stand out as the terrific incidents 
 of such a stupendous crime ? Nor has this 
 storm of wrath expended itself upon the coasts 
 alone. As I said before, these man-hunting 
 forays and ravages have swept inland for 
 twelve or thirteen hundred miles — further than 
 from the Atlantic to the Mississippi — as far as 
 from the Gulf of Mexico to the great lakes. 
 Such has been the diffusive character of this 
 continent-o'erwhelrning crime. And it is in 
 this that we find the cause of Africa's degrada- 
 tion, not the hopes of her redemption. The 
 white man has created the very barbarism 
 which he now impiously uses before Heaven as 
 an excuse for the crime of creating it. Foreign 
 intercourse engrafted the full-developed vices 
 
 bariaq 
 eated the 
 very necessity for that civilization, which, as 
 they now profanely contend, the further sin of 
 slavery is to supply. The cause of African 
 barbarism was slavery; and, according to the 
 argument, the remedy is slavey. Tho white 
 man clutches the profits, while be throws off 
 the wickedness upon God. But what kind of 
 a God does he give to the black man. who suf- 
 fers equally from both disease and remedy? 
 
 Mr. MASON. 1 desire to ask the gentleman 
 from Massachusetts a single question. I wish 
 to call his attention to the fact, which I learn 
 from the history of the race, that the three mil- 
 lions of negroes in the United States, who are 
 slaves, are in a hetter condition, physically and 
 morally, than any three millions of the African 
 race that have existed since we have any au- 
 thentic accounts of them. I ask the gentleman 
 whether he does not consider the improve- 
 ment in the moral and physical condition of 
 
these negroes sufficient to counter! >alance the 
 evils which necessarily grow out of the institu- 
 tion of slavery? 
 
 Mr. MANN. That is a fair question, and I 
 am ready to answer it. According to the laws 
 of population, which govern barbarous nations, 
 Africa has as many inhabitants now, as it 
 would have if the robber had never invaded her 
 domain, and stolen away her children. Among 
 barbarous tribes, the population presses upon 
 the means of subsistence. It tends toincrease 
 faster than the means of subsistence increase. 
 Remove a part of the great family from the 
 table whence they are supplied, and their va- 
 cant places will be soon filled by others, ac- 
 cording to the laws of natural increase. As to 
 them, the Malthusian theory holds good. 
 Therefore we have not diminished the number 
 of suffering, degraded, and demoralized beings 
 in Africa, by one unit, in consequence of taking 
 a portion of their ancestors from them. 
 
 Mr. MASON. What would have been the 
 condition of these three millions of negroes, had 
 not their ancestors been brought to this coun- 
 try ? Would they not, by degradation and 
 starvation, have gone out of existence ? 
 
 Mr. MANN. They would never have come 
 into existence ; but their places amongst u8 
 would have been occupied by a white popula- 
 tion of our own race, or of some race kindred 
 to our own. Other men would have been sub- 
 stituted for them — whites for blacks, freemen 
 for slaves. 
 
 Mr. MASON. Are not our slaves better off, 
 both morally and physically, than any three 
 millions of negroes ever were in Africa? 
 
 Mr. MANN. Before the gentleman insti- 
 tutes a comparison between the moral and 
 physical condition of the black race here and 
 in Africa, he must see what has caused their 
 degradation at home. Remember the awful 
 facts that forty millions of the best of them — 
 selected men and women — within the last three 
 centuries, have been torn from home, and that 
 these ravages have not been confined to the 
 eastern and western shores, but have pierced 
 inland; so that the country has bled at every 
 pore — at every vital organ — and conceive, if 
 mortal imagination can conceive, what effect 
 this of itself must have in making and keeping 
 a people barbarian. And, after all, what has 
 been the social condition of the interior tribes, 
 who have had less communication and been 
 less corrupted by the 'lower law''' nations? 
 Travellers inform us that, generally speaking, 
 they are a mild, docile, peaceable people — nut 
 aggressive and predatory, land-robbing and 
 man-hunting, like the British in India, or our- 
 selves on this continent. They are contented, 
 companionable, home-loving, and unwarlike. 
 Some of the early Christian Fathers, as the 
 gentleman must well know, were Africans; 
 and there is every reason to believe that Chris- 
 tianity would have spread southward from the 
 
 Mediterranean into Africa, quite as fast as 
 northward into Europe, and would even have 
 encountered less opposition from the stern and 
 unyielding nature of the people, but for the de- 
 moralizing elements injected through every 
 vein and artery of their system by the stronger 
 nations of the earth. 
 
 Mr. MASON. I think the gentleman might 
 give many other reasons than the one which 
 he has named, why the Africans have not be- 
 come more civilized. I think he might find 
 reasons for it in the history of that race for the 
 last thousand years, and in the history of the 
 missionaries who have gone amongst them. 
 The Catholics have been there for several hun- 
 dred years, and have established churches, but 
 have always abandoned them; although I see 
 by the last reports that they are trying it 
 again. I think the gentleman could find a rea- 
 son for it in the nature of the black man, as 
 made by his Creator. He is not capable or 
 susceptible of any of these qualifications in any 
 Vher state than in a state of slavery. The 
 three millions who have been reduced to sla- 
 very in this country have been placed in a bet- 
 ter condition than any of the race have been 
 known to exist in. The gentleman admits that 
 fact. 
 
 Mr. MANN. Has the gentleman read Dr. 
 Shaw's Travels in Africa ? 
 
 Mr. MASON. I have read some extracts 
 from Dr. Shaw's Travels. 
 
 Mr. MANN. Dr. Shaw relates the manner 
 in which the western Moors of Africa had 
 traded, "from time immemorial, 7 ' as he says, 
 with the native tribes on the banks of the 
 Niger, without ever having violated the charter 
 which prescribed the mode of traffic : 
 
 " At a certain time of the year," says Dr. Shaw, 
 " they [the Moors] make this journey in a numerous 
 caravan, carrying along with them coral and glass 
 beads, bracelets of horn, knives, scissors, and such 
 like trinkets. When they arrive at the place appoint- 
 ed, which is on such a day of the moon, they find in 
 the evening several different heaps of gold dust, lying 
 at a small distance from each other, against which 
 the Moors place so many of their trinkets as they 
 judge will be taken in exchange for them. If tho 
 Nigritians the next morning approve of the bargain, 
 they take up the trinkets and leave the gold dust, or 
 else make some deduction from the latter. In this 
 manner they transact their exchange, without seeing 
 one another, or without the least instance of dishon- 
 esty or perfidiousness on either side.'"* 
 
 Now, contrast this picture with the honesty 
 of the black men in this country, or of the 
 white men either. Contrast it with the fact of 
 our infinite mercantile frauds, from the forgery 
 of custom-house invoices, through adulteration 
 and false weights and false measures, down to 
 the shower of lies which is so often rained upon 
 his goods by the last retailer, affirming them 
 to be what he knows they are not, and make 
 
 * Travels and Observations rein ting to several parts 
 of Barbary and the Levant. Dr. Shaw was English 
 chaplain at Algiers in the reign of George I. 
 
your own comparisons as to what the race is 
 here, and what it might have been, but for 
 man-stealing, there. 
 
 Mr. MASON. The gentleman must not un- 
 derstand me as being an enemy of the African 
 race; but I look upon them as being an entire- 
 ly different people. If the effect of civilization 
 is to make men dishonest, we had better not 
 try to civilize the Africans. 
 
 Mr. MANN._ And now_, as the argument is 
 that God ordained American slavery as the 
 means of civilizing and Christianizing Africa, 
 let us see what kind and style of civilization 
 and Christianity it is which our example prof- 
 fers them. The most conspicuous features in 
 the civilization of this country are, that it holds 
 more than three millions of human beings in 
 ruthless bondage ; that the spirit which governs 
 the country has lately annexed slaveholding 
 Texas, because it was slaveholding: that it has 
 despoiled Mexico of her richest provinces, in 
 the hope of making them slaveholding also; 
 that it has attempted to rob Spain of Cuba, 
 and still means to do it; that two millions of 
 our white children are growing up without 
 schools; that intemperance is a common vice 
 among the people, and not an uncommon one 
 among rulers; and that, in our cities, the rich 
 and the strong live upon the poor and the 
 weak, almost as much as in the waters on 
 which they are situated, the great fishes eat up 
 the little ones. When some one asked John 
 Jacob Astor how so many men found business 
 in the city of New York, his reply was. "They 
 cheats one another, and they calls that busi- 
 ness.'- The wealthy have more houses than 
 they can live in. the costliest furniture, ward- 
 robes, equipages, libraries, and all that art or 
 nature can produce; while thousands of the 
 children of the same Heavenly Father, around 
 them, are houseless and shelterless, naked and 
 hungry. Such is the type of the civilization 
 which our example proffers to Africa. 
 
 And how do our " lower law" apologists for 
 slavery dispose of the American coastwise 
 slave trade among the facts of their impious 
 argument? In 1820, Virginia had a slave 
 population 425,153. According to the ratio of 
 increase in the whole slave population of the 
 United States, her slaves, in 1850, should have 
 amounted to 800,000. But the actual number 
 was only 472.528; that is, more than 300,000 
 less than the proportionate natural increase. 
 This number, or at least most of them, must 
 have been sent to the South for sale. 
 
 In 1833, Professor Dew, of William and 
 Mary College said that Virginia exported her 
 own native population, at the rate of 6.000, for 
 whu'eh she received $1,200,000. annually. 
 
 So in 1820, the slave population of Maryland 
 was 107.398. Making all due abatements for 
 manumissions and escapes, this number should 
 have increased, in thirty years, to nearly 
 200,000. But in 1850 it was only 90,368. The 
 
 difference has gone to the remorseless South. 
 And doubtless, in most of these cases, members 
 of families have been torn asunder — man from 
 woman, parents from children. 
 
 The same slave trade is carried on from 
 North Carolina. The slaves are borne from 
 the less rigorous bondage of the Northern 
 slave States, to a more unrelenting prison- 
 house. Is this also in furtherance of God's 
 gracious purpose of spreading Christianity and 
 civilization over Africa ? 
 
 Our Christianity secures the Trial by Jury, 
 and the Great Writ of Freedom, to ourselves, 
 but disfranchises and outlaws, and puts beyond 
 the pale of human sympathy, an entire race of 
 a different color. But when have we sent to 
 Africa a colony of Americans to teach them 
 the arts? When a Las Casas to teach them 
 Christianity? The missionaries we have sent 
 them have been rum and fire-arms. The arts 
 we have taught them have been those of 
 treachery and man stealing. In what we took, 
 and in what we gave, we inflicted upon them 
 a double curse. And yet Doctors of Divinity 
 and political aspirants dare tell us that God 
 looked down through the vista of the ages, and, 
 seeing this frightful form of civilization afar 
 off, with all its attendant ministers of ven- 
 geance, and woe, and death, bade the gory 
 demon advance ! 
 
 Mr. POLK, (interrupting.) I ask the gentle- 
 man from Massachusetts to paint me the con- 
 dition of the black race in the non-slaveholdine: 
 States. 
 
 Mr. MANN. At the proper time I will at- 
 tend to that subject. It does not belong to my 
 present course of argument. 
 
 Mr. POLK. I insist upon it now. sir. 
 
 [Loud cries of "Order!" "Order!"] 
 
 Mr. MANN. If the gentleman will show 
 me what right he has to insist upon it, I will 
 obey him ; but not until he does. 
 
 Mr. POLK. I consider the attack which 
 the gentleman is making upon the South as 
 unworthy of a member upon this floor. 
 
 [Renewed cries of " Order ! "] 
 
 Mr. MANN. The gentleman from Tennes- 
 see must not, in the first place, forbid our dis- 
 cussing the subject of slavery 
 
 Mr. POLK. I forbid nothing but slanders 
 upon the institutions of the South. 
 
 [Shouts of "Order!"] 
 
 Mr. MANX. And then, when we get a 
 chance to discuss it, undertake to determine 
 upon what topics discussion shall be had. 
 
 Mr. POLK. I say that a gentleman upon 
 this floor has no right to perpetrate such vile 
 slanders upon the South, when he does not hold 
 himself personally responsible 
 
 [Loud shouts of " Order ! "] 
 
 The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from 
 Tennessee is out of order, and must take his 
 seat. 
 
 Mr. HARRIS, of Alabama. I rise to a ques- 
 
tion of order, and I wish to have the question 
 decided. The gentleman from Massachusetts 
 has now been, for the last three quarters of an 
 hour, assailing the established institutions of 
 one half of this Union — existing institutions, 
 existing under the Constitution of the United 
 States. I ask if that be in order? I call him 
 to order upon the ground that it is not in order, 
 and I want the question decided by the Chair. 
 The CHAIRMAN. The Chair will state that 
 the latitude of debate upon these bills is very 
 
 great, and it is very difficult indeed 
 
 Mr. POLK, (interrupting ) I would ask the 
 Chair one other question. Is it right that the 
 gentleman from Massachusetts should assail 
 an institution of the South, with which we are 
 all connected, in a manner that is insulting in 
 its character, when he does not hold himself 
 responsible for his insults? 
 
 Mr. FOWLER. I rise to another question 
 of order. My question of order is this, that 
 when the gentleman from Massachusetts is 
 using his privilege, he shall be allowed to go 
 on, and that this House shall sustain the Chair 
 in allowing him to go forward with his re- 
 marks. 
 
 The CHAIRMAN. The gentleman from 
 Massachusetts [Mr. Mann] will proceed. 
 
 Mr. POLK. He has no right to state false- 
 hoods about one-half of the nation 
 
 [Shouts of ' ; Order!'"'] 
 
 Mr. MEADE. I call for the reading of the 
 31st rule. 
 
 Mr. JOHN W. HOWE. I call for the read- 
 ing of the two platforms. [Great Laughter.] 
 
 The CHAIRMAN. The Chair has decided 
 that the gentleman from Massachusetts ia in 
 order, and he will proceed. 
 
 Mr. MEADE. The 31st rule prohibits all 
 discussion of this question in this House, except 
 upon a proposition to which it is germane. I 
 ask for the reading of that rule. 
 
 The CHAIRMAN. The Chair has already 
 decided that the gentleman from Massachu- 
 setts is not out of order, in pursuing this course 
 of remark. If that decision is not satisfactory, 
 the Chair trusts some gentleman will appeal 
 from it. 
 
 Mr. HARRIS, of Alabama. I appeal from 
 that decision. 
 
 Mr. CAMPBELL, of Ohio. Very well. Let 
 us try it on the question of order presented by 
 those who have been in the habit of dragging 
 evei-y possible question into debate here. We 
 will see whether there are not other places in 
 this country besides Tennessee — other parts of 
 the Union besides the South. 
 
 Mr. POLK. I take that responsibility, and 
 appeal from the decision of the Chair. 1 hold 
 the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Campbell] 
 equally responsible; and I pronounce him the 
 same vile slanderer as the gentleman from 
 Massachusetts, who makes these charges. j 
 [Cries of "Order!"] 
 
 The 31st rule was then read by the Clerk as 
 follows : 
 
 "When any member is about to speak in debate, 
 or deliver any matter to the House, he shall rise from 
 his seat, and respectfully address himself to ' Mr. 
 Speaker,' and shall confine himself to the question 
 under debate, and avoid personality." 
 
 Mr. MANN continued : Mr. Chairman, for 
 myself, I do not regret this interruption. But 
 I did not think it possible, even after the Balti- 
 more edict had gone forth, even after a Sena- 
 tor had been silenced at the other end of the 
 Capitol [Mr. Sumner,] and also a Representa- 
 tive on this floor, [Mr. Cleveland.] because 
 they proposed to speak on the subject of slave- 
 ry—I did not think it possible, when I was in 
 the legitimate course of making a speech, and 
 was rightfully entitled to the floor, and was in 
 order, that a dozen men should start up here, 
 so hostile to hearing the words of truth _ and 
 soberness, when spoken in relation to the insti- 
 tute of slavery, as to try to gag me down. 
 
 I had spoken of the cause of Africa's demor- 
 alization and barbarism. I had spoken of the 
 type of civilization which it is proposed to offer 
 her as an example, and I had shown how im- 
 pious was the argument which would attribute 
 to the All-good and the All-powerful, such a 
 tardy, cruel, circuitous method of effecting her 
 regeneration ; and which, after waiting through 
 slow centuries of agony and crime, would send 
 her such a civilization by such messengers ! I 
 have only to add, that before 1 would accept 
 any such theology as this, I would seek my 
 creed among the old mythologies of the hea- 
 then. In this hideous doctrine, which slavery 
 has now forced upon that public intellect which 
 it had before depraved, there is material suffi- 
 cient for eight anti " Bridgewater Treatises,'' 
 all dw-proving the wisdom, the power, and the 
 goodness of God. 
 
 Another obvious consequence of the exist- 
 ence of slavery in this country, has been the 
 criminal remissness of the Government in^ sup- 
 pressing the slave trade on the coast of Africa. 
 We have refused to enter into treaties with 
 European Governments to secure so desirable 
 an end; and authentic documents, developing 
 the horrors of this traffic, and proving Ameri- 
 can-built merchant ships to be engaged in it, 
 have laid on the files of the State Department 
 for years, and through whole Presidential 
 terms, unnoticed. On such an appalling crime 
 as this, whose suppression has been within our 
 reach, the national conscience has been be- 
 numbed into torpidity and paralysis, by the ex* 
 istence of slavery amongst us. 
 
 Look at another instance in which slavery 
 has depraved the popular sentiment of the 
 country. Under the generous and chivalnc 
 lead of Mr. Clay, with what enthusiasm did 
 we hail the birth of the South American Re- 
 publics ! What hosannas did we shout forth 
 for the emancipation of Greece! How deep 
 
g 
 
 the sigh of the nation's heart when Poland 
 struggled in her death-agony and breathed her 
 last! Even so late as 1848, this Congress sent 
 resolutions congratulating France on her Mag- 
 na Charta of "liberty, equality, and fraternity.*' 
 [n one of the European revolutions of that year, 
 on the banks of the Danube, a young man 
 sprang, at a single bound, from comparative 
 obscurity to universal fame. His heroism or- 
 ganized armies. His genius created resources. 
 He abolished the factitious order of nobility, 
 but his exalted soul poured the celestial ichor 
 of the gods through ten millions of peasant 
 hearts, and made them truly noble. Though 
 weak in all but the energies of the soul, yet it 
 took two mighty empires to break down bis 
 power. When he sought refuge in Turkey, 
 the sympathies of the civilized world attended 
 his exile. He was invited to ouv shores. He 
 came, and spoke as man never before spake. 
 It was Byron's wish that he could condense all 
 the raging elements of his soul 
 
 '' into one. word, 
 And that one word were lightning." 
 
 Kossuth found what Byron in vain prayed for, 
 for all his words were lightning; not bolts, but 
 a lambent flame, which he poured into men's 
 hearts — not to kill, but to animate with a more 
 exalted and a diviner life. In cities where the 
 vast population went forth to hail him, in aca- 
 demic halls, where the cultivation of eloquence 
 and knowledge is made the business of life : in 
 those great gathering places, where the rivers 
 of people have their confluence, he was address- 
 ed by the most eloquent men whom this nation 
 of orators could select. More than five hun- 
 dred of our selectest speakers spoke speeches 
 before him which they had laboriously prepar- 
 ed from history and embellished from the poets, 
 with severe toil, by the long-trimmed lamp. 
 Save in two or three peculiar cases, his unpre- 
 pared and improvised replies, in eloquence, in 
 pathos, in dignity, in exalted sentiment, excel- 
 led them all. For their most profound philoso- 
 phy, he gave them deeper generalizations; he 
 out-circuited their widest ranges of thought, 
 and in the whole sweep of the horizon revealed 
 glories they had never seen ; and while they 
 checked their ambitious flight beneath the sun, 
 he soared into the empyrean, and brought down, 
 for the guidance of men's hearts and deeds, the 
 holy light that shines from the face of God. 
 Though all their splendors were gathered to a 
 focal point, they were outshone by his efful- 
 gence. His immortal theme was Liberty — 
 liberty for the nations, liberty for the people. 
 Once that word was enough to electrify men's 
 hearts, aye, to make the stones in the streets cry 
 out for joy. But, by the compromises of 1850, 
 and this infernal Slave Law, and the efforts of 
 political leaders and parties to sustain them, the 
 people had been demoralized; their sentiments 
 had been debauched. To thousands and hun- 
 dreds of" thousands the cry of the rights of man 
 had become an odious cry. To hail liberty in 
 
 the East, while wo were propagating slavery 
 in the West; to receive with honors a fugitive 
 from Austrian bondage, while our bands were 
 thrusting back fugitives into a tenfold direr 
 bondage at the South, were contradictions so 
 palpable and flagrant that even partisan blind- 
 ness could not but see them. Kossuth owed 
 labor and service to Francis Joseph of Austria, 
 just as much as Thomas Sims owed it to John 
 Potter of 'Georgia. Why should the one be 
 cheered and the other chained? Why should 
 the Mississippi bring Kossuth here for free- 
 dom, and the Acorn carry Sims back to bond- 
 age? Kossuth had committed treason, ten 
 thousand times over, against the House of Haps- 
 burg. Why should he be sheltered in our 
 arms from the penalties of treason, while the 
 Government here sets all the foul ministers of 
 the law to make constructive treasons for the 
 punishment of innocent men ? Kossuth had re- 
 belled against Austria, and had caused the 
 death of tens of thousands of her subjects. 
 Why should he be screened behind a rampart 
 of American hearts, while those who killed 
 Gorsuch, under the law of self-preservation, and 
 in defence of life, liberty, and home, should be 
 ignominiously hung on the gallows? These 
 were questions that no deafness could avoid 
 hearing, and, when heard, no sophistry could 
 answer. Freedom is one, slavery is its antipode, 
 and therefore the protection of the fugitive Kos- 
 suth and the surrender of the fugitive slave 
 could never be reconciled. Hence it was that, 
 in public assemblies, among public men, 
 throughout the newspaper press, wherever the 
 spirit of slavery predominated, there Kossuth 
 was denounced. I say, among public men. 
 Accuracy directs me to add, that, among our 
 public men, there were a few honorable excep- 
 tions, of which Mr. Webster was one. But, as 
 to the newspapers, if you saw one to-day, filled 
 with the veriest servility towards the slave 
 power, you might be sure that it would revile 
 and defame Kossuth to-morrow. Or, if you 
 saw one column reeking with abuse of Kos- 
 suth, you would be sure to find a pro-slavery 
 pasan in the next. Even at the door of this 
 House, after Kossuth had been invited to the 
 Capitol, he was stopped and insulted. Some 
 of the more simple ones avowed their reasons. 
 They said, if we sympathize with the oppress- 
 ed in the person of a Hungarian now, we may 
 next be called upon to sympathize with the op- 
 pressed in the persons of three millions of Af- 
 ricans. Compare the triumphal ' ; Progress" of 
 Kossuth through the free States, such as no Ro- 
 man consul, returning from foreign conquests 
 and laden with spoils, ever knew, with the fee- 
 ble, and grudged, and stinted honors paid him 
 in the land of bondage. Slavery made the 
 contrast. Almost without exception, the North- 
 ern opponents of Kossuth were sympathizers 
 with Southern slavery, and therefore with 
 Francis Joseph and Nicholas. 
 The person of this truly noftle Hungarian 
 
10 
 
 has departed from our shores; but he has left a 
 spirit behind him that will never die. He has 
 scattered seeds of liberty and truth, whose flow- 
 ers and fruit will become honors and glories 
 amaranthine. I trust he goes to mingle in 
 sterner scenes; I trust he goes to battle for the 
 right, not with the tongue and pen alone, but 
 with all the weapons that freedom can forge 
 and wield. Before the Divine Government J 
 bow in reverence and adoration; but it tasks 
 all my philosophy and all my religion to be- 
 lieve that the despots of Europe have not ex- 
 ercised their irresponsible and cruel tyrannies 
 too long. It seems too long since Charles was 
 brought to the axe, and Louis to the guillotine. 
 Liberty, humanity, justice, demand more mod- 
 ern instances. The time has fully come when 
 the despot, not the patriot, should feel the ex- 
 ecutioner's steel or lead. The 'time has fully 
 come when, if the oppressed demand their in- 
 alienable and Heaven-born rights of their op- 
 pressors, and this demand is denied, that they, 
 should say, not exactly in the language of Pat- 
 rick Henry, " Give me liberty or give me 
 death;" that was noble language in its day, 
 but we have now reached an advanced stage 
 in human development, and the time has fully 
 come when the oppressed, if their rights are 
 forcibly denied them, should say to the oppres- 
 sor : " Give me liberty, or I will give you death ! " 
 
 I have said that one of the collateral conse- 
 quences of slavery in this country has been to 
 deprave, corrupt, and debauch public senti- 
 ment. When, before, in the history of the world, 
 has it ever happened that the leading men of 
 a Republic, and the leading organs of public 
 sentiment supported by their wealth, have be- 
 come abettors and champions of slavery? Yet 
 such is the morally hideous spectacle our coun- 
 try now exhibits. 
 
 When, before, in the history of the world, 
 have the most influential minds in the commu- 
 nity labored and striven to blot out, theoreti- 
 cally and practically, the ineffaceable distinc- 
 tion between a man and a brute, between a 
 human soul and an inanimate chattel, to plant 
 and enroot in our civil polity a vast, expanding 
 system, in which conscience, reason, the capa- 
 cities of religion, and the inborn convictions of 
 accountability and immortality are made sub- 
 servient and secondary to bones and muscles, 
 and put upon auction blocks as incidents to 
 the body that perisheth ? When, before, in 
 all our history, have men of eloquence and 
 power ever traversed the country, and scatter- 
 ed letters and speeches, like the flakes of a 
 snow-storm, to subdue and harmonize the pub- 
 lic mind to such stupendous wrongs ? When, 
 before, since the May-Flower crossed the ocean 
 with her precious burden, has any one minis- 
 ter of the Puritan stock ever dared or ever 
 desired to put on priestly robes and enter the 
 house of God, to defend slavery, or to palliate 
 it?^ Sir, such things were never known before. 
 It is a new spectacle for men and angels. It 
 
 must give a new joy in the world of darkness. 
 
 Another collateral effect which slavery has 
 produced, is the promulgation from the Halls 
 of Congress, and also from — what, in such cases, 
 is not the sacred, but the profane desk — that 
 there is no " Higher Law" than the Constitu- 
 tion, or than any interpretation which any cor- 
 rupt Congress may put upon it. Such a doc- 
 trine is nothing less than palpable and flagrant 
 atheism. If 1 am bound to obey any human 
 law or Constitution, as my paramount rule of 
 duty, thenceforth that rule becomes my supreme 
 arbiter, judge, and god ; and I am compelled, 
 by logical necessity, to abjure, renounce, and 
 depose all others. There cannot be two su- 
 preme rules of right. If I acknowledge my- 
 self bound by the divine law, and that comes 
 in conflict with the human law, then I must 
 disobey the latter. But if the human law be 
 the Higher Law, and if it conflicts with God's 
 law, then I am bound to disobey the law of 
 God. If the Constitution be the " Higher Law," 
 then we, on taking our seats in this House, and 
 all magistrates and legislators, when entering 
 upon the duties of their respective offices, ought 
 not to take an oath before God to support the 
 Constitution, but ought to swear by the Consti- 
 tution to support that first, and God after- 
 wards ; provided it is convenient. I say, then, 
 that this doctrine — which is one of the off- 
 shoots of slavery — that there is no higher la y w 
 than the law of the State, is palpable and prac- 
 tical atheism. And yet it is perfectly well 
 known to all who hear me, and to all who fre- 
 quent the purlieus of Congress, that there is no 
 butt of ridicule so common here, nothing which 
 so readily and so frequently raises the "loud 
 laugh that speaks the vacant mind," as a fling 
 or jeer at the " higher law." 
 
 Sir, it is of fearful omen, when the laws of 
 men are made, even in theory, to take prece- 
 dence and override the laws of God. And the 
 last aggravation is added to this iniquity, when 
 the politician disguises himself beneath the 
 garb of a priest, and cloaks his wickedness un- 
 der the show of religion. 
 
 No person feels a profounder reverence, or 
 would pay a sincerer homage to a godly, sin- 
 avoiding, sin-exposing priesthood, than myself. 
 But I have no adequate words to express my 
 abhorrence for the clerical hypocrite, with 
 whom religion is neither a sanctification of the 
 soul, nor a purification of the body, but only a 
 kind of policy of insurance against the retribu- 
 tion in another world for sins committed in 
 this, accompanied all the while by knavish 
 tricks on the part of the insured to cheat the 
 Divine Insurer out of his premium. 
 
 Mr. SUTHERLAND. I ask the gentleman 
 from Massachusetts whether it is possible that 
 the higher law of God can come in conflict 
 with the Constitution 1 
 
 Mr. MANN. I think it would be better to 
 ask whether the Constitution comes in conflict 
 with the higher law. 
 
11 
 
 Mr. SUTHERLAND. I ask the gentleman 
 if every American citizen does not obey the 
 higher law of God when he obeys every part of 
 the Constitution ? And can any good result 
 come from discussing these immaterial abstrac- 
 tions ? Is not the spirit of the Constitution in 
 accordance with the higher law ? Can you 
 point to a clause in the Constitution which, 
 when fulfilling to the best of my ability, would 
 make me violate the higher law of God? 
 
 Mr. MANN. That is not to the point. 
 
 Mr. SUTHERLAND. It is the very point. 
 You and others — I say it with all possible re- 
 spect — disturb the harmony of this House and 
 the country by trying to get up issues upon ab- 
 stract questions of morality, which have noth- 
 ing whatever to do with the proceedings of this 
 House, or with correct public sentiment. If I 
 should undertake to make an issue between 
 you and me upon the subject of slavery, it 
 would be wrong. Yet you get up here and at- 
 tempt to make this issue before the country. 
 You get up an issue upon an immaterial ques- 
 tion of morality, which simply tends to excite 
 men without any practical benefit. 
 
 Mr. MANN. I hope the gentleman will not 
 interrupt me further. His argument would 
 have answered just as well in the time of 
 Herod, the Tetrarch, when he issued the order 
 for the murder of all the children under two 
 years of age. The murderers doubtless got ten- 
 dollar commissioner fees for the deed. So those 
 who massacred thirty-six thousand Protestants, 
 on St. Bartholomew's day, at the ringing of a 
 signal-bell, went by the " Higher Law" of the 
 Pope, or of his vice-gerent, the King ; and had 
 not they their " Union " to save by if? And 
 our Pilgrim Fathers were driven into exile by 
 the " Higher Law " of a hierarchical Parlia- 
 ment. And so if you admit this doctrine, there 
 is no enormity, actual or conceivable, which 
 may not be perpetrated and justified under it. 
 
 The gentleman says I am discussing " imma- 
 terial abstractions," and raising issues that 
 have no practical bearing. Is the Fugitive 
 Slave Law an "immaterial abstraction?" a 
 law which violates both the divine law and the 
 Constitution of the country. Ask the free man, 
 Gibson, who was sent into bondage under it 
 when as much entitled to his liberty as you or 
 I, whether that law has not some bearing on a 
 practical question. Are not the Baltimore 
 edicts before the country ? And have they no 
 practical bearing, when their very purpose is 
 to suppress free speech; and when that pur- 
 pose has been executed again and again — and 
 the attempt has been made here, within the 
 last half hour, upon me, to enforce it? 
 
 Now, sir, I do not believe in preaching against 
 theoretical and distant sins, and letting real 
 and present ones escape. I do not believe in 
 denouncing Hindoo suttees, because they are 
 on the other side of the globe, and defending 
 the extension of slavery in our own land. That 
 sin has the beguiling defence of office and prof- 
 
 its not less than ours. But that sin destroys 
 only the body ; ours the soul. The modern 
 clergymen of the u lower law " school can se- 
 lect some monster of the Old Testament — Da- 
 rius, Nebuchadnezzar, or Jeroboam — and hold 
 them up for execration, while they suffer the 
 greater moral monsters of their own parishes 
 to escape with impunity. They have no mercy 
 for Jeroboam, old hunker though he was, lie- 
 cause he " drove Israel from following the 
 Lord," more especially as there was noonu 
 for the Presidency, nor any tariff, nor sale of 
 dry goods to tho South, to tempt him. But they 
 forget that each and all of the worst sinners 
 whose names blacken the page of history had 
 their accompanying temptations, and their 
 uistry for self-defence, just as much as the of- 
 fenders of our day. They forget that when 
 posterity looks backwards upon great crimes, 
 as they stand out in historic relief, they are 
 seen in their foul nakedness and deformity, and 
 without any of the palliations or pretexts by 
 which their wickedness was softened to the 
 tempted eye of the perpetrator. They forget 
 that it will be as true of the crimes of our day, 
 as of ancient ones, when the evanescent cir- 
 cumstances of the seduction have passed by — 
 that then they, too, will stand out in the fore- 
 ground of the historic canvass, in their full pro- 
 portions, and in their native deformity, hideous, 
 unmitigated, and execrable. Had not Ananias 
 and Sapphira a temptation every whit as strong 
 to keep back from the apostles a part of the 
 price of their possessions, as though they had 
 been offered a sinecure chaplaincy in the Navy 
 for defending the Fugitive Slave Law ? We 
 have historic proof that Benedict Arnold at- 
 tempted to justify his treason, on the ground 
 that he was seeking the best good of the colo- 
 nies, just as his followers in our times seek to 
 justify themselves by the far less plausible plea 
 of saving the Union. 
 
 I know it is said, that if the doctrine of the 
 "Higher Law" is admitted, all laws will beset 
 at naught, and civil Government be overthrown. 
 All history refutes this ; for, of all the men who 
 have ever lived, those who contend for the 
 higher law of God have universally been the 
 most faithful and obedient, when human laws 
 were coincident with the divine. That identi- 
 cal principle in our nature, which makes us 
 true to the will of God, makes us also true to 
 all the just commands of men.* 
 
 * What is the following fling at tho " Higher Law," 
 hut explicit atheism : 
 
 " When nothing else will answer, they invoke re- 
 ligion, and speak of a higher law. Gentlemen, this 
 North mountain is high, the Bluo Ridge higher still, 
 the Allegany higher than either, and yet this higher 
 law ranges further than an cagle"s flight above tho 
 highest peaks of the Allegany. [Laughter.] No com- 
 ono)i vision can discern it, no conscience vot trans- 
 cendental and ecstatic can feel it, the hearing of com- 
 mon men never learns tts high behests ; and therefore 
 one should think it is not a safe law to be acted on 
 in matters of tho highest practical moment. It is tho 
 
12 
 
 Another consequennce of most evil portent 
 has grown out of the late political enthusiasm 
 for slavery : I mean a false interpretation of 
 the law of treason. Sir, you know, and we 
 all know, that under the bloody reigns of Brit- 
 ish tyrants, treason by construction was the 
 great engine of political and personal ven- 
 geance. Under the old doctrine of construct- 
 ive treason, if living lips dared to preach the 
 gospel of freedom, they were foreed to preach 
 the doctrine of abject submission to ungodly 
 laws; for the heads they belonged to were 
 decapitated and borne on soldiers' pikes through 
 the streets of cities, and hung up to fester and 
 rot at all the city gates. I could occupy the 
 day with the recital of instances, where the 
 purest innocence and the noblest virtues fell a 
 sacrifice to a forced and arbitrary construction 
 of the law of treason. Having lately looked 
 through those English cases, I now declare 
 that they were not one whit a greater outrage 
 upon the English law, than was Judge Kane's 
 charge to the grand jury in the Christiana 
 cases. Both had in view the same object, to 
 put down agitation for freedom, and Lord Jef- 
 fries's expositions were as plausible as Judge 
 Kane's. 
 
 To exclude all possibility of constructive 
 treason, under our Constitution, its framers de- 
 fined that offence in the following words: 
 
 "Treason against the United States shall consist 
 only in levying war against them ; or in adhering 
 to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." 
 
 Judge Kane says, that whatever would make 
 a man an accessory to the crime, in any other 
 felony, makes him a principal in this ; when 
 the very intent of the new definition, in our 
 Constitution, was so far to abrogate the Eng- 
 lish law. The emphatic word only, in our 
 definition, expressly excludes the accessory. It 
 is only the man who levies the war, or the man 
 who adheres to the enemies of the country, 
 who is, or, under our Constitution, can be a 
 traitor. The other interpretation opens the 
 door to all the constructive treasons known to 
 the worst days of English judicial tyranny — 
 the very door which the framers of our Con- 
 Btitution intended to lock and double-lock and 
 fasten impregnably. 
 
 And again : The doctrine of accessories and 
 the relation of accessories to principals, was a 
 part of the English common law. That com- 
 mon law these United States never adopted, 
 as has been decided again and again, and 
 therefore there can be no accessories in trea- 
 son, by construction. 
 
 And besides all this, the seventh section of 
 the Fugitive Slave Law provides a penalty for 
 every act which a man can commit in assisting 
 the escape of a slave; so that, if any such act 
 were treason before, it is no longer so ; for no 
 legal principle is better settled than that when 
 
 code, however, of the fanatical and factious Aboli- 
 tionists of the North." — Daniel Webster's speech at 
 Capon ( Virginia) Spri7?gs, Jtair, 1851. 
 
 a subsequent statute reduces the penalty provi- 
 ded in a previous one, the previous actds so far 
 repealed, even without any repealing words. 
 On any ground, therefore, the charge of Judge 
 Kane is only inferior in monstrousness to the 
 law whose inherent atrocity he sought to ag- 
 gravate. 
 
 A similar attempt to' create constructive trea- 
 son was made in the Syracuse cases; but the 
 air of Western New York being more electric 
 with freedom, had a salutary effect upon the 
 health of the Court. Would to Heaven that 
 these healthful breezes of the country could 
 reach and sweep away the judicial miasma 
 that stagnates upon our Atlantic cities. 
 
 The district attorney at Syracuse, having 
 rendered himself obnoxious by the inordinate 
 zeal with which he pursued the suspected- in 
 the rescue cases at that city, I was glad to see 
 it stated in the newspapers that the ladies of 
 the place had a meeting, and sent him a pres- 
 ent of thirty pieces of silver. They were three- 
 cent pieces, however — ninety cents in the 
 whole ! The ancient Judas got larger pieces. 
 Such,, however, is now the rivalry to fill his 
 place, that the competitors must content them- 
 selves with smaller coin. 
 
 It was said, also, that when Jerry, the al- 
 leged fugitive in that case, reached her Majes- 
 ty's dominions, he put the irons with which he 
 had been " dressed " into a nice box, and sent 
 them to President Fillmore. When the signer 
 of the Fugitive Slave Law unboxed these irons, 
 and unwrapped them, and first took in the full 
 significance of their meaning, it must have 
 presented a scene worthy the highest art of 
 the historic painter! I trust it so happened 
 that they were received and opened at a Cabi- 
 net meeting ! 
 
 And under this prolific head of the collate- 
 ral consequences of slavery, I say again, and 
 finally, where else, since the light of the Chris- 
 tian era first dawned upon the world, has it 
 ever been known that the leading men of a 
 young Republic espoused the side of slavery ? 
 It is unnatural as parricide. Look at the Re- 
 publics of Switzerland, or at the States Gene- 
 ral of Holland. Look at France at the period 
 of the great Revolution, when in her maddened 
 throes for liberty, after fifteen centuries of op- 
 pression, one of her first acts was the recogni- 
 tion of the natural and universal freedom of 
 man. Look at the South American Republics, 
 composed as they mainly were of Catholics, 
 who for ages had been inured to bodily and 
 mental thraldom, and amongst whom slavery 
 was an existing institution, as it was here when 
 our Declaration of Independence was promul- 
 gated, yet by a noble act of moral heroism 
 they cast the incubus away. Yes, I rdpeat, 
 ours is the first Republic since Christ died for 
 men, whose leaders have disowned and deserted 
 the principles of their Go' £ nment, and be- 
 come the willing champions of the most re- 
 morseless of deepotiems. 
 
13 
 
 Sir, I may as well remark here as anywhere, 
 in order to make any honest misconstruction 
 of my views impossible, that when 1 speak of 
 
 the all-comprehending wickeness of slavery 
 
 when I say that it is in relation to the wrongs 
 and crimes of men— what the Primum Motile 
 was in the ancient systems of astronomy — an 
 all-encircling and all-upholding concave, within 
 which every wrong and every Crime lias its 
 natural home— when 1 affirm this, 1 affirm it 
 of the system or institution of slavery. And 
 
 to this I wish to add — what all history provi 
 
 that good men may he implicated in a bad 
 system— as in the English hierarchy, which 1 
 regard as a vicious system of church govern- 
 ment; and yet how many super-cminently 
 great, and good, and pious men it has pro- 
 duced; or. as in the Catholic religion, which I 
 believe to he an untrue form of Christianity, 
 and yet in no religion have there been brighter 
 examples of purity and beneficence. In bat- 
 tling to overcome the moral wrongs and errors 
 into which a man has been born, the moral 
 sentiments, like the intellect, grow heroic as 
 they become victorious, and in their noble 
 strivings they reach a sublimity of virtue pro- 
 portioned to the depths of vice from which 
 thej' sprang. But this does not prevent bad 
 systems from producing their natural fruits on 
 the mass of men. 
 
 And now, having shown what a mighty 
 wrong slavery is, in and of itself; having shown 
 what collateral debasement, cruelty, and prac- 
 tical atheism, it generates and diffuses, let me 
 ask, if the political Free Soil party do not go 
 to the uttermost verge that patriot, moralist, or 
 Christian can go, when it consents to let sla- 
 very remain where it is ? Thefre is an en- 
 deavor to make up a false issue for the coun- 
 try, and for the tribunal of history, on this sub- 
 ject. Free-Soilers are charged with interfering 
 with slavery within the jurisdiction of the 
 States where it is. This allegation is wholly 
 unfounded. Our whole effort has been sim- 
 ply to keep it within the jurisdiction of the 
 States where it is. We would not have it pro- 
 fane free territory. We would not allow it to 
 double its present domain ; we would, not see 
 it blast with nameless and innumerable woes, 
 two-thirds of our territorial area on the Pacific 
 coast, as it already has two-thirds on the At- 
 lantic. This is all we have done. And, to the 
 argument that, with only about three slaves 
 to a square mile over all your territory, you, 
 gentlemen of the slave States, must have more 
 space, because you are becoming suffocated by 
 bo close crowding, we simply reply, that we 
 cannot admit that argument, because it devotes 
 the whole world to inevitable slavery. For, if 
 you already need a greater expanse of territory 
 for comfortable room, that, too, will soon be 
 crowded with three slaves to a square mile, 
 and the argume. r or further conquest and ex- 
 pansion will come back upon us. Yielding 
 again, the argument will speedily recur again. 
 
 It will be a never-ending, still-beginning, pre- 
 text for extension, until the whole world shall 
 Become a reel realm of slavery — even tin 
 State, being engulfed with the rest, so that the 
 dove of freedom will have no spot on the sur- 
 face of the globe where she ran set her foot. 
 
 And now, notwithstanding the infinite evil 
 and wrong of slavery, intrinsic in it. and in- 
 separable from it: notwithstanding the virus 
 with which it poisons all our free institutions — 
 its exclusion of independent communities from 
 the brotherhood of the I Dion; it, hardening 
 the nation's heart against all people struggling 
 for liberty; its atheist-making; its attempt to 
 transfer the whole false English code of high 
 treason into our law; and all its debasement 
 of the republican sentiment, aid the moral 
 sentiment of this country — notwithstanding all 
 this, the Baltimore Conventions decree thai the 
 subject of slavery shall he agitated among us 
 no more forever. 
 
 _ Look at the comprehensiveness of this inter- 
 dict. It embraces all subjects. It forbids the 
 political economist from discussing the relative 
 productiveness of free and slave labor. It for- 
 bids the educationist from demonstrating that 
 a slaveholding people must always, from the 
 necessity of the case, be an ignorant people — a 
 people divided not only into castes of wealth, 
 but into castes of intelligence. It forbids ge- 
 nius from presenting Truth in the glowing 
 similitudes of Fiction ; and that divine-hearted 
 woman, the authoress of u Uncle Tom's Cabin,'-' 
 is under the Baltimore ban. It forbids the 
 poet, whose lips from olden days have been 
 touched as with live coals from off the heaven- 
 ly altar — from ever again kindling the hearts 
 of mankind with a divine enthusiasm for lib- 
 erty. It strikes out all the leading chapters 
 from the book of the moralist. It puts its seal 
 upon the lips of the minister of Christ, when 
 he would declare the whole counsel of God, 
 and forbids him ever again to preach from the 
 text, '• Whatsoever ye would that men should 
 do unto you, do ye even so unto them.' ; All — 
 worldly prosperity, education, genius, morality, 
 religion, truth — are struck out by these Balti- 
 more Conventions in their maniacal partisan- 
 ship. 
 
 The noblest men whom God has ever sent 
 into the world — patriots, reformers, philanthro- 
 pists, apostles, and Jesus Christ himself — are on 
 the side of freedom. Tyrants, usurpers, trai- 
 tors, mcn-stealers, the wholesale murderers and 
 robbers of nations, are on the side of slavery. 
 The Baltimore Conventions enlist under the 
 1. aimers of the latter. They affiliate with the 
 House of Hapsburg, and with Nicholas; with 
 the King of Naples, and with the " Prince 
 President" of France. One might almost 
 suppose they had plagiarized their resolves 
 from the Paris Moniteur, where that ape who 
 mimics the imperial grandeur he cannot com- 
 prehend, records his tyrannical decrees against 
 freedom of speech. Louis Napoleon decreed 
 
14 
 
 free discussion out of existence in France. Six 
 hundred men at Baltimore decreed the same 
 thing for this country. The ape succeeded; 
 they fail. 
 
 And how are thesa resolves to be construed, 
 pi'ovided new questions respecting slavery arise, 
 or questions already started are precipitated 
 upon us ? Should an attempt to annex Cuba, 
 in order still further to aggrandize the Slave 
 Power, be made — and if General Pierce should 
 be elected such attempt doubtless will be 
 made — or should a new slave State, with a 
 slave Constitution, from California, apply for 
 admission — or should Mexico be again dismem- 
 bered to form new slave territory and new slave 
 States — in the occurrence of these events, or 
 of either of them, how are these Baltimore res- 
 olutions to be then construed ? We know per- 
 fectly well what claim will be set up. It will 
 be said that the new events come within the 
 terms of the prohibition — the casus foederis — 
 and bind the nation to silence. It will be 
 claimed that the resolutions cover not only all 
 subjects, but all time ; and enslave our chil- 
 dren as well as ourselves. 
 
 I have exposed the character and extent of 
 those resolutions. Let me now expose their 
 motive. I charge upon those Conventions the 
 base motive of attempting to silence discussion 
 by force — as in this House and in the Senate, 
 the same spirit once rejected petitions, and 
 would now silence debate — because they are 
 conscious they cannot meet it by argument. 
 The Fugitive Slave Law, for instance, is as- 
 sailed by the jurist, because it is unconstitu- 
 tional ; by the patriot, because it disgraces the 
 country in the eyes of the civilized world ; by 
 the religious man, because it is unchristian ; 
 and by every one who has the sentiment of 
 humanity in his bosom, for its unheard-of cru- 
 elty. The upholders of that law can answer 
 no one of these arraignments. Their only re- 
 source, therefore, is the dastardly denial of 
 discussion and free speech — like Louis Napo- 
 leon, who having no possibility of reply to the 
 accusations of treachery, perjury, and usurpa- 
 tion, forbids the accusations to be made. 
 Among all our constitutional judges, and among 
 all those mock judges called Commissioners, 
 there is not one who has met the arguments 
 against the constitutionality of this law. They 
 intrench themselves behind a feeble rampart 
 of precedents as their only defence. Judge Nog- 
 gins decides it to be constitutional,because Judge 
 Scroggins has decided it to be so. And when 
 we look back to Judge Scroggins for light, we 
 find he decided it to be constitutional, because 
 Judge Spriggins had held it to be so. Chief 
 Justice Shaw, of Massachusetts, whom I re- 
 gard as one of the ablest judges who ever ad- 
 ministered the common law, anywhere, virtu- 
 ally admitted, in the Sims case, that if the ques- 
 tion of the constitutionality of this law were a 
 new one, the affirmative could not be sustained. 
 I repeat, then, it is a dastardly order to keep 
 
 silence, because they cannot meet discussion. 
 Necessity is their only defence, 
 and with necessity, 
 
 The tj'rant's plea, excuse their devilish deed." 
 Let me state, in a few simple propositions, 
 the unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave 
 Law, which has been so much elaborated else- 
 where : 
 
 Excepting the Army and Navy, the Consti- 
 tution of the United States declares that " no 
 person shall * * be deprived of life, lib- 
 erty, or property, without due process of law." 
 It also declares that, " in suits at common law, 
 where the value in controversy shall exceed 
 twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall 
 be preserved." 
 
 Now, every case of claim for an alleged 
 slave necessarily involves both the question of 
 liberty and the question of property. 
 
 By the Constitution of every free State in 
 this Union, every person within it is presumed 
 to be a free man ; or, in other words, there is 
 never any prima facie presumption that any 
 man within it is a slave. Every man is pre- 
 sumptively free until proved to be otherwise. 
 If the civil condition or status of slavery is to 
 be fastened upon any one, it must be done by 
 the decision of a tribunal having jurisdiction 
 over liberty and property — that is, by court 
 and jury. The prima facie evidence that a man 
 is free, entitles him to the tribunal and the trial 
 of a free man. But under this Fugitive Slave 
 Law, a man's prima facie right to the tribunal 
 and the trial of a free man is taken away, not 
 by a court and jury, but by a complaint and 
 warrant. A claimant demands a human being 
 presumptively free as his slave, and that mere 
 demand is made to cancel the presumption of 
 freedom and self-ownership, to take him away 
 from a freeman's tribunal of court and jury, 
 and to carry him for trial before a slave tribu- 
 nal — that is, a Commissioner. Is it replied, 
 that the decision of the Commissioner that he 
 is a slave, and not a free man, proves that he 
 had no right to the tribunal and the trial of a 
 free man — I retort, that before an unbought, 
 unbribed, freeman's tribunal, there might have 
 been a contrary decision ; but you prejudged 
 him to be a slave, by carrying him before a 
 slave tribunal, and you robbed him of the first 
 right of a freeman, by depriving him of a free- 
 man's tribunal and trial. For him, and for 
 his case, you abolished the trial by jury. And 
 if, by virtue of such complaint and warrant, you 
 can deprive any person, in any free State, of 
 a trial by jury, you can by the same rule de- 
 prive all the men in all the free States of this 
 trial — that is, you can abolish that trial for 
 all this class of cases; and then, by equivalent 
 legislation, you can abolish it in all cases what- 
 ever. Where, then, is that right to a trial by 
 jury which the Constitution declares "shall 
 be preserved?" 
 
 The law, then, is palpably unconstitutional ; 
 because it takes from a man presumptively 
 
15 
 
 free the right to be tried as a freeman : and 
 it is because the Baltimore Conventions cannot 
 answer this argument, that they forbid its pro- 
 mulgation. . 
 
 And besides this, the proofs which the law 
 provides for and declares conclusive are abhor- 
 rent to reason, to common tense, and to the 
 common law. ltjirovides that evidence taken 
 in a Southern State, at any time or place 
 which a claimant may select, without any no- 
 tice, or any possibility of knowledge on the 
 part of the person to be robbed and enslaved 
 by it, may be clandestinely carried or sent to 
 any place where it is to be used, and there 
 sprung upon its victim, as a wild beast springs 
 from its jungle upon the passer-by; and it 
 provides that this evidence, thus surreptitiously 
 taken and used, shall be conclusive proof of 
 the tacts of slavery and of escape from slavery. 
 It does not submit the sufficiency of the evi- 
 dence to the judgment of the tribunal; but it 
 arbitrarily makes it conclusive, whether suffi- 
 cient or not. It abolishes the common law dis- 
 tinction between competency and credibility. 
 Indeed, it abolishes the elementary idea of a 
 court of justice itself, considered as a tribunal 
 whose functions are, first and chiefest, to hear 
 both sides, and then to discern between truth 
 and falsehood. The heathen emblem of jus- 
 tice was that of a goddess, holding balances in 
 her hand, and weighing with holy exactness 
 all conflicting probabilities and testimonies. The 
 true emblem of this law would be that of some 
 Glossin lawyer clutching at ten dollars as a bribe, 
 and trampling the sacred balances under foot. 
 
 What would the Southern gentlemen who 
 hear me say, if, while attending to your duties 
 in this Hall, a miscreant in any Northern city 
 or State, without knowledge or possibility of 
 knowledge on your part, should now be suborn- 
 ing witnesses to obtain evidence that your 
 house, your plantation, or cotton crop, was his, 
 ->nd by and by should make his appearance on 
 ir premises, demanding instant possession, 
 i, in case of refusal or demur, should drag 
 you'before some ten-dollar magistrate, read his 
 conclusive proof, while you are forced to be 
 dumb, and then thrust you out of estate, house, 
 and home ? And yet this Fugitive Slave Law 
 is as much more atrocious than that would be, 
 as liberty is more precious than pelf. 
 
 The cruel fruits of this law have been such 
 as might be expected to grow on so wicked a 
 stock. The first man sent into slavery under 
 it, Adam Gibson, was a free man. When the 
 claimant's agent brought Gibson to him, he 
 refused to receive him ; for he knew, and he 
 knew that all his household and neighbors 
 would know, that Gibson had never been his 
 slave. And so, after this free man had been 
 seized as a slave, and sentenced as a slave and 
 dragged forcibly away from home to Mary- 
 land as a slave, by the authority and at the 
 expense of the United States, be was set adrift 
 and left to find hi» way back as he could. 
 
 Of the first eight persons doomed to slavery 
 und(T this law, four were free men. 
 
 When this dreadful law was first broached, 
 it waa said that we might rely upon the intel- 
 ligence and the integrity of the Southern courts 
 to send into the land of freedom no certificates 
 that would doom men to bondage, unless found- 
 ed upon competent and undoubted testimony. 
 But in the case of Daniel, who was tried be- 
 fore Mr. Commissioner Smith, at Buffalo, the 
 slave claimant never carried a single witness 
 before the court that made the record of sla- 
 very and of escape. The Southern court made 
 the record on affidavits only, and then gavo the 
 claimant a certified copy of it, without ever 
 seeing or hearing a witness in the case. These 
 affidavits were given by nobody knows whom, 
 and sworn to by nobody knows whom— per- 
 haps not sworn to at all, but forged for the occa- 
 sion ; yet on sight of them the commissioner 
 pronounced Daniel to be a slave. It afterwards 
 turned out, on a hearing before Judge Conk- 
 ling, of the United States court, that there 
 never had been one particle or scintilla of evi- 
 dence before the commissioner, on which his 
 ten-dollar certificate of slavery was founded. 
 
 In another case, in Philadelphia. Commis- 
 sioner lngraham decided some point directly 
 against law and authority ; and when a decis- 
 io°n of a judge of the United States court was 
 produced against him, he coolly said he differ- 1 
 ed from the judge, made out the certificate, 
 pocketed the ten dollars, and sent a human be- 
 ing to bondage. There could be no appeal 
 from this iniquity, for the law allows none. 
 
 In another case, before Mr. Commissioner 
 Hallett, of Boston, where white persons were 
 examined, on a charge of rescuing an alleged 
 slave, he admitted this foreign evidence of a 
 State court, taken in secret, against the native- 
 born citizens of a free State. 
 
 And yet, with all these abominations on the 
 face of the law, and after this long train of 
 outrages in its administration, the Baltimore 
 Whig resolutions, which, perhaps, are the less 
 iniquitous of the two, declare that the law shal 
 not be modified, 'unless "time and experience 
 shall demonstrate some abuse of its powers. 
 How low down must these men live, that they 
 do not call what has already happened an 
 
 abuse ! ,. . . » 
 
 A story is current respecting the origin ot 
 this law, for whose authenticity I cannot per- 
 sonally vouch ; but it certainly carries verisi- 
 militude on its face. The bill is said to have 
 been concocted by a Southern disumonist. anx- 
 ious for some pretext to break up the Repub- 
 lie; and who therefore prepared a bill sc .un- 
 constitutional, so abominable and fiendish that 
 as he believed, even the recklessness ot North- 
 ern servility must spurn it. He would then 
 make its rejection his war-cry for disunion 
 But, alas! he had not fathomed the baseness ol 
 Northern politicians. What a Southern " fare, 
 eater » thought too unrighteous for any human 
 
16 
 
 being to touch, the Northern aspirants for the 
 Presidency adopted " with alacrity," and roll- 
 ed as a sweet morsel under their tongue. Now, 
 both Whig and Democratic Conventions reaf- 
 firm the law, and attribute to it a sacredness 
 and a permanency unknown to the Constitu- 
 tion itself. 
 
 Sir, when . I survey, one after another, the 
 horrid features of this law — its palpable viola- 
 tion both of the letter and the spirit of the Con- 
 stitution ; its contempt and defiance of that 
 great organic law, the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence, and of the whole spirit and acts and lives 
 of our re volution ary fathers; its repugnance to 
 all the noblest maxims and principles of the 
 British Constitution, consecrated and hallowed 
 as these have been from age to age by patriots' 
 struggles and by martyrs' blood; its fabrica- 
 tion of such a code of evidence as was never 
 before placed on the statute-book of any civil- 
 ized nation; its provisions for deciding conclu- 
 sively the question of a man's liberty, in what 
 is to him a foreign State, and before what is to 
 him a foreign tribunal, without the possibility 
 of his appearing there to confront witnesses, or, 
 even of knowing what the conspirators against 
 him are doing ; its peremptory orders to seize 
 a man, and try the unspeakably precious ques- 
 tion of his freedom and self-ownership, " in a 
 summary manner," when even robbers, pirates, 
 and murderers, must have notice of their accu- 
 sation,-adequate time to prepare for defence 
 and counsel for assistance ; its bribing magis- 
 trates to decide against liberty, and in favor of 
 slavery, and its] creation of a set of officers, 
 some of whom have so decided as to prove them- 
 selves capable of accepting a bribe; its instant 
 execution of the|dreadful sentence, without ap- 
 peal or writ of error ; its repudiation of the 
 statute of limitations, (the policy of which is 
 recognised by all civilized nations, not only in 
 cases of debt, but in regard to the title to real 
 estate, and even in regard to crimes,) so that a 
 master who has abandoned his slave for forty 
 years can come and pluck him from wife and 
 children, from home, property, and friends — 
 and when, further, I see the practical workings 
 of this law — free Northern citizens carried into 
 bondage ; Southern professors in the art of kid- 
 napping, chasing the shrieking fugitive from 
 all his hiding-places and his altars; monster 
 fathers pursuing the children of their own loins, 
 as lately happened in New York, to sell them 
 into slavery ; the virtuous woman hunted by 
 the lecher, from whose whips and scourgings 
 she had fled, to avoid his guilty embrace ; thou- 
 sands of laborious and peaceable citizens 
 amongst us. surrounded by self-earned comfort 
 and competence, fleeing from all the endear- 
 ing relations of kindred and neighborhood, out 
 of a republic into a monarchy, to regain the 
 lost birth-right of freedom — thus re-enacting 
 the scenes of the Huguenot flight under Charles 
 IX ; and, as the crowning cruelty of the whole, 
 an entire race of free people, of" innocent peo- 
 
 ple, of people whose ancestors fought and fell 
 in the battles of the Revolution, and who have 
 as much right, not merely to security and pro- 
 tection, but to the feeling of security and pro- 
 tection, under our Government, as you or I — 
 when I see these people, filled with consterna- 
 tion and dismay for themselves and for their, 
 children, trembling when they look around 
 them upon the earth, lest some tiger, in human 
 shape, should spring from his ambush and seize 
 them, and plunge them into slavery's hell, and 
 trembling when they look upward into the sky, 
 because God seems to have forsaken them; sir, 
 when I contemplate all these things,, I am com- 
 pelled, though against the common faith, to ac- 
 knowledge evidence of supernatural inspiration 
 in the hearts of men. But it is infernal and 
 diabolical inspiration, whose evidences I recog- 
 nise.'^ Sir, this Fugitive Slave Law was not 
 made by man alone : for unaided total deprav- 
 ity is not equal to all its atrocities. Place the 
 law and the Baltimore edicts side by side, the 
 command and the prohibition together. "You 
 shall chase the fugitive, but you shall not 
 speak." As in the days of the early Christians, 
 or like the Pilgrim Fathers, in the times of the 
 non-conformists, we may hold our meetings 
 only in dens or caves, or in the most secret re- 
 cesses of our dwellings, with doors locked and 
 guarded. Once the bloodhounds were muzzled ; 
 now the bloodhounds are let loose, and freemen 
 are muzzled. 
 
 Sir, when any humane and intelligent man 
 reflects upon the attributes of this law, and 
 then turns to the fiat of the Baltimore Conven- 
 tions, that it shall not be agitated or discussed, 
 he cannot but tremble with an agony of indig- 
 nation and contempt. These resolves are so 
 subversive, not only of all divine but of all hu- 
 man government; the.y are so audacious and 
 yet so impotent ; they assume so imperial an 
 air, while yet they are more imbecile than an 
 idiot's gibberish, that the great poet of our lan- 
 guage, whose mind supplies redundant images 
 for all things vile and mean, has but one pas- 
 sage that befits their vileness. To borrow his 
 words, these Baltimore resolutions are a 
 
 " birth-strangled babe, 
 
 Ditch-deliver'd by a drab." 
 
 Justice and gratitude, however, demand that I 
 should say that there were sixty-seven mem- 
 bers of the Whig Convention who stood out 
 bravely and to the last against this attempted 
 abolition of the freedom of speech. In the Dem- 
 ocratic Convention there seems to have been 
 scarcely a whisper of dissent. 
 
 Sir, I cannot but acknowledge that the events 
 I have recited have an ominous look for the 
 cause of freedom. It seems as though the black 
 cloud which has settled down over Europe was 
 extending its gloomy folds across this country, 
 to envelop, in darkness and despair, the last 
 hopes of liberty upon earth. But I have infi- 
 nite faith in God and in truth. I believe that 
 cloud to be surcharged with lightnings which 
 
will jet blast tl.e oppressor, And after the 
 lightnings and the storm have passed, then 
 shall come the day of universal freedom and 
 
 joy. 
 
 ' "False as those Baltimore Conventions were 
 to the Constitution of the United States, to the 
 Declaration of Independence, tci humanity, and 
 to God. jet when we come to scan their proceed- 
 ings more closely, we find that they were 
 amenable to a power they refused to acknowl- 
 edge. It was there as in the ancient mythol- 
 ogy: the gods decreed, but there was an inex- 
 orable fate standing behind the gods, and con- 
 trolling their decrees. That irresistible fate, 
 which bound the Conventions as with a spell, 
 and hemmed in their desires and aptitudes for 
 wrong, which was a will within their will, was 
 the g'enius of Northern Anti-Slavery. There 
 were at least half a do/.en candidates, whom 
 the Democratic Convention vastly preferred to 
 the one they finally took up with; and there 
 was at least one, whom the Whig Convention, 
 under the Southern pressure brought to bear 
 upon them, would have consented to take, but 
 for the uplifted arm of the North, which men- 
 aced inexorable defeat for any such selection, 
 and would have terribly executed its menace. 
 As in the vision of the Scottish seer, ' : coming 
 events cast their shadows before," so here the 
 coming thunders of the people's rebuke sent 
 their echoes forward, and forbade both Con- 
 ventions from inscribing the more apostate 
 names upon their banners. It was the Free 
 Soil party of the North that held those thun- 
 ders in its hands; and if it did not determine 
 whom the Conventions should nominate, it did 
 determine whom they should not. 
 
 Why did not the Democratic party nomi- 
 nate General Cass? For forty years he had 
 stood conspicuously before the country: had 
 served in early life, in a military capacity, on 
 the Northern 'frontier : been afterwards Gov- 
 ernor of a Territory now swarming with three 
 millions of men ; Ambassador abroad and Cab- 
 inet Minister and Senator at home. Besides, he 
 was a man of unblamable private life — one 
 who. whatever sinister rewards he may have 
 expected, never exposed himself to the inputa- 
 tion of bartering his integrity for -dotations;" 
 reputed, and I believe justly reputed, to be a 
 temperance man — which fact, by itself, had he 
 been a candidate against a man of known in- 
 temperate habits, would have given him fifty 
 thousand votes in New England alone — a fact 
 which future Presidential aspirants will do 
 well to heed. Why was not General Cass 
 nominated? His Ndcbolson letter was the 
 flaming barrier, which neither the perverse 
 Baahuu of Democracy, nor its beast, was able 
 to pa-s by ! By that letter, as the returns of 
 1848 show, General Cass struck off a hundred 
 thousand votes from his ticket in the State of 
 New York alone. General Cass died of a mod- 
 ern disease, called •< letter-writing," which has 
 
 proved singularly fatal to Presidential candi- 
 dates. The Nicholson letter was the malignant 
 distemper that bloated and killed him. 
 
 Why was not Mr. Buchanan nominated — 
 the favorite of that great State which, as she 
 inclines one way or the other, seems to rock 
 and sway the Union, and determine the result 
 in every Presidential election? He was a man 
 of great powers — one whom nature had laid 
 out on a grand scale. When the history of 
 this country is written, Mr. Buchanan's name 
 cannot be put in a parenthesis. He made 
 General Jackson, rather than General Jackson 
 him. His talruis, with those of Gov. Marcy, 
 uf New York, were the salt that saved Mr. 
 Polk"s Administration from putridity. He was 
 a daring man. In 18-18, in an official commu- 
 nication to the French Provisional Govern- 
 ment, he boldly obtruded his counsels upon 
 them for the formation of their Constitution, as 
 though the new Republic were his ward. La- 
 martiue politely made a French bow in return; 
 but saying, as he gave it. he would not toler- 
 ate advice from any other people God ever 
 created. 
 
 Why was not Mr. Buchanan nominated? 
 Ah ! be bad been even bolder in bis domestic 
 diplomacy than in his foreign. His offer to 
 run the Missouri Compromise line through to 
 the Pacific ocean, and to sacrifice all south of 
 that line on the altar of the Moloch of slavery, 
 was a grand act of apostacy to Northern sen- 
 timent and to freedom, which brought the films 
 of death over his eyes. His coup d'etat was a 
 coup dc grace. He will be less successful in 
 making such Northern platforms than in 
 making French Constitutions. In all the States 
 north of Pennsylvania, during the forty-nine 
 ballotings, he rarely received more than half 
 a dozen votes ; and I think his average in those 
 States did not come up to that insignificant, or 
 rather that significant number. 
 
 And what was the fate of the Senator from 
 Illinois, whom some sagacious and overreach- 
 ing Whig called the Young Giant— a nick- 
 name which his own friends were silly enough 
 to adopt? I say silly, for everybody knows that 
 the common notion which the common people 
 have of a "young giant'-' is that of unnatural 
 and precocious animal development. _ The very 
 name conjures up images of rowdyish passion 
 and appetite, of nocturnal revels, of a sort of 
 wild, obscene force, unchastened by the lessons 
 of experience, and untempered by Nestonan 
 wisdom. What was his reward for his implied 
 or understood offer of the annexation of Cuba? 
 From the four States of Massachusetts, New 
 York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, he never at any 
 one time received more than sixteen votes, and 
 in four-fifths of the ballotings lie received but 
 five or six. In winning the South, he forgot 
 the North. 
 
 " Vaulting ambition that ocrlcaps itself 
 And {alls on t'other sido. : ' 
 
18 
 
 Or, as a graver poet has expressed it, these 
 worshippers at the Southern shrine, while they 
 renounced Northern constituencies, were 
 " like idiots gazing in a brook, 
 "Who leap at stars and fasten in the mud." 
 I cannot stop to enumerate the victims in 
 detail. The slain Hectors may have a monu- 
 ment and be remembered; but it is the felicity 
 of the vulgar herd, in an ungodly contest, that 
 they rot in a forgotten grave. 
 
 Long before the Baltimore Convention met, 
 we had supposed that the Northern Democrat- 
 ic aspirants for the Presidency had done their 
 
 retributions of sin shall pursue the sinner. If 
 the preacher does this when he has but a single 
 victim for a text, what an accumulation of 
 energy and emphasis is given to his admoni- 
 tions when there are fifteen victims before 
 him ! 
 
 ^ Now, there are two or three general observa- 
 tions on this impressive spectacle, which I wish 
 to make. In the first place, all the leading 
 candidates of both Conventions were Northern 
 men. Would not the historian have signalized 
 the event as something most extraordinary, if 
 fifteen Southern champions of slavery, born and 
 
 worst; that they had drank the last dregs of bred in its midst, whose very growth, bodily 
 
 the cup of humiliation. But Southern genius 
 seems exhaustless in resources for Northern de- 
 basement. Some unknown political upstart in 
 Richmond, Virginia, obtruded himself into 
 notice by shouting out the two words, " Presi- 
 dency, " "Pro-Slavery/"' to all the candidates, 
 and instantly thirteen of them were at his feet. 
 He put to them some " more last questions" in 
 the catechism of infamy — : ' whether, if they 
 could be elected, they would veto any bill re- 
 pealing the Fugitive Slave Law," and so forth. 
 All answered as his questions indicated they 
 must. Forgetful of the nature of the oath they 
 longed to take, forgetful that it is a violation 
 of the whole spirit of our Government for the 
 Executive to interfere with Congress, by tell- 
 ing them beforehand what acts of theirs he 
 will not approve, they all hastened to give the 
 desired response. He did not send them a 
 pro-slavery creed, with a blank left for their 
 signatures, but he compelled them to write out 
 their own shame with their own hands. He 
 did not send the collar and chains all ready 
 for them to put on : but he said, forge them 
 and rivet them on yourselves; and, submissive, 
 they forged them and riveted them on, and ex- 
 pressed gratitude for the favor. 
 
 And now, where are those thirteen Demo- 
 cratic candidates? And where, too, are those 
 two Whig candidates who, within the last two 
 years, have done every conceivable thing, and 
 a^ thousand things before inconceivable, to pro- 
 pitiate the slave power ? Gone, sir ; all gone 
 with those who perish at Tyburn ! They re- 
 belled against humanity and against God, and 
 verily they have their reward. They mounted 
 a platform, where they hoped to be crowned, 
 amid the huzzas of the people; but an aveng- 
 ing Nemesis stood there, and in the twinkling 
 of an eye changed it into the " drop platform" 
 of the executioner Sir, when a single male- 
 factor receives at the hands of justice his well- 
 merited doom, the moralist seizes the example 
 to give a warning to others who may be tempt- 
 ed, in like cases, to offend. He points to the 
 ignominious body of his victim, and, as the 
 herald of God, he proclaims the eternal law, 
 that crime never can compensate the criminal. 
 He declares that, until finite man can over- 
 power or circumvent the infinite Creator, the 
 
 and mental, had been only the accretion of 
 pro-slavery particles and ideas, and who were 
 committed to the institution by a life- long se- 
 ries of acts, had suddenly gone over to North- 
 ern Free-Soilers, and offered to stand upon 
 their platform to obtain their votes? Would 
 it have at all diminished the marvel, if these 
 fifteen Southern applicants for Northern sup- 
 port, with all the followers whom lust of power 
 or of money could enlist, had gone through all 
 the South, vociferating that, unless they should 
 adopt the Free Soil platform, the Union would 
 be dissolved? I think such a chapter in his- 
 tory would never cease to create amazement 
 and wonder. Is it not infinitely more wonder- 
 ful, in this age of the world, that Northern 
 men should do for slavery what we could never 
 expect, at one time, so many Southern men to 
 do even for freedom ? 
 
 My second remark pertains to the number 
 of the candidates. Never were there even half 
 so many on the Presidential race-course before. 
 Now, why were they so numerous, as well as 
 all from the North ? The answer is obvious. 
 The South had said again and again, and most 
 explicitly, to the North, "Give us your most 
 pro-slavery man, and we will adopt him." It 
 is easy to see that when moral or even intel- 
 lectual qualifications are the test in choosing a 
 President, the candidates must be few; but if 
 devotion to slavery is the sole test, then there 
 may not only be fifteen, but five hundred or 
 five thousand. In this way the competitors be- 
 come so numerous ,that the chances of success 
 are worth nothing. Nobody will pay much for 
 a lottery ticket, when the blanks are to the 
 prizes as a hundred to one. It was a poor 
 speculation, therefore, for the Presidential as- 
 pirants to put the price of the office so low that 
 anybody, however obscure before, could become 
 a rival. Cass. Buchanan, Marcy, Douglas, 
 Dallas, Dickinson, and so forth, should have 
 thought of this before they entered the lists, 
 and put themselves on an equality with a man 
 whom not one in five thousand out of New 
 Hampshire could remember ever to have heard 
 of before, and yet who plucked the prize out 
 of their hands. 
 
 Another remark is, that the Southern vote,, 
 in both Conventions, could have been concen- 
 
19 
 
 (rated at any time upon cither one of the 
 Northern candidates, with one reniarkahle ex- 
 ception — which I will mention hy and hy — 
 provided only that the Northern men could 
 have united upon him. At any moment the 
 South would have accepted General Cass, or 
 Mr. Buchanan, or Governor Marcy. In the 
 Whig Convention, the South was most anxious 
 to take Mr. Fillmore ; but it was impossible to 
 bring the North to their support. Each of 
 them, by the eagerness of his pro-slavery 
 course, had signed his own death-warrant in 
 States enough to defeat him. And as to Mr. 
 Fillmore, on whom the South wa^ more unani- 
 mous than on any one of all the other candi- 
 dates, his bloody right hand had signed the 
 Fugitive Slave Law; and therefore it was as 
 certain as anything future can be, that he 
 could not obtain a single electoral vote north 
 of Mason and Dixon's line. The infinite mercy 
 of God may wash that blot from his name in 
 another world, hut it can never he forgotten in 
 this. And thus they all came under that great 
 moral law which forever cries '-Woe! woe!" 
 to the offender. Fascinated by the brilliancy 
 of the prize, they forgot the eternal law of rec- 
 titude and humanity, by which alone it can be 
 honorably won and worn. 
 
 [A Voice. What do you say of General 
 Pierce ?] 
 
 Mr. MANN. Some one inquires what I say 
 of General Pierce. I say of General Pierce, 
 that if he had been conspicuous in the pro-sla- 
 very contest for the last two years; if he had 
 been known as the ardent lover of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law, and had answered the Richmond 
 Scott letter about a veto of it, he never would 
 have received the Baltimore nomination. Some 
 other man would have been exhumed for the 
 occasion. Not knowledge of him. but igno- 
 rance of him, secured his nomination. 
 [A Voice. How of General Scott ?] 
 Mr. MANN. Had General Scott devoted 
 himself to the cause of slavery for the last two 
 years, as his competitors had done, he would 
 not have been nominated. His short-comings 
 in that iniquity, as everybody knows, is the 
 reason, and I might almost say the sole reason, 
 ■why the South and the pro-slavery part of the 
 North oppose him. But for this, the South 
 would prefer him before either of his rivals. 
 
 In regard to Mr. Webster, there are three 
 points which I propose to elucidate — his posi- 
 tion of special and marked hostility to slavery 
 in 1848, what he did for the cause of slavery 
 in 1850, and how the South requited him in 
 1852. His case is peculiarly impressive. In- 
 structive warnings as all the others are. yet 
 '• the Secretary stands alone." I am about to 
 speak of his downfall in no spirit of pergonal 
 exultation, though he has done me the greatest 
 wrong. Because, when sitting on the top of 
 his political Olympus, he hurled his shafts at 
 mcf, I scorn to retaliate when he lies deserted 
 
 and despairing at its base. The man does not 
 live, (unless now it be himself.) who felt a more 
 poignant grief at his ruin than was felt in this 
 heart of mine. But it was not on the 21st of 
 June last, and at Baltimore, that he fell; but 
 on the 7th of March, 1850. in the Senate of 
 the United States. It was then that he sunk 
 his beaming forehead in the dust, never again, 
 I fear, to be lifted up. It was then that he 
 tore from his brow the glorious diadem of 
 Fame, and cast its clustered stars away — a di- 
 adem richer than ever blazed upon the brow 
 of royalty, for its gems were not gathered from 
 rock or mine, but from the more precious treas- 
 ures of wisdom and eloquence. Then thousands 
 of hearts were wrung with anguish, as, cold, 
 relentless, and blaspheming, those apostate 
 doctrines fell from his lips. I say no bosom. 
 Bave now perhaps his own. was i rermore deep- 
 ly saddened at the spectacle of that moral ruin 
 than mine. As I think of him now, ever re- 
 curring and dirge-like do the elegiac strains, 
 written for the occasion by the great Poet of 
 Humanity, wake their mournful echoes in my 
 breast : 
 
 " So fallen ! so lost! the light withdrawn 
 
 Which once he wore ! 
 The priory from his gray hairs gone 
 
 Forevermorc ! 
 
 Revile him not — the Tempter hath 
 
 A snare for all ; 
 And pitving tears, not scorn and wrath, 
 
 Befit his fall ! 
 
 Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage, 
 
 When he who might 
 Have lighted up and led his age, 
 
 Falls back in night. 
 
 Scorn! would the angels laugh to mark 
 
 A bright soul driven, 
 Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark, 
 
 From hope and Heaven ! 
 
 Let not the land, once proud of him, 
 
 Insult him now, 
 Nor brand with deeper shame his dim, 
 
 Dishonored brow. 
 
 But let its humblest sons, instead, 
 
 From sea to lake, 
 A long lament, as for the dead, 
 
 In sadness make. 
 
 Of all wo loved and honored, naught 
 
 Save power remains — 
 A fallen angel's prido of thought, 
 
 Still strong in chains. 
 
 All else is gone : from those great eyes 
 
 The soul has Bed ; 
 When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
 
 The man is dead ! 
 
 Then pay the reverence of old days 
 To his dead fame : 
 
 Walk backward, with avorted gazo, 
 
 And hide his shame' " 
 
 Still. I should leave this part of my subject 
 maimed and incomplete, should I forbear to 
 draw the moral which the fate of this eminent 
 man so impressively teaches. In the history of 
 the world, it is inexpressibly sad that offences 
 
20 
 
 should come. It would he still more sad if we 
 could not use them to warn others from offend- 
 ing. Besides, the drama, in one of whose scenes 
 we were brought together upon the stage and 
 euacted a part, has now heen played out. and 
 1 am now able to establish by history all the 
 positions I then maintained by argument. 
 
 The grandeur of Mr. Webster's intellect — 
 the first point always made in his defence — I 
 readily admit. On this point I give his friends 
 carte blanche of concession and agreement — the 
 whole argument their own way. 
 
 Bat, on thenext point, I claim to have the 
 whole concession and argument my own way: 
 that though his intellect were fitted to fill a 
 '•Dome of Thought," vast as one of those Egyp- 
 tian statues that have been lately found on the 
 banks of the Nile, from whose craniums the na- 
 tives have long been in the habit of cutting 
 millstones without sensibly diminishing their 
 bulk, yet if he could exchange it all to blot out 
 the history of the 7'h of March speech, he 
 would make a divine speculation. 
 
 For proof of this, I might cite volumes. I 
 might refer to his Pilgrim Address at Plym- 
 outh, and his reply to Col. Hayne, and select 
 something from almost every page of those vol- 
 umes of eloquence— beautiful as painting, and 
 grand as statuary— whose appeals fell upon 
 men's hearts like an afflatus of the spirit of 
 God. With all this, I might theu contrast 
 what he has written and spoken since the day 
 of his downfall, pictorial as it is, with emblems 
 of whips and chains, of auction-blocks, and 
 shrieking fugitives, fleeing from the bloody 
 lash and the lecher's arms, and finding no pro- 
 tection in the sanctuary of Faneuil Hall, or un- 
 der the shadow of Banker Hill, or by the sa- 
 cred monuments of Lexington and Concord. 
 
 But I will confine myself to a single item of 
 proof, irrefragable and conclusive: 
 
 The Buffalo Contention of 1848 proclaimed 
 its determination -to maintain the rights of 
 free labor against the aggressions of the slave 
 power, and to secure free soil for a free people." 
 It declared its "'independence of the slave 
 power, and its fixed determination to rescue the 
 Federal Government from its control." 
 
 It declared that the Proviso of Jefferson, to 
 prohibit slavery in all the Territories, and the 
 Ordinance of 1787, excluding slavery from the 
 Northwestern Territory, ■'• clearly show that it 
 was the settled policy of the nation, not to ex- 
 tend, nationalize, or encourage, but to limit, lo- 
 calize, and discourage slavery; and to this poli- 
 cy, which should never have been departed 
 from, the Government ought to return." 
 
 It declared '-that it is the duty of the, Fed- 
 eral Government to relieve itself from all re- 
 sponsibility for the existence or continuance of 
 slavery wherever that Government possesses 
 constitutional authority to legislate on that 
 subject, and is thus responsible for its exist- 
 ence." 
 
 ^declared " that the only safe means of pre- 
 venting the extension of slavery into territory 
 now free, is to prohibit its existence in all such 
 territory by an act of Congress." 
 
 It declared " that we accept the issue which 
 the slave power has forced upon us, and to 
 their demand for more slave territories, our 
 calm but final answer is. no more slave States — 
 no more slave territory." 
 
 And what did Mr. Webster say of this plat- 
 form, within one month after it had been adopt- 
 ed? This is his language: 
 
 " I have said, gentlemen, that in this Buffalo plat- 
 form, this collect of tho new school, there is nothing 
 new. There is nothing in it that all the Whigs of 
 the Northern and Middle States may not adopt. 
 Gentlemen, it is well known that there is nothing in 
 this Buffalo platform which, in general, does not 
 meet the approbation of all the Whigs of the Middle 
 and Northern States. Suppose, now, that all of U3 
 who nre Whigs should go and join the Free Soil par- 
 ty, what would he the result? Why, so far nothing 
 would happen, but that the Whig party would have 
 changed its name. That would be all. Instead of 
 being tho Whig party, it would bo the Free Soil par- 
 ty. We should be all there, exactly upon the same 
 principles upon which we have always stood." 
 
 Now, contrast this full, explicit, comprehen- 
 sive, and apparently ingenuous subscription 
 and adhesion to all the doctrines and articles 
 of the Buffalo platform, in 1848, with the 7th 
 of March speech in 1850. aud with all that has 
 since followed it from the same source. 
 
 Surely, if General Jackson, in 1836, in order 
 to obtain a third election, had courted and de- 
 fended the United States Bank, written and 
 spoken through all the Eastern cities in its be- 
 half, and made James Watson Webb and Nich- 
 olas Biddle his bosom confidants and counsel- 
 lors; surely, if Mr. Clay, in 1848, had declared 
 for free trade, against all tariffs, against river 
 and harbor improvements, and against all the 
 policy that had most signalized his life; surely, 
 if Mr. Calhoun, during the controversy respect- 
 ing the new Territories, had suddenly avowed 
 himself the disciple of Clarkson and Wilber- 
 force, and had raised the standard of "imme- 
 diate emancipation;" surely, I say, neither of 
 these events would have furnished such ample 
 material of contradiction and amazement as 
 are supplied by the melancholy case I am now 
 considering. After having nurtured, tutored, 
 and led Northern Anti-Slavery sentiment for 
 thirty years; after having claimed the '-'patent- 
 ed thunder " of the Wilmot Proviso; and after 
 having discovered the North star, in a single 
 day, without premonition or cause of change, 
 Mr. Webster espouses doctrines more Southern 
 than South Carolina, and becomes Calhouner 
 than Mr. Calhoun. 
 
 Where shall the searcher of history find a 
 parallel for this ? I know of none. I can con- 
 ceive but one — that of Moses, from the confines 
 of Jordan, and the top of Pisgah. commanding 
 the children of Israel to march back into the 
 land of Egypt, for re-subjugation to Pharoah; 
 
21 
 
 yet striving to persuade thorn that the (! geog- 
 raphy w and " scenery " of the Nile would ren- 
 der slavery there impossible. 
 
 And yet, when the trial- hour of the Balti- 
 more Convention came, what did he gain hy it 
 all? A single Southern State? Not one. A 
 single delegate from a Southern State ? Not 
 one! With all the efforts that official power, 
 and the wealth of cities, and ama/.ing industry, 
 could make: with ail that subscription nom- 
 inations, and Faneuil Hall meetings, and Cas- 
 tle Garden committees, and Wall street, and 
 State street, an I subsidized presses, and fraud- 
 ulent hopes of tariff and Southern trade, could 
 effect, Mr. Webster could rally but an average 
 of twenty-nine votes in a convention of almost 
 three hundred members; and never, on any bal- 
 loting, according to the political thermometer 
 which measured his popularity^ did he rise 
 above thirty-two degrees — the point of eternal 
 congelation'! No Southern State gave him a 
 vote! No Southern delegate was sent there to 
 give him a vote! Fifty-three opportunities oc- 
 curred, extending from day to day, and, accord- 
 ing to an account published in the Boston 
 Courier, from a professed eye-witness of the 
 scene, the Northern friends of Mr. Webster be- 
 sought their Southern brethren with prayers 
 and entreaties, sad and tearful enough to have 
 melted flint, to have melted platinum, to have 
 melted anything but the infusible heart of sla- 
 very, and yet they were inexorable. Nay, ac- 
 cording to 'the published statement of his friend, 
 Doctor Bell, a delegate from the Fourth Con- 
 gressional District of Massachusetts, after the 
 fifty-second ballot, and when it became certain 
 that General Seott would be nominated the 
 next time, these Southern gentlemen '• were 
 earnestly appealed to, as a matter of courtesy, 
 and to place our candidate [Mr. Webster] right 
 [wrong?] on the page of history, to unite in the 
 final vote on Mr. Webster, which would have 
 left him with some one hundred and twenty or 
 thirty votes" — they refused to give him even 
 that empty compliment. 
 
 So certain has been the fate of Mr. Webster. 
 for the last eighteen months, that I and all 
 those with whom I am politically associated 
 have foreseen it aad predicted it with as much 
 confidence as an astronomer foretells an eclipse. 
 Let us trust that the fate of such victims will 
 not be lost for the future upon Northern men. 
 Sir, out of thifl Fugitive Slave Law has 
 arisen an ill-sounding, hall-barbarous word, to 
 express the wholly barbarous idea that the law 
 is never to be repealed or modified. It is the 
 word '-Finality." This word has already got 
 into somewhat common use in regard to its ob- 
 jects. It is destined to get into universal use 
 in regard to its authors. I think Genera! Cass 
 and Mr. Buchanan, Mr. Fillmore and Mr. 
 Web many others, have by this time 
 
 an interior and realizing sense of what the 
 •<"ord "finality" means. Though too late for 
 
 them to profit by it, I hope it will be blessed to 
 the use of others. 
 
 And what palliation, what pretext, what sub- 
 terfuge even, had these men for such betrayal 
 of human rights? Nothing, literally nothing, 
 but that fraudulent idea of 'danger to the 
 Union y } that cry of 'vvoli;'' which the South 
 always raises when she has an object to ac- 
 complish; and which she will always continue 
 to raise, on pretences more and more shadowy 
 and evanescent, the more we have the folly to 
 heed it. The same threat is now, at this in- 
 stant time, made, if the North does not give 
 them their choice in the two candidates for the 
 Presidency. 
 
 Among redundant proofs, demonstrating that 
 the Union has been in no peril, nor shadow of 
 peril, there are two which never have been an- 
 swered, and never can be answer* d. Notwith- 
 standing all that was done in this House, and 
 more especially in the Senate, and by all the 
 pro-slavery presses and pro-slavery champions. 
 North and South, during the yar 1850, to 
 create a panic in behalf of the Union, they 
 Were never able to effect the price of the Uni- 
 ted States stocks, neither in this country nor in 
 Europe, so that the difference could be discov- 
 ered with a microscope. Now, of all men liv- 
 ing, stockholders and annuitants are the most 
 sensitive. Universally they are a timid race. 
 If there be a cloud in the heavens, or a rip- 
 ple on the surface, they fear wreck, and shout 
 the alarm. But timid as they constitutionally 
 are. not politicians nor panic makers could dis- 
 compose their serenity by all tl cries 
 about the crumbling of the Union to pie-"-: 
 and there was not a member of the Castle Gar- 
 den committees who would have taken one 
 cent less, or would not have given every cent 
 as much, for United States securities on the 
 days when they sent forth their fraudulent re- 
 solves as before or after. 
 
 On this point I will cite an authority whose 
 soundness upon the question in issue I believe 
 in, and certainly my opponents will not dispute 
 
 '• Wo have preserved and Fostered credit till all 
 - csl t,in its Cui thi r oontinuftn 
 preservation. It has run deep and wide into our 
 whole system of social : i feels the vi- 
 
 bration -whe^n a blow is struck upon it. Ami this is 
 the reason why nobody has escaped the influence of 
 the Secretary's recent mCtourt. While credit is del- 
 icate, sensitive, easily wounded, and more easily 
 alarmed, it is also infinitely ramified, diversified! ox- 
 ig everywhere, and touching everything.''* 
 
 And yet the very men who. in their capacity 
 of politicians, shrieked "dangei to the Union," 
 in their other capacity of stock-dealers and 
 merchants, never varied their asking or their 
 giving prices one jot or tittle. They cried 
 " earthquake/' when not a rumble could ho 
 heard nor a jar felt; and they tried to make 
 
 =* Webster's Spa r!u-—[ Spt eeh on the Removal of th» 
 JJepo$ites\—vol. 4,jj- 92. 
 
22 
 
 us believe that a tornado was uprooting the 
 forests, when nobody could see a leaf on a tree 
 moving. No! the cry of danger to the Union 
 was raised to divert attention from their as- 
 saults upon the Constitution. It was the lat- 
 ter and not the former that was in danger. 
 
 Another reason, and it is a standing and con- 
 tinuous one. why there was no danger to the 
 Union, consists in the fact that the South, ac- 
 cording to their own estimate, are under bonds 
 of $1,500,000,000 to keep the public peace. Let 
 them break up this Union, and their property 
 in slaves, which they now value at this enor- 
 mous sum, will not, at the end of a quarter of 
 a century, be worth so many groats. Does 
 anybody imagine that this Union can be dis- 
 solved without civil commotion, without revo- 
 lution by arms'? Sir, this is a subject incon- 
 ceivably painful; but it is a possibility spoken 
 of and sported with by others with such levity, 
 that I am constrained to invest it with some of 
 its appropriate solemnities. Does any one be- 
 lieve there can be two border nations, one 
 founded on the principle of freedom, and the 
 other on the basis of slavery, having a contig- 
 uous frontier of three thousand miles, and dai- 
 ly traversing the same waters, with immunity 
 from war ? And in such wars, who will be 
 the eager allies of the North ? Sir. there are 
 ten thousand fugitive slaves in Canada to-dav, 
 capable of bearing arm?, and their number is 
 increasing faster than ever. They are prac 
 
 areat his side, whose weakness or whose beau- 
 ty, in presence of an imbruted foe. may provoke 
 the first assault. Aye. sir, in a civil or a ser- 
 vile war, the South will be in a more perilous 
 condition than if every kernel of gunpowder in 
 all the magazines of an army, just on the eve 
 of battle, should suddenly become animated and 
 set itself on fire. If the South wish to exhibit 
 to the world, on a magnificent scale, the natu- 
 ral retribution of slavery; if they wish to real- 
 ize in their own fair land, and by Hyder Alis 
 of their own, Burke's terrible picture of the 
 desolation of the Carnatic, they have but one 
 thing to do, and that is to dissolve this Union. 
 But I do not fear any such madness will pos- 
 sess them. As I said before, they are under 
 bonds of $1,500,000,000 to keep the peace, and 
 their wives and daughters are sureties in the 
 bonds. All wealth that is consumable, all 
 affection that is destructible, all chastity that 
 is violable, are pledged for the fulfilment of 
 their vows. 
 
 Waiving a hundred other facts and consid- 
 erations, the two which I have now specified 
 are sufficient to show that this cry of " danger 
 to the Union ' ; was wholly baseless and decep- 
 tive. 
 
 From another point of the compass, and from 
 an independent series of facts, a similar moral 
 may be drawn for future Presidential aspi- 
 rants. Neither the Democratic party nor its 
 Northern leaders had anything to gain by the 
 
 ticing the use of fire-arms, and the menage of Mexican war, and yet they pluno-ed headlong 
 the horse. The story of their oppressions is ' 
 
 recounted every day, in every hamlet and at 
 every fire-side. The mothers nurse their chil- 
 dren with milk and with vengeance together. 
 The knowledge of a North star is penetrating 
 further and further into the Southern interior, 
 and arousing new hearts to the effort of self- 
 emancipation. A dissolution of the Union re- 
 peals the accursed act of 1850. The free soil 
 of Canada and the British Provinces — the only 
 free Soil there now is on the Northeastern part 
 of this continent — is brought down to Mason 
 and Dixon's line. We have in the Northern 
 States a population of two hundred thousand 
 of African descent. In case of war between 
 the two sections, thousands of this colored race 
 will fly to the laud of bondage, swift as they 
 ever flew from it. They will go to make deso- 
 lation of the realm that once made desolation 
 of them, and of all they held dear. Under 
 their avenging cry, insurgents will rise up like 
 an exhalation over all the South. There are 
 no motives more terrible than those which urge 
 a bondsman to his revenge. Perpetual prox- 
 imity between master and slave, furnishes per- 
 petual opportunity for retribution. Every 
 house is an arsenal of weapons; every tool on 
 the plantation an instrument of death. Fire 
 and darkness are allies which nature proffers 
 him. In this warfare, the master does not go 
 into the battle alone ; his wife and children 
 
 into it at the dictation of the South. The 
 Whig party, as such, always pronounced the 
 war itself to be an aggression, and its territo- 
 rial acquisitions a robbery. Yet the great body 
 of this party voted the supplies that ratified its 
 inception. Opposition to the war of 1812 had 
 proved politically disastrous to many of those 
 who made it; and it. was foreseen that opposi- 
 tion to the Mexican war might be attended 
 with similar results. Hence the lukewarmness 
 of Whig opposition in Congress, and hence the 
 voting of supplies to carry it on. Hence the 
 pro-slavery men and the •' manifest destiny " 
 men were allowed to have their way; and so 
 the war was continued, at an estimated ex- 
 penditure, in the whole, of more than two 
 hundred millions of dollars, and the ultimate 
 acquisition of territory, some portion of which 
 is already occupied by slaves, and two-thirds of 
 which is laid open to slavery by law. 
 
 And now, what has been the effect of that 
 war upon both the Democratic and Whig ci- 
 vilians, who either vigorously sustained it, or 
 opposed to it only a feeble resistance ? It made 
 the Cyesars who have come back to rule over 
 Rome. But for the Mexican war, Gen. Taylor 
 would have remained a "frontier Colonel," as 
 Mr. Webster sneeringly called him, and not 
 even lunacy would have conceived of him for 
 President. But for the Mexican war, Genfrnl 
 Scott, though in honor and in bravery ret 
 
23 
 
 ing his invincibility, would have lacked, to po- 
 litical wooers, the more potent charm of avail- 
 ability, and would never have been nominated. 
 And but for the Mexican war, the shades of 
 oblivion would soon bave perfected their easy 
 work of hiding the name of Gen. Pierce from 
 the world forever. And now behold the civil- 
 ians — Cass. Buchanan, Marcy, and the rest — 
 who stood sponsors and godfathers for that 
 bloody deed. Defeated in 1848 by the very 
 man whom the war they supported had raised 
 up! Gen. Taylor discomfited only one Santa 
 
 Anna in Mexico, but half a dozen at home 
 Look, too, at Mr Webster, whose giant blows. 
 had they been struck at the fitting time, might 
 have broken the helmet and pierced the mailed 
 armor of that Mars; yet see him thrust aside 
 in 1848. to make room for one hero born of that 
 war: and in 1852 hardly allowed to enter his 
 name as a competitor against another. In 
 1852, also, see G< ueral Pierce, who had about 
 as much to do with the Mexican victories as 
 little lulus had with the Trojan war, yet pluck- 
 ing the nomination from Cass, Buchanan, 
 Marcy, Douglas, and all the rest. The camp 
 triumphs over Cabinet and Senate. The cc- 
 dant arma togcc is read backwards. How many 
 of these warriors will remain in 1856, and in 
 1860, to shoulder aside the civilians lor the third 
 and fourth time, because they were false to 
 their duty in waging or in tolerating that war, 
 remains to be seen. But what a righteous 
 retribution for those civilians who, at first, 
 might have prevented, or afterwards might 
 have stayed, that effusion of human blood! As 
 a specimen of poetic justice, romance or drama 
 has nothing finer. 
 
 I have, sir. but one topic more to present, 
 before I shall have sufficiently disobeyed and 
 defied the Baltimore resolutions, for this time, 
 and shall he ready to sit down. As I said be- 
 fore, present omens forebode ill to the cause of 
 freed- im, in this land : but a more searching anal- 
 ysis throws a cheering light upon our prospects. 
 Let us see, in the first place, why it is that 
 the North, with almost two-thirds of Mm popu- 
 lation and of the votes of the whole Union, is 
 controlled on all questions pertaining to slavery 
 by the other third belonging to the South. 
 The answer is at hand. We at the North are 
 divided into two parties — Whigs and Dcmo- 
 cra ts — who balance, and in all political con- 
 tests neutralize each other. Nominally, the 
 South is divided into the same parties, but in 
 whatever regards slavery it is undivided and a 
 unit — indissoluble as the Siamese twins: for 
 where you find Chang you are sure to find Eng. 
 On tariffs, river and harbor improvements, and 
 so forth, the)- carry on a feeble and somnolent 
 warfare among themselves; but whenever the 
 tocsi ' of slavery is sounded, they awaken to 
 seize their arms, and form in solid column for 
 a qu march to the point in contest. 
 
 aiuing the feeblest support from 
 
 the North — generally speaking by stealing 
 marches upon us, while we are engrossed by 
 our accustomed vocations — an easy triumph is 
 won. The nominal division of parties, there- 
 fore, is very far from being the true one. The 
 country is, and for a long time Iras been, for all 
 purposes aside from the spoils of office, divided 
 into three parties of very nearly equal num- 
 bers — the Whigs and Democrats of the North, 
 and the Pro-Slavery party of the South — the 
 latter, with the slightest aid, or even with ac- 
 quiescence, from either of the others, being 
 able to prevail. And this will continue to be 
 the case, until a practical Anti-Slavery party 
 is formed at the North, to balance this Pro- 
 Slavery party of the South, and to do battle 
 for liberty as they do for slavery. Such a 
 party, in sufficient numbers to contend success- 
 fully with its antagonists, may not be immedi- 
 ately formed, and therefore I see before us a 
 period of struggle and trial. But the spirit of 
 God is on our side in this work. The laws of 
 the moral universe, the laws of nature, the laws 
 of population and power, are our allies, and 
 therefore we must prevail. 
 
 Look at the amazing fact that the Southern 
 States, with more than double the area of the 
 Northern, after an experiment of more than 
 sixty years of free government, have but about 
 half the free population of the latter. I say 
 the area of the former is more than double the 
 area of the latter ; but this is by no means the 
 only element of their natural superiority. 
 Their milder climate, their more fertile and 
 easily-cultivated soil, and its happy adaptation 
 for producing the great staples of commerce 
 which the whole civilized world wdl have and 
 are ready to pay for, gives to the South at 
 least a two-fold advantage over the North, acre 
 for acre, or State for State. With their super- 
 eminent and easily-understood advantages, the 
 Southern section of this Union might possess, 
 and but for its slavery would to-day possess, 
 three-fold the population of the Northern sec- 
 tion — all free, all blessed with more abounding 
 comforts and competence, and with all the 
 means of embellishment, education, and univer- 
 sal culture. As compared with the North in 
 all that gives individual independence or social 
 strength, instead of being as one to two, they 
 should be as three to one. Ohio and Kentucky, 
 separated only by a ribbon's width of water, 
 illustrates this problem, even to school-boys. It 
 is slavery, and slavery alone, that has struck 
 them down from their lofty pre-eminence, that 
 has dwarfed their gigantic capacities, and 
 driven them to maintain an ascendency — ulti- 
 mately worthless, and worse than worthless — 
 by suborning Northern politicians, instead of 
 exulting in the legitimate superiority of home- 
 born and undecaying vigor. 
 
 And this is only the fulfilment of an eternal 
 law which always has been, and always will 
 be. exemplified in the history of mankind — the 
 
24 
 
 law that all error Is weakness ; that all wick- 
 edness is dementia. By a law, fixed as gravi- 
 tation, error tends to ruin, and moral wrong to 
 imbecility. Let any individual act upon a false 
 theory, and in that his hopes will be disap- 
 pointed, and his fortunes maimed. Let a com- 
 munity^ legalize false principles, or adopt evil 
 institutions into its organic law — which is its 
 sensorium — its strength becomes faintness. and 
 its glory turns black. False notions, or even 
 ignorance about the laws of health, bring dis 
 
 If the Northern States of this Union, there 
 fore, will cherish liberty while the Southerr 
 foster slavery, the predominance of the forme] 
 in political power, as well as in all other thing; 
 desirable, will soon be overwhelming. Foreign 
 annexations by the latter cannot redress the 
 balance. They but palliate the symptoms of a 
 distemper which is organic — as the newly- 
 erected wing of a lazar-house for a time dilute? 
 the infection, which it soon sends back to a 
 gravate the general virulence. I appeal To 
 
 " .,..,, — ;- — i ."-:"& fe .-.iv^ uuv, & cucia.i vuuiBuce. j. appeal w 
 
 ease upon an individual, or endemics upon a the friends of liberty, then, wherever they may 
 
 country. False conclusions in political economy 
 bankrupt a city or the treasury of a nation. 
 False metaphysical or theological dogmas 
 cramp the faculties, vitiate the knowledge^and 
 repress the aspirations of their possessors: and 
 the schools or the sects that adopt them dwin- 
 dle^ into weakness, become contemptible, and 
 perish. God kills out error by the meanness 
 of its results. Neither caste, primogeniture, 
 nor hierarchy, can save it. The false notions 
 of Aristotle, about the perfectness of the circle 
 for motion, and the law of equilibrium for 
 fluids, with other absurdities, kept the philo- 
 sophic and inventive genius of the world in 
 irons for two thousand years ; but then they 
 passed into everlasting contempt. False max- 
 ims in government, and false practices in po- 
 litical economy, have worked out the terrible 
 problem of Ireland's ruin, sending almost two 
 
 millions of her people, through~disease and 
 starvation, to the grave, or into exile, within 
 the last ten years, and completing, by processes 
 which make < destruction sicken," the dreadful 
 demonstration of a crime which was begun six 
 centuries ago, and has now passed into the Ge- 
 henna of eternal execration wherever history 
 shall be read. 
 
 Now, as slavery is error and wickedness 
 combined, it must incur the penalties ordained 
 of God against both. As it corrupts domestic 
 virtue, contravenes the natural laws of a na- 
 tion's prosperity and growth, excludes and 
 drives away those who are instinct with the 
 love of freedom from settling within its bor- 
 ders, makes general education impossible, and 
 eviscerates from the Gospel of Jesus Christ the 
 highest and purest of its principles and pre- 
 cepts, it follows by a law of adamantine neces- 
 sity, that the body politic, which suffers it, is 
 vulnerable in every part, and that physical and 
 moral death besieges every gate of its citadel. 
 Slavery assails all the laws of Gird broadside; 
 and it must therefore receive His retributions 
 broadside. 
 
 These are but specimens of the weakness 
 which is always inflicted by error, and of the 
 fatuity that ensues from moral wrong. T!my 
 are specimens of those '-Higher Laws'" of God, 
 •which fulfill their destiny, whether men heed 
 them or defy. They crush the resistant while re- 
 sisting, and silence* he blasphemer in mid volley. 
 
 be found, to stand fast in 'their integrity ; for, 
 to adopt the sentiment of Mr. Jefferson, in such 
 a contest, there is not an attribute of the Al- 
 mighty but must take part with us. 
 
 S:r, I have endeavored now to speak upon 
 the real and true state of the Union. I have 
 desired to ascertain towards what point of the 
 moral compass this great vehicle, which we 
 call Government, freighted as it is with so 
 much of human welfare, and with the fondest 
 hopes of the oppressed, is now moving. I have 
 sought to determine that direction, not by the 
 meteoric lights which are exhaled from human 
 passion and selfishness, but by taking observa- 
 tion of the unchangeable luminaries of truth 
 and duty, which shine down upon us forever 
 from their fixed places in the skies. I have 
 spoken no word in the spirit of a partisan or a 
 politician : but have sought to embrace within 
 my vision the horizon of the future as well as 
 of the present. 
 
 The mere politician judges of events by their 
 immediate consequences — by their relation to 
 himself and his party. Under our Constitution, 
 the next four years is the politician^ eternity. 
 The next election is his judgment day. The 
 blessedness of his future consists in an antici- 
 pated share of the $200,000,000 to be distribu- 
 ted from the National Treasury during the 
 next Presidential term, and in being one of the 
 hundred thousand men who for the same peri- 
 od are to be elevated into conspicuousness. But 
 the eternity that I believe in will not end on 
 the 4th of March. 1856. Consequences are to 
 flow from events now passing, which are un- 
 ending in their nature and their influence. In- 
 terests are at stake infinitely more important 
 than the temporary official prominence or ob- 
 scurity of a hundred thousand men — infinitely 
 niore precious than $200,000,000, or two hun- 
 dred millions of Californias, with golden Aus- 
 tralias to boot. He only is worthy the name 
 of statesman, he only is fit to preside over the 
 affairs of a great nation, whose vision takes ia 
 the vast relations of cause and effect; whose 
 judgment is determined by what must be ir 
 the future, as well as by what exists in tin 
 present, and who never erects a superstructure 
 of Constitution or law for the protection or tL . 
 enjoyment of any human intei 
 laying its foundations on . " 
 

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