MR. PRESIDENT,—Undertaking now, after a silence of more than four years, to address the Senate on this important subject, I should suppress the emotions natural to such an occasion, if I did not declare on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being through whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for the cause so near my heart. To the honored Commonwealth whose representative I am, and also to my immediate associates in this body, with whom I enjoy the fellowship which is found in thinking alike concerning the Republic,[25] I owe thanks which I seize the moment to express for indulgence extended to me throughout the protracted seclusion enjoined by medical skill; and I trust that it will not be thought unbecoming in me to put on record here, as an apology for leaving my seat so long vacant, without making way, by resignation, for a successor, that I acted under the illusion of an invalid, whose hopes for restoration to natural health continued against oft-recurring disappointment.
When last I entered into this debate, it became my duty to expose the Crime against Kansas, and to insist upon the immediate admission of that Territory as a State of this Union, with a Constitution forbidding Slavery. Time has passed, but the question remains. Resuming the discussion precisely where I left it, I am happy to avow that rule of moderation which, it is said, may venture to fix the boundaries of wisdom itself. I have no personal griefs to utter: only a vulgar egotism could intrude such into this Chamber. I have no personal wrongs to avenge: only a brutish nature could attempt to wield that vengeance which belongs to the Lord. The years that have intervened and the tombs that have opened[26] since I spoke have their voices, too, which I cannot fail to hear. Besides, what am I, what is any man among the living or among the dead, compared with the question before us? It is this alone which I shall discuss, and I begin the argument with that easy victory which is found in charity.
The Crime against Kansas stands forth in painful light. Search history, and you cannot find its parallel. The slave-trade is bad; but even this enormity is petty, compared with that elaborate contrivance by which, in a Christian age and within the limits of a Republic, all forms of constitutional liberty were perverted, all the rights of human nature violated, and the whole country held trembling on the edge of civil war,—while all this large exuberance of wickedness, detestable in itself, becomes tenfold more detestable, when its origin is traced to the madness for Slavery. The fatal partition between Freedom and Slavery, known as the Missouri Compromise,—the subsequent overthrow of this partition, and the seizure of all by Slavery,—the violation of plighted faith,—the conspiracy to force Slavery at all hazards into Kansas,—the successive invasions by which all security there was destroyed, and the electoral franchise itself was trodden down,—the sacrilegious seizure of the very polls, and, through pretended forms of law, the imposition of a foreign legislature upon this Territory,—the acts of this legislature, fortifying the Usurpation, and, among other things, establishing test-oaths, calculated to disfranchise actual settlers friendly to Freedom, and securing the privileges of the citizen to actual strangers friendly to Slavery,—the whole crowned by a statute, “the be-all and the end-all” of the whole Usurpation, through which Slavery was not only recognized on this beautiful soil, but made to bristle with a Code of Death such as the world has rarely seen,—all these I fully exposed on a former occasion. And yet the most important part of the argument was at that time left untouched: I mean that found in the Character of Slavery. This natural sequel, with the permission of the Senate, I now propose to supply.
Motive is to Crime as soul to body; and it is only when we comprehend the motive that we can truly comprehend the Crime. Here the motive is found in Slavery and the rage for its extension. Therefore, by logical necessity, must Slavery be discussed,—not indirectly, timidly, and sparingly, but directly, openly, and thoroughly. It must be exhibited as it is, alike in its influence and its animating character, so that not only outside, but inside, may be seen.
This is no time for soft words or excuses. All such are out of place. They may turn away wrath; but what is the wrath of man? This is no time to abandon any advantage in the argument. Senators sometimes announce that they resist Slavery on political grounds only, and remind us that they say nothing of the moral question. This is wrong. Slavery must be resisted not only on political grounds, but on all other grounds, whether social, economical, or moral. Ours is no holiday contest; nor is it any strife of rival factions, of White and Red Roses, of theatric Neri and Bianchi; but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong, between Good and Evil. Such a battle cannot be fought with rosewater. There is austere work to be done, and Freedom cannot consent to fling away any of her weapons.
If I were disposed to shrink from this discussion, the boundless assumptions made by Senators on the other side would not allow me. The whole character of Slavery, as a pretended form of Civilization, is put directly in issue, with a pertinacity and a hardihood which banish all reserve on this side. In these assumptions Senators from South Carolina naturally take the lead. Following Mr. Calhoun, who pronounced Slavery “the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions,”[27] and Mr. McDuffie, who did not shrink from calling it “the corner-stone of our republican edifice,”[28] the Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Hammond] insists that its “frame of society is the best in the world”[29]; and his colleague [Mr. Chesnut] takes up the strain. One Senator from Mississippi [Mr. Jefferson Davis], adds, that Slavery “is but a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves”;[30] and his colleague [Mr. Brown] openly vaunts that it “is a great moral, social, and political blessing,—a blessing to the slave, and a blessing to the master.”[31] One Senator from Virginia [Mr. Hunter], in a studied vindication of what he is pleased to call “the social system of the South,” exalts Slavery as “the normal condition of human society,” “beneficial to the non-slave-owner as it is to the slave-owner,” “best for the happiness of both races,”—and, in enthusiastic advocacy, declares, “that the very keystone of the mighty arch, which, by its concentrated strength, and by the mutual support of its parts, is able to sustain our social superstructure, consists in the black marble block of African Slavery: knock that out, and the mighty fabric, with all that it upholds, topples and tumbles to its fall.”[32] These are his very words, uttered in debate here. And his colleague [Mr. Mason], who never hesitates where Slavery is in question, proclaims that it is “ennobling to both races, the white and the black,”—a word which, so far as the slave is concerned, he changes, on a subsequent day, to “elevating,” assuming still that it is “ennobling” to the whites,[33]—which is simply a new version of the old assumption, by Mr. McDuffie, of South Carolina, that “the institution of Domestic Slavery supersedes the necessity of an order of nobility.”[34]
Thus, by various voices, is Slavery defiantly proclaimed a form of Civilization,—not seeing that its existence is plainly inconsistent with the first principles of anything that can be called Civilization, except by that figure of speech in classical literature where a thing takes its name from something which it has not, as the dreadful Fates were called merciful because they were without mercy. Pardon the allusion, if I add, that, listening to these sounding words for Slavery, I am reminded of the kindred extravagance related by that remarkable traveller in China, the late Abbé Huc, where a gloomy hole in which he was lodged, infested by mosquitoes and exhaling noisome vapors, with light and air entering by a single narrow aperture only, was styled by Chinese pride “The Hotel of the Beatitudes.” According to a Hindoo proverb, the snail sees nothing but its own shell, and thinks it the grandest palace in the universe. This is another illustration of the delusion which we are called to witness.