Thou shapelesse shape, live death, paine pleasing, servile raigne?”[214]
It is true, there can be no such thing as property in man: and here I begin to answer the questions propounded by the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Davis]. If this pretension is recognized anywhere, it is only another instance of custom, which is so powerful as to render the idolater insensible to the wickedness of idolatry, and the cannibal insensible to the brutality of cannibalism. To argue against such a pretension seems to be vain; for the pretension exists in open defiance of reason as well as of humanity. It will not yield to argument; nor will it yield to persuasion. It must be encountered by authority. It was not the planters in the British islands or in the French islands who organized emancipation, but the distant governments across the sea, far removed from local prejudice, which at last forbade the outrage. Had these planters been left to themselves, they would have clung to the pretension, as men among us still cling to it. In making this declaration against the idea of property in man, I say nothing new. An honored predecessor of the Senator from Maryland [Mr. Kennedy], whose fame as a statesman was eclipsed, perhaps, by his more remarkable fame as a lawyer,—I mean William Pinkney, and it is among the recollections of my youth that I heard Chief Justice Marshall call him the undoubted head of the American bar,—in a speech before the Maryland House of Delegates, spoke as statesman and lawyer, when he said:—
“Sir, by the eternal principles of natural justice no master in the State has a right to hold his slave in bondage for a single hour.”[215]
And Henry Brougham spoke not only as statesman and lawyer, but as orator also, when, in the British Parliament, he uttered these memorable words:—
“Tell me not of rights, talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny the right, I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings, of our common nature rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim. There is a law above all the enactments of human codes,—the same throughout the world, the same in all times: … it is the law written on the heart of man by the finger of his Maker; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud and loathe rapine and abhor blood, they will reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man.”[216]
It has been sometimes said that the finest sentence of the English language is that famous description of Law with which Hooker closes the first book of his “Ecclesiastical Polity”; but I cannot doubt that this wonderful denunciation of an irrational and inhuman pretension will be remembered hereafter with higher praise; for it gathers into surpassing eloquence the waking and immitigable instincts of Universal Man.
If I enter now into analysis of Slavery, and say familiar things, it is because such exposition is an essential link in the present inquiry. Looking carefully at Slavery as it is, we find that it is not merely a single gross pretension, utterly inadmissible, but an aggregation of gross pretensions, all and each utterly inadmissible. They are five in number: first, the pretension of property in man; secondly, the denial of the marriage relation,—for slaves are “coupled” only, and not married; thirdly, the denial of the paternal relation; fourthly, the denial of instruction; and, fifthly, the appropriation of all the labor of the slave and its fruits by the master. Such are the five essential elements which we find in Slavery; and this fivefold barbarism, so utterly indefensible in every point, is maintained for the single purpose of compelling labor without wages. Of course such a pretension is founded in force, and nothing else. It begins with the kidnapper in Guinea or Congo, traverses the sea with the pirate slave-trader in his crowded hold, and is continued here by virtue of laws representing and embodying the same brutal force that prevailed in the kidnapper and the pirate slave-trader. Slavery, wherever it exists, is the triumph of force, sometimes in the strong arm of an individual, and sometimes in the strong arm of law, but in principle always the same. Depending upon force, he is master who happens to be stronger,—so that, if the slave were stronger, he would be master, and the master would be slave. Beyond all doubt, according to reason and justice, every slave possesses the same right to enslave his master that his master possesses to enslave him. If this simple statement of unquestionable principles needed confirmation, it would be found in the solemn judgments of courts. Here, for instance, are the often quoted words of Mr. Justice McLean, of the Supreme Court of the United States: “Slavery is admitted by almost all who have examined the subject to be founded in wrong, in oppression, in power against right.”[217] And here are the words of the Supreme Court of North Carolina: “Such services [of a slave] can only be expected from one who has no will of his own, who surrenders his will in implicit obedience to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect.”[218] And the Supreme Court of the United States, by the lips of Chief Justice Marshall, has openly declared, in a famous case, read the other day by the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Davis], that “Slavery has its origin in force.”[219] Thus does it appear by most authoritative words, that this monstrous Barbarism is derived not from reason, or nature, or justice, or goodness, but from force, and nothing else.
Here in the national capital, under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, the force which now maintains this unnatural system is supplied by Congress. Without Congress the “uncontrolled authority” of the master would cease. Without Congress the master would not be master, nor would the slave be slave. Congress, then, in existing legislation, is the power behind, which enslaves our fellow-men. Therefore does it behoove Congress, by proper, instant action, to relieve itself of this painful responsibility.
The responsibility becomes more painful, when it is considered that Slavery exists at the national capital absolutely without support of any kind in the Constitution: and here again I answer the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Davis]. Nor is this all. Situated within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Constitution, where State rights cannot prevail, it exists in open defiance of most cherished principles. Let the Constitution be rightly interpreted by a just tribunal, and Slavery must cease here at once. The decision of a court would be as potent as an Act of Congress. And now, as I confidently assert this conclusion, which bears so directly on the present question, pardon me, if I express the satisfaction with which I recur to an earlier period, shortly after I entered the Senate, when, vindicating the principle now accepted, but then disowned, that Freedom and not Slavery is National, I insisted upon its application to Slavery everywhere within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Constitution, and declared that Congress might as well undertake to make a king as to make a slave.[220] That argument has never been answered; it cannot be answered. Nor can I forget that this same conclusion, having such important bearings, was maintained by Mr. Chase, while a member of this body, in that masterly effort where he unfolded the relations of the National Government to Slavery,[221] and also by the late Horace Mann, in a most eloquent and exhaustive speech in the other House, where no point is left untouched to show that Slavery in the national capital is an outlaw.[222] Among all the speeches in the protracted discussion of Slavery, I know none more worthy of profound study than those two, so different in character and yet so harmonious in result. If authority could add to irresistible argument, it would be found in the well-known opinion of the late Mr. Justice McLean, in a published letter, declaring the constitutional impossibility of Slavery in the National Territories, because, in the absence of express power under the Constitution to establish or recognize Slavery, there was nothing for the breath of Slavery, as respiration could not exist where there was no atmosphere. The learned judge was right, and his illustration was felicitous. Although applied at the time only to the Territories, it is of equal force everywhere within the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress; for within such jurisdiction there is no atmosphere in which Slavery can live.
If this question were less important, I should not occupy time with its discussion. But we may learn to detest Slavery still more, when we see how completely it instals itself here in utter disregard of the Constitution, compelling Congress ignobly to do its bidding. The bare existence of such a barbarous injustice in the metropolis of a Republic gloriously declaring that “all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is a mockery which may excite surprise; but when we bring it to the touchstone of the Constitution, and consider the action of Congress, surprise is deepened into indignation.