[Speech in Congress on the Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery, January 13, 1865]
On the 21st day of June, 1788, our national sovereignty was lodged, by the people, in the Constitution of the United States, where it still resides, and for its preservation our armies are to-day in the field. In all these stages of development, from colonial dependence to full-orbed nationality, the people, not the States, have been omnipotent. They have abolished, established, altered, and amended, as suited their sovereign pleasure. They made the Constitution. That great charter tells its own story best:
"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
That Constitution, with its amendments, is the latest and the greatest utterance of American sovereignty. The hour is now at hand when that majestic sovereign, for the benignant purpose of securing still farther the 'blessings of liberty,' is about to put forth another oracle; is about to declare that universal freedom shall be the supreme law of the land. Show me the power that is authorized to forbid it.... They made the Constitution what it is. They could have made it otherwise then: they can make it otherwise now.
In the very crisis of our fate, God brought us face to face with the alarming truth, that we must lose our own freedom, or grant it to the slave. In the extremity of our distress, we called upon the black man to help us save the Republic, and amidst the very thunder of battle we made a covenant with him, sealed both with his blood and ours, and witnessed by Jehovah, that when the nation was redeemed, he should be free, and share with us the glories and blessings of freedom. In the solemn words of the great proclamation of emancipation, we not only declared the slaves forever free, but we pledged the faith of the nation "to maintain their freedom"—mark the words, "to maintain their freedom." The Omniscient witness will appear in judgment against us if we do not fulfil that covenant. Have we done it? Have we given freedom to the black man? What is freedom? Is it a mere negation? the bare privilege of not being chained, bought, and sold, branded, and scourged? If this be all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion, and it may well be questioned whether slavery were not better.
But liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality. It is the realization of those imperishable truths of the Declaration, "that all men are created equal," that the sanction of all just government is "the consent of the governed." Can these truths be realized until each man has a right to be heard on all matters relating to himself?
Mr. Speaker, we did more than merely to break off the chains of the slaves. The abolition of slavery added four million citizens to the Republic. By the decision of the Supreme Court, by the decision of the attorney-general, by the decision of all the departments of our government, those men made free are, by the act of freedom, made citizens.
If they are to be disfranchised, if they are to have no voice in determining the conditions under which they are to live and labor, what hope have they for the future? It will rest with their late masters, whose treason they aided to thwart, to determine whether negroes shall be permitted to hold property, to enjoy the benefits of education, to enforce contracts, to have access to the courts of justice—in short, to enjoy any of those rights which give vitality and value to freedom. Who can fail to foresee the ruin and misery that await this race to whom the vision of freedom has been presented only to be withdrawn, leaving them without even the aid which the master's selfish, commercial interest in their life and service formerly afforded them? Will these negroes, remembering the battle-fields on which nearly two hundred thousand of their number have so bravely fought, and many thousands have heroically died, submit to oppression as tamely and peaceably as in the days of slavery? Under such conditions there could be no peace, no security, no prosperity. The spirit of slavery is still among us; it must be utterly destroyed before we shall be safe.
Mr. Speaker, I know of nothing more dangerous to a Republic than to put into its very midst four million people, stripped of every attribute of citizenship, robbed of the right of representation, but bound to pay taxes to the government. If they can endure it, we can not. The murderer is to be pitied more than the murdered man; the robber more than the robbed. And we who defraud four million citizens of their rights are injuring ourselves vastly more than we are injuring the black man whom we rob.
Throughout the whole web of national existence we trace the golden thread of human progress toward a higher and better estate.
The life and light of a nation are inseparable.
We confront the dangers of suffrage by the blessings of universal education.
We should do nothing inconsistent with the spirit and genius of our institutions. We should do nothing for revenge, but everything for security: nothing for the past; everything for the present and future.
There are two classes of forces whose action and reaction determine the condition of a nation—the forces of Repression and Expression. The one acts from without; limits, curbs, restrains. The other acts from within; expands, enlarges, propels. Constitutional forms, statutory limitations, conservative customs, belong to the first. The free play of individual life, opinion, and action, belong to the second. If these forces be happily balanced, if there be a wise conservation and correlation of both, a nation may enjoy the double blessing of progress and permanence.
It matters little what may be the forms of National institutions, if the life, freedom, and growth of society are secured.
There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.
The Union and the Congress must share the same fate. They must rise or fall together.
Real political issues cannot be manufactured by the leaders of political parties, and real ones cannot be evaded by political parties. The real political issues of the day declare themselves and come out of the depth of that deep which we call public opinion. The nation has a life of its own as distinctly defined as the life of an individual. The signs of its growth and the periods of its development make issues declare themselves; and the man or the political party that does not discover this, has not learned the character of the nation's life.