"The northern Democrats aided us to bring into the Union Texas, a magnificent slave-holding territory—large enough to make four slave States, and strengthened us more in that peculiar interest than was ever before done by any single act of the Federal Government. Since then they have amended a very imperfect fugitive slave law, passed in 1793, and have given us now a law for the recovery of fugitive slaves, as stringent as the ingenuity of man could devise. Since then they have aided us by their votes in establishing the doctrine of non-intervention with slavery by Congress in the territories. Since then they have reduced the odious tariff of 1842, and fixed the principle of imposts on the revenue, not the protective basis. Since then they have actually repealed the Missouri restriction, opened the territories to settlement, and enabled us, if the South will be true to herself, and aid in peopling Kansas, to form another slave State.
"In 1843, a man would have been pronounced insane, had he predicted that slavery would be introduced there by the removal of congressional restrictions. Since then they have adopted the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and Madison's report—the very corner-stone of State rights—as a part of the Democratic platform. They have by their votes in Congress and Convention given all these pledges to the Constitution since 1843; and if we could then fraternize with them, what change has transpired that justifies the delegates in that Convention, at least, in refusing now to fraternize with northern and southern Democrats?"
The reader will easily see Col. Orr's position from this letter. He is a southern Democrat, and, as such, a defender of slavery and slavery extension, a free trader, and an opponent of all homestead bills, but he does not go with the most ultra class of Southern politicians; in short, he is "a National Democrat." He stands by the Democratic organization of the country, so long as it stands by the South and her institutions as well as it has done in the past. Upon the new issues of intervention for slavery in the territories he has not yet spoken, but he was, of course, a rigid Lecomptonite. But during the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska bill he spoke very decidedly. He said: "The legislative authority of a territory is invested with no vote for or against laws. We think they ought to pass laws in every territory, when the territory is open to settlement, and slaveholders go there, to protect slave property. But if they decline to pass such laws, what is the remedy? None, sir. If the majority of the people are opposed to the institution, and if they do not desire it ingrafted upon their territory, all they have to do is simply to decline to pass laws in the territorial legislature for its protection."
In Congress, Col. Orr has generally ranged himself with the compromising democracy. He is not born of the old aristocratic stock of South Carolina planters, but was the son of a worker—a country merchant. This fact has never been lost sight of by a portion of the citizens of South Carolina, and they have been, some of them at least, his bitter enemies for years. It is not impossible but Col. Orr, for this reason, has taken a more "national" view of politics, and has refused to go out of the Union for the sake of the slaveholding aristocracy.
In his personal appearance Col. Orr is not, perhaps, prepossessing; though his great, black eye and fine open face show the force and power of his intellect. He is large in person, and not particularly graceful in his actions or appearance. He has a certain dignity, however, which enforces attention if he is the orator of the occasion, and obedience if he is the presiding officer.
JOHN MINOR BOTTS.
We have no extended sketch of Mr. Botts to present to the reader, but a few leading facts in reference to the political man.
Mr. Botts is a native of Dumfries, Prince William County, Virginia, and was born in September, 1802. As early as 1834, he joined the Whig party, and in 1839, he came to Congress as a Whig. He was known in the House as a follower of Mr. Clay, or rather a supporter of Mr. Clay and his peculiar doctrines. Mr. Botts, in other words, was in favor of a highly protective tariff, the distribution of the public lands, and internal improvements. He is to-day in favor of these measures of what he would call reform. So strong was he in his devotion to the tenets of the Whig party, that when President Tyler disappointed his friends by his tariff policy, Mr. Botts, though a friend of years, at once terminated the friendship. He could not hold in respect the man who, it seemed to him, had betrayed his friends.