Page images
PDF
EPUB

misgiving, mirth, and fear in view of such demonstration? If you did not, or if you did, think it a poor, arrogant, impious, and hypocritical method of electioneering, would you not wish to know with a trifle more of precision and fulness what were these principles, and that spirit, and those aims of the Bible thus suddenly adopted into the creed of a party? If they told you they meant those principles and that spirit "promulgated in the Bible" and "embodied in the Constitution," should you feel that you knew much more than you did before? So here. What do these mean by this adoption of the Declaration of Independence into their creed? What are "those principles promulgated" in it, and "embodied in the Constitution?" The Declaration announces all men to be born free and equal, and to have certain inalienable rights, among which is the right to liberty. The Constitution sends back the fugitive slave to his master. Is this a case of a principle promulgated in one, and embodied in the other? If not, how does their platform deal with it? What are the "principles so embodied?" In what article, in what word, are they so? Which do they go for, the "promulgation," or the "embodi ment?" What practical legislation, or administration, are they supposed to prescribe or warrant? Nay-come a little closer; what do they intend to say they get from the Declaration, or do by means of the Declaration, more than anybody else gets from it, and does by means of it? Would they venture the proposition that the Federal Government derives any powers, any one power from that source? Certainly not; or if so, it is the most dangerous and most revolutionary heresy ever yet promulgated. Would they say that they call in the Declaration to interpret the language of the Constitution? I suppose not; for, that the meaning of those who constructed that consummate frame of government, and weighed, measured, and stamped its words of gold, and drew, or sought to draw, with so much precision and certainty, the delicate line which parts the powers given to the Union from those retained to the States or the people, and therein ordained that all powers not delegated to the United States, or prohibited to the States, are reserved respectively to the States or the people, that this language, in this instrument of 1787, can be interpreted, enlarged or narrowed, darkened or illustrated by the language

of that other instrument, not less renowned, penned in 1776, in a time and for a purpose so different, that thrilling appeal to the reason and justice of nations, in which a people assume to vindicate upon grounds of natural right their claim to take their place in the great equality of States, and then announce their sublime decision to make their claim good by revolution and battle-composed to engage the sympathies of mankind for the new nation, and to lift up its own spirit to the demands of the great crisis, that the latter of these papers, in point of time, is to be interpreted by the former in any sense, of which any jurist, or any reader of his mother-tongue, can form conception, is a proposition too extravagant to be imputed to the author of the platform.

How do

Well, then, if they do not use the Declaration as a source of power, nor as a help to construction, what do they mean to do with, or do by it? How profiteth it them any more than others? than us? Why, they would say they were going to execute their constitutional powers "in the spirit of the Declaration." That is it, is it? They are to take the constitutional powers as they exist to find them as you find them, and as all find them, by just and legitimate interpretation. But the difference between you and them is, they "are going to execute them in the spirit of the Declaration." Well, now, what does even this mean? What sort of execution is this to insure? you apply your rule? Nay what is the rule? the spirit of the Declaration in this behalf? Is it anything more than its meaning? It is what the framers of it, the congress of 1776, then meant, by their language, is it not? Did they mean then to assert that slaves had an inalienable right to liberty? Did they mean to make any assertion at all upon the subject of master and slave? Was that application of this generality of natural right in their contemplation in any, the least degree? Were they consciously and intentionally conceding and proclaiming that it was a sin to hold a slave and a duty to emancipate?

What is

How the student of the history of that act may answer this inquiry is not now to the purpose. The question is not now on the actual principles of the Declaration as its framers understood and limited and applied them. It is on the meaning of the framers of the Republican platform. What is their

"spirit of the Declaration," and how do they mean to use it; and what do they mean to draw from it in executing the Constitution? If they will point out one single object they can or design to accomplish through it, which other parties have not accomplished and cannot accomplish, by administering the government upon these principles of equal and exact justice to all the States and all the sections, in the purpose of promoting internal tranquillity and a more perfect Union, which have heretofore constituted the recognized creed of American statesmanship, we can then judge whether this parade of that instrument and that act in their platform has any meaning at all, and if so whether what is meant is needful or safe.

We can

then judge whether they have used a form of language intended to lead the passionate and unthinking to believe they intended something, and yet to leave themselves at liberty to protest when examined on it that they intended nothing. We can then judge whether this language of their creed is revolutionary and dangerous, or whether it merely

"Palters with us in a double sense;

That keeps the word of promise to our ear,
And breaks it to our hope."

Holding then, Fellow-citizens, the clear and settled conviction that this combination of Northern States against the South is totally unnecessary for any purpose, I record my protest against the attempt to form it and give it power. No interest of freedom requires or will be helped by it. No aspects of slavery justify it. It will not give liberty to an acre, or to a man, one hour sooner than they will have it without. It will not shorten or lighten the rule or limit the spread of slavery in the least degree.

And is not this enough to deter you from an innovation so vast, an experiment so untried, an agency of influences so incapable to be calculated?

But what if, more than novel and more than needless, it proves only an enormous evil? What if it proves, of all the fruits that slavery has borne yet, the deadliest?

To many I know the bare imagination of such fear is matter of mirth. Seeing farther than I can see, or more sanguine, or more bold, for them it seems without terror; or promises only good, or a preponderance of good, or to be a necessary

evil and a risk worth taking at the worst. Let me dare to avow that which I assuredly believe and deeply feel. To me, to many thoughtful men whose opinions are far more important than mine, there is occasion for the wisdom of fear.

The grounds and the particulars of the apprehension with which such men may regard this party, there is no need here and now to open at large.

We have come so near to the time when practical consequences are to take the place of our conjectures, or to be scattered to the winds forever or for a space, if this party is defeated, — that I may forbear to display them in detail. I compress my convictions upon the whole subject of the proposed organization in a brief, articulate enumeration, and deliver them to your judgment.

They are:

[ocr errors]

That in the exact sense in which the language has been used, and the thing been held out for warning in the Farewell Address, and by all the illustrious men of both schools of our politics, of Washington and of Jefferson, whom heretofore the American people has regarded as its safest and most sagacious councillors, but on a scale more gigantic and swayed by passions far more incapable of control or measure than they have any of them feared, it is a Geographical party,-confined exclusively in fact and in the nature of things to one of the two great regions into which the American States are distributed; seeking objects, resting on principles, cultivating dispositions, and exerting an aggregate of influence and impressions calculated to unite all on one side of the line which parts the two regions against all on the other, upon the single subject on which, without the utmost exercise of forbearance, sense, and virtue, they cannot live at peace; but for which they could not fail to be one people forever; by reason of which their disruption is possible at all times.

That in the sense of the language heretofore employed in American politics and history to describe this kind of thing there is not now and there never has been another Geographical party; that both the other two which now divide or now unite the people, extending through every State North and South, professing political and industrial creeds, seeking objects, breathing a spirit and presenting candidates which every

region may own alike, exerting each an aggregate of influence and impression calculated to foster an American feeling and not a sectional animosity; that both these whatever else may be alleged against them - are national parties.

That the Geographical party, in its nature and spirit and immediate object of taking possession of the government, is founded in essential injustice to the section which it excludes ; that in ethics and reason these States are partners, and stockholders, and contractors each with all, — a partnership, an incorporation for all the good and glory and progress to which national life may aspire; that therefore, although the will of the majority is the law of the mighty concern, yet that that requires a will obedient to justice; and it is not just that a section, or a class of partners should associate among themselves by that organization called a party, to appropriate, to the practical exclusion of the rest, the government, and all the honor, profit, and power which belongs to its possession and administration, for an indefinite period, or for a presidential term, forasmuch as it violates or deserts the great implied agreement of the society-implied in the act of coming into the federal tie that a property, a privilege, a power, a glory so large, so desirable, as the possession and administration of the government, shall pass about by a just and equitable rotation, and every section shall at all times have its share:

That if the manner in which the South has performed its duties to the Union and to the Northern section of States be regarded as a whole, from the adoption of the Constitution to this day, it affords no justification of the attempt to take possession of the government, to the exclusion of that section of States; that her federal obligations, as such, have been discharged as the general fact; that she has set no example of such sectional exclusion as this; that her federal life and activities have been exerted in and through national parties, and as a branch or wing thereof; that she has supplied her proportionate share of capacity and valor to the service of the whole country, and that the bad language, and violent acts, and treasonable devices of her bad men create no case for the injustice here meditated:

That the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the disposition of the South to form Kansas into a slave State, while

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »