American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) by Various

V >> Various >> American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

AMERICAN ELOQUENCE

STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY

Edited with Introduction by Alexander Johnston

Reedited by James Albert Woodburn

Volume II. (of 4)

CONTENTS:

V.-THE ANTI-SLAVERY STRUGGLE.

RUFUS KING
On The Missouri Struggle--United States Senate,
February 11 And 14, 1820.

WILLIAM PINKNEY
On The Missouri Struggle--United States Senate,
February 15, 1820.

WENDELL PHILLIPS
On The Murder Of Lovejoy--Faneuil Hall, Boston,
December 8, 1837.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
On The Constitutional War Power Over Slavery
--House Of Representatives, May 25, 1836.

JOHN C. CALHOUN
On The Slavery Question--United States Senate,
March 4, 1850.

DANIEL WEBSTER
On The Constitution And The Union--United States
Senate, March 7, 1850.

HENRY CLAY
On The Compromise Of 1850--United States Senate,
July 22, 1850.

WENDELL PHILLIPS
On The Philosophy Of The Abolition Movement--Before
The Massachusetts, Anti-Slavery Society, Boston,
January 27, 1853.

CHARLES SUMNER
On The Repeal Of The Fugitive Slave Law--United
States Senate, August 26, 1852.

LIST OF PORTRAITS--VOLUME II.

RUFUS KING -- From a steel engraving.

JOHN Q. ADAMS -- From a painting by MARCHANT.

JOHN C. CALHOUN -- From a daguerreotype by BRADY.

DANIEL WEBSTER -- From a painting by R. M. STAIGG.

HENRY CLAY -- From a crayon portrait.

INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED VOLUME II.

The second volume of the American Eloquence is devoted exclusively
to the Slavery controversy. The new material of the revised edition
includes Rufus King and William Pinkney on the Missouri Question; John
Quincy Adams on the War Power of the Constitution over Slavery; Sumner
on the Repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. The addition of the new
material makes necessary the reservation of the orations on the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and on the related subjects, for the third volume.

In the anti-slavery struggle the Missouri question occupied a prominent
place. In the voluminous Congressional material which the long
debates called forth, the speeches of King and Pinkney are the best
representatives of the two sides to the controversy, and they are of
historical interest and importance. John Quincy Adams' leadership in
the dramatic struggle over the right of petition in the House of
Representatives, and his opinion on the constitutional power of the
national government over the institution of slavery within the States,
will always excite the attention of the historical student.

In the decade before the war no subject was a greater cause of
irritation and antagonism between the States than the Fugitive Slave
Law. Sumner's speech on this subject is the most valuable of his
speeches from the historical point of view; and it is not only a worthy
American oration, but it is a valuable contribution to the history of
the slavery struggle itself. It has been thought desirable to include in
a volume of this character orations of permanent value on these themes
of historic interest. A study of the speeches of a radical innovator
like Phillips with those of compromising conservatives like Webster and
Clay, will lead the student into a comparison, or contrast, of these
diverse characters. The volume retains the two orations of Phillips, the
two greatest of all his contributions to the anti-slavery struggle. It
is believed that the list of orations, on the whole, presents to the
reader a series of subjects of first importance in the great slavery
controversy.

The valuable introduction of Professor Johnston, on "The Anti-Slavery
Struggle," is re-printed entire.

J. A. W.

V. -- THE ANTI-SLAVERY STRUGGLE

Negro slavery was introduced into all the English colonies of North
America as a custom, and not under any warrant of law. The enslavement
of the negro race was simply a matter against which no white person
chose to enter a protest, or make resistance, while the negroes
themselves were powerless to resist or even protest. In due course of
time laws were passed by the Colonial Assemblies to protect property in
negroes, while the home government, to the very last, actively protected
and encouraged the slave trade to the colonies. Negro slavery in all
the colonies had thus passed from custom to law before the American
Revolution broke out; and the course of the Revolution itself had little
or no effect on the system.

From the beginning, it was evident that the course of slavery in the two
sections, North and South, was to be altogether divergent. In the colder
North, the dominant race found it easier to work than to compel negroes
to work: in the warmer South, the case was exactly reversed. At the
close of the Revolution, Massachusetts led the way in an abolition
of slavery, which was followed gradually by the other States north of
Virginia; and in 1787 the ordinance of Congress organizing the Northwest
Territory made all the future States north of the Ohio free States.
"Mason and Dixon's line" and the Ohio River thus seemed, in 1790, to be
the natural boundary between the free and the slave States.

Up to this point the white race in the two sections had dealt with
slavery by methods which were simply divergent, not antagonistic. It was
true that the percentage of slaves in the total population had been
very rapidly decreasing in the North and not in the South, and that the
gradual abolition of slavery was proceeding in the North alone, and that
with increasing rapidity. But there was no positive evidence that the
South was bulwarked in favor of slavery; there was no certainty but that
the South would in its turn and in due time come to the point which the
North had already reached, and begin its own abolition of slavery. The
language of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Henry, and Mason, in regard
to the evils or the wickedness of the system of slavery, was too strong
to be heard with patience in the South of after years; and in this
section it seems to have been true, that those who thought at all upon
the subject hoped sincerely for the gradual abolition of slavery in
the South. The hope, indeed, was rather a sentiment than a purpose, but
there seems to have been no good reason, before 1793, why the sentiment
should not finally develop into a purpose.

All this was permanently changed, and the slavery policy of the South
was made antagonistic to, and not merely divergent from, that of the
North, by the invention of Whitney's saw gin for cleansing cotton
in 1793. It had been known, before that year, that cotton could be
cultivated in the South, but its cultivation was made unprofitable, and
checked by the labor required to separate the seeds from the cotton.
Whitney's invention increased the efficiency of this labor hundreds of
times, and it became evident at once that the South enjoyed a practical
monopoly of the production of cotton. The effect on the slavery policy
of the South was immediate and unhappy. Since 1865, it has been found
that the cotton monopoly of the South is even more complete under a
free than under a slave labor system, but mere theory could never have
convinced the Southern people that such would be the case. Their whole
prosperity hinged on one product; they began its cultivation under slave
labor; and the belief that labor and prosperity were equally dependent
on the enslavement of the laboring race very soon made the dominant race
active defenders of slavery. From that time the system in the South was
one of slowly but steadily increasing rigor, until, just before
1860, its last development took the form of legal enactments for the
re-enslavement of free negroes, in default of their leaving the State
in which they resided. Parallel with this increase of rigor, there was a
steady change in the character of the system. It tended very steadily to
lose its original patriarchal character, and take the aspect of a purely
commercial speculation. After 1850, the commercial aspect began to be
the rule in the black belt of the Gulf States. The plantation knew only
the overseer; so many slaves died to so many bales of cotton; and the
slave population began to lose all human connection with the dominant
race.

The acquisition of Louisiana in 1803 more than doubled the area of the
United States, and far more than doubled the area of the slave system.
Slavery had been introduced into Louisiana, as usual, by custom, and had
then been sanctioned by Spanish and French law. It is true that Congress
did not forbid slavery in the new territory of Louisiana; but Congress
did even worse than this; under the guise of forbidding the importation
of slaves into Louisiana, by the act of March 26, 1804, organizing
the territory, the phrase "except by a citizen of the United States,
removing into said territory for actual settlement, and being at the
time of such removal bona fide owner of such slave or slaves," impliedly
legitimated the domestic slave trade to Louisiana, and legalized slavery
wherever population should extend between the Mississippi and the
Rocky Mountains. The Congress of 1803-05, which passed the act, should
rightfully bear the responsibility for all the subsequent growth of
slavery, and for all the difficulties in which it involved the South and
the country.

There were but two centres of population in Louisiana, New Orleans and
St. Louis. When the southern district, around New Orleans, applied for
admission as the slave State of Louisiana, there seems to have been no
surprise or opposition on this score; the Federalist opposition to the
admission is exactly represented by Quincy's speech in the first volume.
When the northern district, around St. Louis, applied for admission as
the slave State of Missouri, the inevitable consequences of the act
of 1804 became evident for the first time, and all the Northern States
united to resist the admission. The North controlled the House
of Representatives, and the South the Senate; and, after a severe
parliamentary struggle, the two bodies united in the compromise of 1820.
By its terms Missouri was admitted as a slave State, and slavery was
forever forbidden in the rest of Louisiana Territory, north of latitude
36 deg. 30' (the line of the southerly boundary of Missouri). The instinct
of this first struggle against slavery extension seems to have been
much the same as that of 1846-60 the realization that a permission to
introduce slavery by custom into the Territories meant the formation
of slave States exclusively, the restriction of the free States to
the district between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, and the final
conversion of the mass of the United States to a policy of enslavement
of labor. But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the
balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed worth
while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time. The
topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates on
the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer, opened the real
anti-slavery struggle. Up to this time the anti-slavery sentiment, North
and South, had been content with the notion of "gradual abolition,"
with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner,
be brought to the Northern policy. This had been supplemented, to some
extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the west
coast of Africa; which had two aspects: at the South it was the means of
ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North it was a
means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery. Garrison,
through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for "immediate abolition"
of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into
anti-slavery purpose. This was followed by the organization of his
adherents into the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and the
active dissemination of the immediate abolition principle by tracts,
newspapers, and lecturers.

The anti-slavery struggle thus begun, never ceased until, in 1865, the
Liberator ceased to be published, with the final abolition of slavery.
In its inception and in all its development the movement was a distinct
product of the democratic spirit. It would not have been possible in
1790, or in 1810, or in 1820. The man came with the hour; and every new
mile of railroad or telegraph, every new district open to population,
every new influence toward the growth of democracy, broadened the
power as well as the field of the abolition movement. It was but the
deepening, the application to an enslaved race of laborers, of the work
which Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely less
grievous restraints upon the white laborer thirty year before. It could
never have been begun until individualism at the North had advanced
so far that there was a reserve force of mind--ready to reject all the
influences of heredity and custom upon thought. Outside of religion
there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the
Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well
as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his
work with the declaration that the Constitution itself was "a league
with death and a covenant with hell."

The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered highly
objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively colorless
slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton culture had
advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than a proposal to
destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that section, and it was
received with corresponding indignation. Garrisonian abolitionists were
taken and regarded as public enemies, and rewards were even offered for
their capture. The germ of abolitionism in the Border States found a new
and aggressive public sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt
to introduce gradual abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly
defeated. The new question was even carried into Congress. A bill to
prohibit the transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office
department was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both
parties on the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition
of slavery in the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the
reference of such petitions without reading or action; but this only
increased the number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to
be petitioned against, and in 1842 the "gag rule" was rescinded.
Thence-forth the pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and
could only become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.

Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto
shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were
received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily a
revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which
had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the
Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred
against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the
innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the
Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of
politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were
destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society
and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud,
and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with
efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at
the building or the orators. It was, of course, inevitable that such
a process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians,
at first from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from
sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in
a great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though
it never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to
be necessary. One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the
appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839
was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost
unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism. Lovejoy, a Western
anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to
another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was
there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob. At
a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts,
James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the general sentiment of
the time as to such individual insurrection against pronounced public
opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston "tea-party," and declared
that Lovejoy, "presumptuous and imprudent," had "died as the fool
dieth." Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the stand, and answered in
the speech which opens this volume. A more powerful reinforcement could
hardly have been looked for; the cause which could find such a defender
was henceforth to be feared rather than despised. To the day of
his death he was, fully as much as Garrison, the incarnation of the
anti-slavery spirit. For this reason his address on the Philosophy
of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has been assigned a place as
representing fully the abolition side of the question, just before it
was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican party, which opposed only
the extension of slavery to the territories.

The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in
1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which
have been selected to illustrate it. The admission of Texas to the Union
in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the
acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States.
From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso
(so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in
Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was
persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money
for the purchase of territory from Mexico. It was passed by the House
of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase
was finally made without any proviso. When the territory came to be
organized, the old question came up again: the Wilmot proviso was
offered as an amendment. As the territory was now in the possession of
the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support
had been much more cordial at the South than at the North, the attempt
to add the Wilmot proviso to the territorial organization raised the
Southern opposition to an intensity which it had not known before.
Fuel was added to the flame by the application of California, whose
population had been enormously increased by the discovery of gold within
her limits, for admission as a free State. If New Mexico should do the
same, as was probable, the Wilmot proviso would be practically in force
throughout the best portion of the Mexican acquisition. The two sections
were now so strong and so determined that compromise of any kind was
far more difficult than in 1820; and it was not easy to reconcile or
compromise the southern demand that slavery should be permitted, and
the northern demand that slavery should be forbidden, to enter the new
territories.

In the meantime, the Presidential election of 1848 had come and gone. It
had been marked by the appearance of a new party, the Free Soilers, an
event which was at first extremely embarrassing to the managers of
both the Democratic and Whig parties. On the one hand, the northern and
southern sections of the Whig party had always been very loosely joined
together, and the slender tie was endangered by the least admission
of the slavery issue. On the other hand, while the Democratic national
organization had always been more perfect, its northern section had
always been much more inclined to active anti-slavery work than the
northern Whigs. Its organ, the Democratic Review, habitually spoke of
the slaves as "our black brethren"; and a long catalogue could be
made of leaders like Chase, Hale, Wilmot, Bryant, and Leggett, whose
democracy was broad enough to include the negro. To both parties,
therefore, the situation was extremely hazardous. The Whigs had less
to fear, but were able to resist less pressure. The Democrats were more
united, but were called upon to meet a greater danger. In the end,
the Whigs did nothing; their two sections drew further apart; and the
Presidential election of 1852 only made it evident that the national
Whig party was no longer in existence. The Democratic managers
evolved, as a solution of their problem, the new doctrine of "popular
sovereignty," which Calhoun re-baptized "squatter sovereignty." They
asserted as the true Democratic doctrine, that the question of slavery
or freedom was to be left for decision of the people of the territory
itself. To the mass of northern Democrats, this doctrine was taking
enough to cover over the essential nature of the struggle; the more
democratic leaders of the northern Democracy were driven off into the
Free-Soil party; and Douglas, the champion of "popular sovereignty,"
became the leading Democrat of the North.

Clay had re-entered the Senate in 1849, for the purpose of compromising
the sectional difficulties as he had compromised those of 1820 and of
1833. His speech, as given, will show something of his motives; his
success resulted in the "compromise of 1850." By its terms, California
was admitted as a free State; the slave trade, but not slavery, was
prohibited in the District of Columbia; a more stringent fugitive slave
law was enacted; Texas was paid $10,000,000 for certain claims to the
Territory of New Mexico; and the Territories of Utah and New Mexico,
covering the Mexican acquisition outside of California, were organized
without mentioning slavery. The last-named feature was carefully
designed to please all important factions. It could be represented to
the Webster Whigs that slavery was excluded from the Territories named
by the operation of natural laws; to the Clay Whigs that slavery had
already been excluded by Mexican law which survived the cession; to the
northern Democrats, that the compromise was a formal endorsement of the
great principle of popular sovereignty; and to the southern Democrats
that it was a repudiation of the Wilmot proviso. In the end, the essence
of the success went to the last-named party, for the legislatures of the
two territories established slavery, and no bill to veto their action
could pass both Houses of Congress until after 1861.

The Supreme Court had already decided that Congress had exclusive power
to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution, though the
fugitive slave law of 1793 had given a concurrent authority of execution
to State officers. The law of 1850, carrying the Supreme Court's
decision further, gave the execution of the law to United States
officers, and refused the accused a hearing. Its execution at the North
was therefore the occasion of a profound excitement and horror. Cases
of inhuman cruelty, and of false accusation to which no defence was
permitted, were multiplied until a practical nullification of the law,
in the form of "personal liberty laws," securing a hearing for the
accused before State magistrates, was forced by public opinion upon the
legislature of the exposed northern States. Before the excitement
had come to a head, the Whig convention of 1852 met and endorsed the
compromise of 1850 "in all its parts." Overwhelmed in the election which
followed, the Whig party was popularly said to have "died of an attempt
to swallow the fugitive-slave law"; it would have been more correct to
have said that the southern section of the party had deserted in a body
and gone over to the Democratic party. National politics were thus left
in an entirely anomalous condition. The Democratic party was omnipotent
at the South, though it was afterward opposed feebly by the American
(or "Know Nothing ") organization, and was generally successful at
the North, though it was still met by the Northern Whigs with vigorous
opposition. Such a state of affairs was not calculated to satisfy
thinking men; and this period seems to have been one in which very
few thinking men of any party were at all satisfied with their party
positions.

This was the hazardous situation into which the Democratic managers
chose to thrust one of the most momentous pieces of legislation in our
political history-the Kansas-Nebraska bill. The responsibility for it is
clearly on the shoulders of Stephen A. Douglas. The over-land travel to
the Pacific coast had made it necessary to remove the Indian title to
Kansas and Nebraska, and to organize them as Territories, in order to
afford protection to emigrants; and Douglas, chairman of the Senate
committee on Territories, introduced a bill for such organization in
January, 1854. Both these prospective Territories had been made free
soil forever by the compromise of 1820; the question of slavery had been
settled, so far as they were concerned; but Douglas consented, after a
show of opposition, to reopen Pandora's box. His original bill did
not abrogate the Missouri compromise, and there seems to have been no
general Southern demand that it should do so. But Douglas had become
intoxicated by the unexpected success of his "popular sovereignty"
make-shift in regard to the Territories of 1850; and a notice of an
amendment to be offered by a southern senator, abrogating the Missouri
compromise, was threat or excuse sufficient to bring him to withdraw the
bill. A week later, it was re-introduced with the addition of "popular
sovereignty": all questions pertaining to slavery in these Territories,
and in the States to be formed from them, were to be left to the
decision of the people, through their representatives; and the Missouri
compromise of 1820 was declared "inoperative and void," as inconsistent
with the principles of the territorial legislation of 1850. It must
be remembered that the "non-intervention" of 1850 had been confessedly
based on no constitutional principle whatever, but was purely a matter
of expediency; and that "non-intervention" in Utah and New Mexico was no
more inconsistent with the prohibition of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska
than "non-intervention" in the Southwest Territory, sixty years before,
had been inconsistent with the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest
Territory. Whether Douglas is to be considered as too scrupulous, or too
timid, or too willing to be terrified, it is certain that his action was
unnecessary.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16