Wednesday, March 12.
Importations from Great Britain.
Mr. Jackson.—I admitted, in its fullest latitude, the aversion of the American people to go to war for light and transient causes. They will sedulously foster peace; they will bear and forbear much; viewing war as the scourge of the human race, every honorable exertion will be made by them to avert it; but there is a point of degradation and insult beyond endurance which no nation can advance to without feeling the vengeance of United America. We have tested this truth by experience. Look to the Revolution, sir, when the noble spirit of the times braved the terrors of treason, misery, and death, rather than tamely submit to the accumulated wrongs that were heaped upon us. I have too much respect for my country to believe that any attempt to rob us of a single right which we then secured by one of the noblest struggles recorded in the annals of the world, would be tamely surrendered. But it is said the spirit of the nation has been roused by the impositions of the newspapers, influenced by the rapacity of the merchants. No, sir; it is by seeing its rights and the rights of its citizens trampled on—prostrated by a lawless banditti on the ocean, respecting no law but their own interest—acknowledging no rights between them and the tyranny of the seas. Is the capture of our seamen, and vessels, and cargoes on the ocean, an imposition? No, sir; it is a fatal reality, witnessed by the miseries and bankruptcies of thousands; and when an honest burst of indignation is re-echoed from the remotest corners of the Union, we are gravely told that we must make a distinction between commerce and agriculture, which it is alleged exists in fact, and cannot be lost sight of. Let us examine this doctrine. The merchant purchases the produce of the farmer, his beef, and pork, and every surplus which he has, and traverses every sea in search of a market for it; the price abroad produces competition at home; the profits to the merchant being always nearly the same, and by this competition the farmer receives a premium proportionate to the demand abroad; but take away this rivalship at home by abandoning your merchants to the depredations of every freebooter—for, if you once pronounce that they are to be abandoned, every sea and shore will be infested by them—and you compel him to quit the ocean, to employ his capital on land, and our farmers will be obliged to take whatever price foreigners coming into our ports may choose to give, and to purchase the productions of other countries from them at whatever price they may choose to ask. The interests of agriculture and commerce are, therefore, intimately connected: but another expedient is resorted to. It is said a distinction is to be kept up between the Northern and Southern interests, and this measure will operate on the South alone. Sir, we ought to know nothing of local interests or geographical divisions, when the rights of an American citizen are invaded; we ought only to know it and feel it as Americans. Did the North use other language when the navigation of the Mississippi was destroyed by withholding the right of deposit at New Orleans? No, sir, with honorable feelings, their only solicitude was how they should most effectually restore and preserve it. Let us then act with sentiments of the same noble liberality when the pressure of wrongs is most immediately felt by them, but which must and will operate upon us also, for no measure can affect the rights of this nation that will not sensibly injure every part of the Union. If our commerce is disturbed, if our rights on the sea are cut off one by one, and such is the tendency of the present measures of Britain, what will become of our cotton and tobacco? Will they not rot on our hands, or be sold at the price of those who may be pleased to come and purchase them? If commerce languish, agriculture will languish likewise, for one is the handmaid of the other. But, say gentlemen, the value of the trade interrupted by the piratical conduct of Britain, is not worth contending for, is not worth the risk of the present measure, or the hazard of war. I hope, however, we shall not estimate national wrongs by pounds, shillings, and pence. I hope that, when our rights are invaded, we will all be united, not in calculating the cost, but in adopting measures to insure redress. But gentlemen say these aggressions will only last during the war. Sir, the war in Europe, for the last fifteen years, has been almost unintermitted. Were you to hold this language to an individual, and say to him, you are denied free ingress or egress to or from your own mansion, and console him by adding, you can bear with your wrongs, they will last only during your lifetime; he would spurn you from him with indignation. Look at the state of the European world, at its situation for twenty years past, and say what chance have you of peace? I hope our rights will not be thus permitted to be trampled on with impunity, under such a pretext. I hope to see some systematic measures adopted to meet Great Britain, who appears to have formed a deliberate plan to inflict all the injury in her power on this people, whom she looks upon as her most dangerous rival. This step, which she has taken, is a link in the great chain of vassalage, a colossal stride towards effecting that plan which has for its object the dominion of the seas. If we yield one right, as well established as the right to breathe the vital air, it is weak in us to imagine Great Britain will stop here. This would be as contrary to her genius as the genius of this Government is to war.
I consider the aggressions which Britain has made upon our trade alone, a sufficient stimulus to induce us to do something. But when I refer to the three thousand seamen she holds in miserable bondage, I consider the destruction of this trade as but a drop in the ocean compared with them. But, on this subject, horrid as it is, I find some gentlemen are the apologists of Britain! One gentleman observes that, inasmuch as her own subjects are in our employ, she has a right to take from us an equal number. But there is no analogy between the cases. The act of her subjects in entering into our service is voluntary, while our citizens are kept in her service by violence. Some of our own citizens reside in Britain, and yet we never dreamed of complaining, because she has not banished them from her bosom. No man in his senses can say that Britain is justified in keeping our citizens in slavery, on the ground that we employ her subjects in our service.
If a man has a protection, she says it is fraudulent and tears it to pieces; and if he has not a protection, she declares that conclusive proof that he is not an American citizen. It is very much to be regretted that the law requiring those protections ever passed; and that we had not asserted the right to protect every man sailing under our flag, except the enemies of a belligerent nation. Three thousand of our citizens now groan under this abject slavery! This number have presented their claims to your Government. Besides which, many more are carried from sea to sea, and from one country to another, without being ever able to make their cases known to you. In vain do they endeavor to forward their complaints—an inexorable tyranny denies them the indulgence. It is fair then to infer that the whole number is twice that I have stated, and it really appears to me as if our sensibility were lost in the magnitude of the injury. If there were but a single case of this species of oppression presented to us, it would be more affecting and effective. Draw the picture of a single victim, the only son of aged parents, their staff, the prop of their age, their pride and only support; he toils and labors to obtain a venture, with the pleasing prospect of quadrupling his little capital—they follow him, when ready to leave them, with tears and blessings to the water side, where he embarks; and in a few hours the lessening sail is lost to their view on the bosom of the wide-expanded ocean. They return to their cottage and implore a beneficent God to protect their darling; they count the days of his absence, and when, according to the usual course of events, the period of his return is drawing to a close, each hour awakens new fears and new solicitude. By and by the vessel anchors in its port—they fly to embrace him—but, alas! he is not there—he was, off the harbor’s mouth, robbed of his all, impressed by the British, and carried into worse than Algerine slavery—for with those he would only be compelled to work for his master, whilst these make him work, and fight, under a lash more cruel than the barbarian bastinado, and a despotism more unrelenting than the slave driver’s exercise. Their golden dreams are vanished with the recital. The soul shrinks back upon itself; they cast a long and wishful look upon the ocean, and with tottering steps reach their once peaceful, happy home—but no peace, nor happiness, welcomes their return. Hope lingers for awhile, and cheers their drooping spirits—it directs their appeal to the Government, which the old man fought and bled in the field to establish, upon the basis of universal justice, and whose principles he impressed on the mind of his child. Year after year it is deaf to their cries; it sits down and calculates the cost of asserting its rights, with the nicety of a ledger-keeper, and decides in favor of a pusillanimous acquiescence, because the balance of dollars and cents is struck in its favor. Poverty approaches with rapid strides—their last dollar is laid out to procure the means of subsistence; too proud to beg, and too infirm to labor, they know not how to avert their fate; the little plans they have formed without the means of execution, fly like meteors before them—nature is making a mighty struggle with adversity, when it is announced that their boy fell beneath the thousand lashes which were inflicted on him for attempting his escape; and Death, kindly interposing his friendly arm, grants a respite from their miseries! Does not such a case demand our attention? It is not at all comparable to that of many others. Add to the scene which I have feebly portrayed, the distraction of a tender wife, manacled and confined in the cold damp cells of a lunatic hospital—her children bound out by the parish, and all their prospects of life nipped in the bud, occasioned by the impressment of the husband and the father—and then tell me do we violate the principles of the constitution, which declares that it is made to provide for the common defence and general welfare, by vindicating those measures which are well calculated to procure redress? This were indeed to play such fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make even angels weep! Shall we, in the Tripoline war, to rescue from bondage three hundred Americans, perform, through the agency of some of our citizens, acts of perseverance, address, and heroism, unsurpassed in the annals of ancient or modern times, at the sacrifice of the lives of many brave men, who, with some of those that survived the conflict, will be enrolled by a grateful country upon the list of the favorite sons of the American nation—when as many thousands are groaning under the cruel oppression of Great Britain, and crying to us for succor, without exciting or producing one manly exertion!