DUTY AND STRENGTH OF THE COMING ADMINISTRATION.
From Notes of undelivered Speech on the various Propositions of Compromise, February, 1861.
Mr. Sumner contemplated a speech reviewing the various propositions of Compromise, but he never made it. The following passages are given, as proposed at the time.
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I would not say a word except of kindness and respect for the Senator of Kentucky [Mr. Crittenden]. But that Senator must pardon me, if I insist that he is entirely unreasonable in pressing his impracticable and unconstitutional propositions so persistently in the way of most important public business. Yesterday it hindered a great measure of Internal Improvement. To-day it blocks the admission of a State into this Union, being none other than Kansas, which has earned a better hospitality.
The Senator makes his appeal in the name of the Union. But I must remind him that he takes a poor way of showing that attachment to the Union which he avers. He turns round and lectures us who are devoted to the Union, when his lecture should be addressed to the avowed and open Disunionists in this Chamber. Nay, more, he actually sides with the Disunionists in their claims. Imagine Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Jay, Andrew Jackson, or Henry Clay, in the place of the venerable Senator. They would not wheel towards the known friends of the Union, and ask an impossible surrender of sacred principles, but rather face to face address the Disunionists frankly, plainly, austerely, calling upon them to renounce their evil schemes; to acknowledge the National Constitution, and especially in this age of light to make no new demands for Slavery.
In reply to the Senator, who so constantly lectures us, I say, look to the good examples of our history; take counsel of the Spirit of Nationalism, rather than Sectionalism, and be willing to defend the Constitution as it is, rather than patch it over with propositions which our fathers would have disowned.
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