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

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Sir, follow out the illustration which the Senator from Vermont himself
has given; take his very case of the Delaware owner of a horse riding
him across the line into Pennsylvania. The Senator says: "Now, you
see that slaves are not property like other property; if slaves were
property like other property, why have you this special clause in your
Constitution to protect a slave? You have no clause to protect the
horse, because horses are recognized as property everywhere." Mr.
President, the same fallacy lurks at the bottom of this argument, as of
all the rest. Let Pennsylvania exercise her undoubted jurisdiction over
persons and things within her own boundary; let her do as she has
a perfect right to do--declare that hereafter, within the State of
Pennsylvania, there shall be no property in horses, and that no man
shall maintain a suit in her courts for the recovery of property in a
horse; and where will your horse-owner be then? Just where the English
poet is now; just where the slaveholder and the inventor would be if the
Constitution, foreseeing a difference of opinion in relation to rights
in these subject-matters, had not provided the remedy in relation to
such property as might easily be plundered. Slaves, if you please, are
not property like other property in this: that you can easily rob us of
them; but as to the right in them, that man has to overthrow the
whole history of the world, he has to overthrow every treatise on
jurisprudence, he has to ignore the common sentiment of mankind, he has
to repudiate the authority of all that is considered sacred with man,
ere he can reach the conclusion that the person who owns a slave, in
a country where slavery has been established for ages, has no other
property in that slave than the mere title which is given by the statute
law of the land where it is found. * * *

ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

OF ILLINOIS. (BORN 1809, DIED 1865.)

ON THE DRED SCOTT DECISION,

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, JUNE 26, 1857.

And now as to the Dred Scott decision. That decision declares two
propositions--first, that a negro cannot sue in the United States
courts; and secondly, that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in the
Territories. It was made by a divided court--dividing differently on
the different points. Judge Douglas does not discuss the merits of the
decision, and in that respect I shall follow his example, believing I
could no more improve on McLean and Curtis than he could on Taney.

He denounces all who question the correctness of that decision, as
offering violent resistance to it. But who resists it? Who has, in spite
of the decision, declared Dred Scott free, and resisted the authority of
his master over him?

Judicial decisions have two uses,--first, to absolutely determine the
case decided; and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar
cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use they are
called "precedents" and "authorities."

We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to,
and respect for, the judicial department of government. We think its
decisions on constitutional questions, when fully settled, should
control not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy
of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments to the
Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would
be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We
know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions,
and we shall do what we can to have it to overrule this. We offer no
resistance to it.

Judicial decisions are of greater or less authority as precedents
according to circumstances. That this should be so accords both with
common sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence
of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance
with legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the
departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on
assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in
some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had
there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then
might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to
acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the
public confidence, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to
treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the
country. But Judge Douglas considers this view awful. Hear him:

"The courts are the tribunals prescribed by the Constitution and created
by the authority of the people to determine, expound, and enforce the
law. Hence, whoever resists the final decision of the highest
judicial tribunal aims a deadly blow at our whole republican system of
government--a blow which, if successful, would place all our rights
and liberties at the mercy of passion, anarchy, and violence. I repeat,
therefore, that if resistance to the decisions of the Supreme Court of
the United States, in a matter like the points decided in the Dred Scott
case, clearly within their jurisdiction as defined by the Constitution,
shall be forced upon the country as a political issue, it will become
a distinct and naked issue between the friends and enemies of the
Constitution--the friends and the enemies of the supremacy of the laws."

I have said, in substance, that the Dred Scott decision was in part
based on assumed historical facts which were not really true, and I
ought not to leave the subject without giving some reasons for saying
this; I therefore give an instance or two, which I think fully sustain
me. Chief-Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of
the court, insists at great length that the negroes were no part of the
people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence,
or the Constitution of the United States.

On the contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in
five of the then thirteen States--to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts,
New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina--free negroes were voters,
and in proportion to their numbers had the same part in making the
Constitution that the white people had. He shows this with so much
particularity as to leave no doubt of its truth; and as a sort of
conclusion on that point, holds the following language:

"The Constitution was ordained and established by the people of the
United States, through the action in each State, of those persons who
were qualified by its laws to act thereon in behalf of themselves and
all other citizens of the State. In some of the States, as we have seen,
colored persons were among those qualified by law to act on the subject.
These colored persons were not only included in the body of 'the
people of the United States' by whom the Constitution was ordained and
established; but in at least five of the States they had the power to
act, and doubtless, did act, by their suffrages, upon the question of
its adoption."

Again, Chief-Justice Taney says:

"It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion, in
relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and
enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of
Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed
and adopted."

And again, after quoting from the Declaration, he says:

"The general words above quoted would seem to include the whole human
family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day,
would be so understood."

In these the Chief-Justice does not directly assert, but plainly
assumes, as a fact, that the public estimate of the black man is more
favorable now than it was in the days of the Revolution. This assumption
is a mistake. In some trifling particulars the condition of that race
has been ameliorated; but as a whole, in this country, the change
between then and now is decidedly the other way; and their ultimate
destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four
years. In two of the five States--New Jersey and North Carolina--that
then gave the free negro the right of voting, the right has since been
taken away, and in the third--New York--it has been greatly abridged;
while it has not been extended, so far as I know, to a single additional
State, though the number of the States has more than doubled. In those
days, as I understand, masters could, at their own pleasure, emancipate
their slaves; but since then such legal restraints have been made
upon emancipation as to amount almost to prohibition. In those days
legislatures held the unquestioned power to abolish slavery in their
respective States, but now it is becoming quite fashionable for State
constitutions to withhold that power from the legislatures. In those
days, by common consent, the spread of the black man's bondage to the
new countries was prohibited, but now Congress decides that it will not
continue the prohibition, and the Supreme Court decides that it could
not if it would. In those days our Declaration of Independence was held
sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the
bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed and sneered
at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could
rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the
powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him,
ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is
fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison-house; they have
searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after
another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they
have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can
never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys in
the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what
invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to
make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

It is grossly incorrect to say or assume that the public estimate of the
negro is more favorable now than it was at the origin of the government.

Three years and a half ago, Judge Douglas brought forward his famous
Nebraska bill. The country was at once in a blaze. He scorned all
opposition, and carried it through Congress. Since then he has seen
himself superseded in a presidential nomination by one indorsing the
general doctrine of his measure, but at the same time standing clear
of the odium of its untimely agitation and its gross breach of national
faith; and he has seen that successful rival constitutionally elected,
not by the strength of friends, but by the division of adversaries,
being in a popular minority of nearly four hundred thousand votes.
He has seen his chief aids in his own State, Shields and Richardson,
politically speaking, successively tried, convicted, and executed, for
an offense not their own, but his. And now he sees his own case standing
next on the docket for trial.

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at
the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races;
and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of
his being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself.
If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea
upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He
therefore clings to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank.
He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred
Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration
of Independence includes all men, black as well as white, and forthwith
he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue
gravely that all who contend it does, do so only because they want to
vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes. He will have it that
they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against the counterfeit
logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a
slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for
either. I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is
not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with
her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and
the equal of all others.

Chief-Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that
the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole
human family, but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that
instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did
not at once actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this
grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact that they
did not at once, or ever afterward, actually place all white people on
an equality with one another. And this is the staple argument of both
the Chief-Justice and the Senator for doing this obvious violence to the
plain, unmistakable language of the Declaration.

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all
men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.
They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect,
moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable
distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created
equal--equal with "certain inalienable rights, among which are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said, and this they
meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were
then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to
confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer
such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that enforcement
of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be
familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly
labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly
approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its
influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people
of all colors everywhere. The assertion that "all men are created equal"
was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain;
and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.
Its authors meant it to be--as, thank God, it is now proving itself--a
stumbling-block to all those who in after times might seek to turn a
free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the
proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such
should reappear in this fair land and commence their vocation, they
should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

I have now briefly expressed my view of the meaning and object of that
part of the Declaration of Independence which declares that "all men are
created equal."

Now let us hear Judge Douglas's view of the same subject as I find it in
the printed report of his late speech. Here it is:

"No man can vindicate the character, motives, and conduct of the signers
of the Declaration of Independence, except upon the hypothesis that
they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they
declared all men to have been created equal; that they were speaking of
British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects
born and residing in Great Britain; that they were entitled to the same
inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration was adopted for the purpose
of justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in
withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown, and dissolving
their connection with the mother country."

My good friends, read that carefully over in some leisure hour, and
ponder well upon it; see what a mere wreck--mangled ruin--it makes of
our once glorious Declaration.

"They were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to
British subjects born and residing in Great Britain." Why, according
to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and
America were not spoken of in that instrument. The English, Irish, and
Scotch, along with white Americans, were included, to be sure, but the
French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot
along with the Judge's inferior races.

I had thought the Declaration promised something better than the
condition of British subjects; but no, it only meant that we should be
equal to them in their own oppressed and unequal condition. According to
that, it gave no promise that, having kicked off the king and lords of
Great Britain, we should not at once be saddled with a king and lords of
our own.

I had thought the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement
in the condition of all men everywhere; but no, it merely "was adopted
for the purpose of justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized
world, in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown, and
dissolving their connection with the mother country." Why, that object
having been effected some eighty years ago, the Declaration is of
no practical use now--mere rubbish--old wadding left to rot on the
battle-field after the victory is won.

I understand you are preparing to celebrate the "Fourth," to-morrow
week. What for? The doings of that day had no reference to the present;
and quite half of you are not even descendants of those who were
referred to at that day. But I suppose you will celebrate, and will even
go so far as to read the Declaration. Suppose, after you read it once
in the old-fashioned way, you read it once more with Judge Douglas's
version. It will then run thus: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all British subjects who were on this continent
eighty-one years ago, were created equal to all British subjects born
and then residing in Great Britain."

And now I appeal to all--to Democrats as well as others--are you really
willing that the Declaration shall thus be frittered away?--thus left
no more, at most, than an interesting memorial of the dead past?--thus
shorn of its vitality and practical value, and left without the germ or
even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it?

ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

OF ILLINOIS. (BORN 1809, DIED 1865.)

ON HIS NOMINATION TO THE UNITED STATES SENATE,

AT THE REPUBLICAN STATE CONVENTION, SPRINGFIELD, ILLS., JUNE 16, 1858.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CONVENTION:

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we
could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into
the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and
confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the
operation of that policy, that agitation not only has not ceased, but
has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a
crisis shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against
itself cannot stand." I believe this Government cannot endure
permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that
it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the
other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of
it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it
is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it
forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as
well as new, North as well as South. Have we no tendency to the latter
condition? Let any one who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost
complete legal combination piece of machinery, so to speak--compounded
of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision. Let him consider
not only what work the machinery is adapted to do, and how well adapted,
but also let him study the history of its construction, and trace, if
he can, or rather fail, if he can, to trace the evidences of design and
concert of action among its chief architects from the beginning.

The new year of 1854 found slavery excluded from more than half the
States by State constitutions, and from most of the national territory
by Congressional prohibition. Four days later commenced the struggle
which ended in repealing that Congressional prohibition. This opened all
the national territory to slavery, and was the first point gained. But,
so far, Congress only had acted, and an indorsement, by the people, real
or apparent, was indispensable, to save the point already gained and
give chance for more. This necessity had not been overlooked, but had
been provided for, as well as might be, in the notable argument
of "squatter sovereignty," otherwise called "sacred right of
self-government";--which latter phrase though expressive of the only
rightful basis of any government, was so perverted in this attempted use
of it as to amount to just this: That, if any one man choose to enslave
another, no third man shall be allowed to object. That argument was
incorporated with the Nebraska bill itself, in the language which
follows: "It being the true intent and meaning of this act, not to
legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it
therefrom; but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and
regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to
the Constitution of the United States." Then opened the roar of loose
declamation in favor of "squatter sovereignty," and "sacred right of
self-government." "But," said opposition members, "let us amend the bill
so as to expressly declare that the people of the Territory may exclude
slavery." "Not we," said the friends of the measure; and down they voted
the amendment.

While the Nebraska bill was passing through Congress, a law-case,
involving the question of a negro's freedom, by reason of his owner
having voluntarily taken him first into a free State, and then into a
Territory covered by the Congressional prohibition, and held him as a
slave for a long time in each, was passing through the United States
Circuit Court for the District of Missouri; and both Nebraska bill and
lawsuit were brought to a decision in the same month of May, 1854. The
negro's name was Dred Scott, which name now designates the decision
finally made in the case. Before the then next Presidential election,
the law-case came to, and was argued in, the Supreme Court of the United
States; but the decision of it was deferred until after the election.
Still, before the election, Senator Trumbull, on the floor of the
Senate, requested the leading advocate of the Nebraska bill to state his
opinion whether the people of a Territory can constitutionally exclude
slavery from their limits; and the latter answers: "That is a question
for the Supreme Court."

The election came, Mr. Buchanan was elected, and the indorsement, such
as it was, secured. That was the second point gained. The indorsement,
however, fell short of a clear popular majority by nearly four hundred
thousand votes, and so, perhaps, was not overwhelmingly reliable and
satisfactory. The outgoing President, in his last annual message, as
impressively as possible, echoed back upon the people the weight and
authority of the indorsement. The Supreme Court met again, did not
announce their decision, but ordered a re-argument. The Presidential
inauguration came, and still no decision of the court; but the incoming
President, in his inaugural address, fervently exhorted the people to
abide by the forthcoming decision, whatever it might be. Then, in a few
days, came the decision. The reputed author of the Nebraska bill finds
an early occasion to make a speech at this capital, indorsing the Dred
Scott decision, and vehemently denouncing all opposition to it. The
new President, too, seizes the early occasion of the Silliman letter
to indorse and strongly construe that decision, and to express his
astonishment that any different view had ever been entertained.

At length a squabble springs up between the President and the author of
the Nebraska bill, on the mere question of fact, whether the Lecompton
constitution was, or was not, in any just sense, made by the people of
Kansas; and in that quarrel the latter declares that all he wants is a
fair vote for the people, and that he cares not whether slavery be voted
down or voted up.' I do not understand his declaration, that he cares
not whether slavery be voted _down_ or voted _up_, to be intended by him
other than as an apt definition of the policy he would impress upon
the public mind--the principle for which he declares he has suffered so
much, and is ready to suffer to the end. And well may he cling to that
principle. If he has any parental feeling, well may he cling to it.
That principle is the only shred left of his original Nebraska doctrine.
Under the Dred Scott decision, squatter sovereignty squatted out of
existence--tumbled down like temporary scaffolding--like the mould
at the foundry, served through one blast, and fell back into loose
sand,--helped to carry an election, and then was kicked to the winds.
His late joint struggle with the Republicans against the Lecompton
constitution involves nothing of the original Nebraska doctrine. That
struggle was made on a point--the right of a people to make their own
constitution--upon which he and the Republicans have never differed.

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