William H. Seward’s Speech on the Higher Law.
In the U. S. Senate, March 11, 1850.
“But it is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended by a COMPROMISE of questions which have arisen out of SLAVERY! I am opposed to any such compromise in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed. Because, while admitting the purity and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I think all legislative compromises radically wrong, and essentially vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and the conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for ascertaining the truth. They involve a relinquishment of the right to reconsider in future the decision of the present, on questions prematurely anticipated. And they are a usurpation as to future questions of the providence of future legislators.
“Sir, it seems to me as if slavery had laid its paralyzing hand upon myself, and the blood were coursing less freely than its wont through my veins, when I endeavor to suppose that such a compromise has been effected, and my utterance forever is arrested upon all the great questions, social, moral, and political, arising out of a subject so important, and yet so incomprehensible. What am I to receive in this compromise? Freedom in California. It is well; it is a noble acquisition; it is worth a sacrifice. But what am I to give as an equivalent? A recognition of a claim to perpetuate slavery in the District of Columbia; forbearance towards more stringent laws concerning the arrest of persons suspected of being slaves found in the free States; forbearance from the PROVISO of freedom in the charter of new territories. None of the plans of compromise offered demand less than two, and most of them insist on all these conditions. The equivalent then is, some portion of liberty, some portion of human rights in one region for liberty in another.”
“It is true indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary power over anything, whether acquired by law or seized by usurpation. The constitution regulates our stewardship; the constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to welfare and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purpose. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust, as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness. This is a State, and we are deliberating for it, just as our fathers deliberated in establishing the institutions we enjoy. Whatever superiority there is in our condition and hopes over those of any other ‘kingdom’ or ‘estate,’ is due to the fortunate circumstance that our ancestors did not leave things to ‘take their chances’ but that they ‘added amplitude and greatness’ to our commonwealth ‘by introducing such ordinances, constitutions, and customs as were wise.’ We in our turn have succeeded to the same responsibilities, and we cannot approach the duty before us wisely or justly, except we raise ourselves to the great consideration of how we can most certainly ‘sow greatness to our posterity and successors.’
“And now the simple, bold, and awful question which presents itself to us is this: shall we, who are founding institutions, social and political, for countless millions; shall we, who know by experience the wise and just, and are free to choose them, and to reject the erroneous and unjust; shall we establish human bondage, or permit it by our sufferance to be established? Sir, our forefathers would not have hesitated an hour. They found slavery existing here, and they left it only because they could not remove it. There is not only no free State which would now establish it, but there is no slave State which, if it had had the free alternative, as we now have, would have founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had precisely the same question before them in establishing an organic law, under which the States of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa have since come into the Union, and they solemnly repudiated and excluded slavery from those States forever.”