As I spoke in the convention upon the request of the Republican members of the New York delegation, and as the Representative of the Massachusetts delegation; and as my remarks were not criticized adversely by either party, I reproduce the speech as it was reported by Mr. Chittenden:
SPEECH IN PEACE CONVENTION
I have not been at all clear in my own mind as to when, and to what extent, Massachusetts should raise her voice in this convention. She has heard the voice of Virginia, expressed through her resolutions, in this crisis of our country's history. Massachusetts hesitated, not because she was unwilling to respond to the call of Virginia, but because she thought her honor touched by the manner of that call and the circumstances attending it. She had taken part in the election of the 6th of November. She knew the result. It accorded well with her wishes. She knew that the government whose political head for the next four years was then chosen was based upon a Constitution which she supposed still had an existence. She saw that State after State had left that government,—seceded is the word used,—had gone out from this great confederacy, and that they were defying the Constitution and the Union.
Charge after charge has been vaguely made against the North. It is attempted here to put the North on trial. I have listened with grave attention to the gentleman from Virginia to-day; but I have heard no specification of these charges. Massachusetts hesitated, I say: she has her own opinion of the Government and the Union. I know Massachusetts; I have been into every one of her more than three hundred towns; I have seen and conversed with her men and her women; and I know there is not a man within her borders who would not to-day gladly lay down his life for the preservation of the Union.
Massachusetts has made war upon slavery wherever she had the right to do it; but, much as she abhors the institution, she would sacrifice everything rather than assail it where she has not the right to assail it.
Can it be denied, gentlemen, that we have elected a President in a legal and constitutional way? It cannot be denied; and yet you tell us, in tones that cannot be misunderstood, that, as a precedent condition of his inauguration, we must give you these guarantees.
Massachusetts hesitated, not because her blood was not stirred, but because she insisted that the government and the inauguration should go in the manner that would have been observed had Mr. Lincoln been defeated. She felt that she was touched in a tender point when invited here under such circumstances.
It is true, and I confess it frankly, that there are a few men at the North who have not yielded that support to the grand idea upon which this confederated Union stands that they should have yielded; who have been disposed to infringe upon, to attack certain rights which the entire North, with these exceptions, accords to you. But are you of the South free from the like imputations? The John Brown invasion was never justified at the North. If, in the excitement of the time, there were those to be found who did not denounce it as gentlemen think they should, it was because they knew it was a matter wholly outside the Constitution,—that it was a crime to which Virginia would give adequate punishment.
Gentlemen, I believe—yes, I know—that the people of the North are as true to the government and the Union of the States now as our fathers were when they stood shoulder to shoulder upon the field, fighting for the principles upon which that Union rests. If I thought the time had come when it would be fit or proper to consider amendments to the Constitution at all, I believe that we should have no trouble with you, except upon this question of slavery in the Territories. You cannot demand of us at the North anything that we will not grant, unless it involves a sacrifice of our principles. These we shall not sacrifice; these you must not ask us to abandon. I believe, further,—and I speak in all frankness, for I wish to delude no one,—if the Constitution and the Union cannot be preserved and effectually maintained without these new guarantees for slavery, then the Union is not worth preserving.
The people of the North have always submitted to the decisions of the properly constituted powers. This obedience has been unpleasant enough when they thought those powers were exercised for sectional purposes; but it has always been implicitly yielded. I am ready, even now, to go home and say that, by the decision of the Supreme Court, slavery exists in all the Territories of the United States. We submit to the decision, and accept its consequences. But, in view of all the circumstances attending that decision, was it quite fair, was it quite generous, for the gentleman from Maryland to say that under it, by the adoption of these propositions, the South was giving up everything, the North giving up nothing? Does he suppose the South is yielding the point in relation to any territory which, by any probability, would become slave territory? Something more than the decision of the Supreme Court is necessary to establish slavery anywhere. The decision may give the right to establish it: other influences must control the question of its actual establishment.