I give another instance. In debate in the Senate on the 27th February, 1852, Mr. Clemens, a Slave-Master of Alabama, thus directly attacked Mr. Rhett for undertaking to settle their differences by argument in the Senate rather than by the Duel. “No man,” said he, “with the feeling of a man in his bosom, would have sought redress here. He would have looked for it elsewhere. He now comes here, not to ask redress in the only way he should have sought it.”[106] There was no call to order.
Here is still another. In the debate on the Bill for the Improvement of Rivers and Harbors, 29th July, 1854, the Senator from Louisiana [Mr. Benjamin], who is still a member of this body, ardent for Slavery, while professing to avoid personal altercation in the Senate, especially “with a gentleman who professes the principles of non-resistance, as he understood the Senator from New York does,” proceeded most earnestly to repel an imagined imputation on him by Mr. Seward, and wound up by saying, “If it came from another quarter, it would not be upon this floor that I should answer it.”[107]
During the present session, the Senator from Mississippi [Mr. Jefferson Davis], who speaks so often for Slavery, in a colloquy on this floor with the Senator from Vermont [Mr. Collamer], maintained the Duel as a mode of settling personal differences, and vindicating what is called personal honor,—as if personal honor did not depend absolutely upon what a man does, and not on what is done to him. After certain refinements on the imagined relations between an insult and the obligation to answer for it, the Senator declared, in reply to the Senator from Vermont, that, in case of insult, taking another out and shooting him might be “satisfaction.”[108]
I do not dwell on this instance, nor on any of these instances, except to make a single comment. These declarations have all been made in open Senate, without any check from the Chair. Of course, they are clear violations of the first principles of Parliamentary Law, and tend directly to provoke a violation of the law of the land. Here, in the District of Columbia, all duels are prohibited by solemn Act of Congress.[109] In case of death, the surviving parties are declared guilty of felony, to be punished by hard labor in the penitentiary; and even where nothing has occurred beyond the challenge, all the parties to it, whether givers, receivers, or bearers, are declared guilty of high crime and misdemeanor, also to be punished by hard labor in the penitentiary. Of course, every menace of duel in Congress sets this law at defiance. And yet Senators, who thus openly disregard a law sanctioned by the Constitution and commended by morality, presume to complain on this floor because other Senators disregard the Fugitive Slave Bill, a statute which, according to the profound convictions of large numbers, is as unconstitutional as it is offensive to the moral sense. Let Senators, whose watchword is “the enforcement of laws,” begin by enforcing the statute which declares the Duel to be felony. At least, let the statute cease to be a dead letter in this Chamber, where the watchword is so often heard. But this is too much to expect while Slavery prevails here; for the Duel is part of that System of Violence which has its origin in Slavery.
It is when aroused by the Slave Question in Congress that Slave-Masters have most truly shown themselves; and here again I shall speak only of what has already passed into history. Slavery is a perpetual fever-and-ague, under which Congress has shaken with alternate heats and chills. Even in that earliest debate, in the first Congress after the Constitution, on the memorial of Dr. Franklin, simply calling upon Congress to “step to the verge of its power to discourage every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men,”[110] the Slave-Masters became angry, indulged in sneers at “the men in the gallery” being Quakers and Abolitionists, and, according to the faithful historian, Hildreth,[111] poured out “torrents of abuse,” while one of them began the charge so often since directed against all Antislavery men, by declaring his astonishment that Dr. Franklin had “given countenance” to “an application which called upon Congress, in explicit terms, to break a solemn compact to which he had himself been a party,” when it was obvious that Dr. Franklin had done no such thing. The great man was soon summoned away by death, but not until he had fastened upon this debate an undying condemnation, by portraying, with matchless pen, a scene in the Divan at Algiers, where a Corsair Slave-Dealer, insisting upon the enslavement of White Christians, is made to repeat the Congressional speech of an American Slave-Master.[112]
These displays of Violence naturally increase with the intensity of the discussion. Impelled to be severe, but with little appreciation of debate in its finer forms, they cannot be severe except by violating the rules of debate,—not knowing that there is a serener power than any found in personalities, and that all severity transcending the rules of debate becomes disgusting as the utterance of a Yahoo, and harms him only who degrades himself to be its mouthpiece. Of course, on such occasions, amidst all seeming triumphs, the cause of Slavery loses, and Truth gains. If men cannot afford to be decent, they ought to suspect the justice of their cause, or at least the motives with which they sustain it; but our Slave-Masters, not seeing the indecency of their conduct, know not their losses. There is waste as well as economy of character; but the latter is found only in the cultivation of those principles which make Slavery impossible.
Against John Quincy Adams this violence was first directed in full force. To a character spotless as snow, and to universal attainments as a scholar, this illustrious citizen added experience in all the eminent posts of the Republic, which he had filled with an ability and integrity now admitted even by enemies, and which impartial history can never forget. Having been President of the United States, he entered the House of Representatives at the period when the Slave Question, in its revival, first began to occupy public attention. In all the completeness of his nature, he became the representative of Human Freedom. The first struggle occurred on the Right of Petition, which Slave-Masters, with characteristic tyranny, sought to suppress. This was resisted by the venerable patriot, and what he did was always done with his whole heart. Then was poured upon him abuse “as from a cart,” according to a famous phrase of Demosthenes. Slave-Masters, “foaming out their shame,” became conspicuous, not less for the avowal of sentiments at which Civilization blushed than for an effrontery of manner where the accidental legislator was lost in the natural overseer, and the lash of the plantation resounded in the voice.
In an address to his constituents, September 17, 1842, Mr. Adams thus frankly describes the treatment he experienced:—
“I never can take part in any debate upon an important subject, be it only upon a mere abstraction, but a pack opens upon me of personal invective in return. Language has no word of reproach and railing that is not hurled at me.”