Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States. v. 2 (of 2)

by George Ticknor Curtis

Before the Wilmot proviso was interposed, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia had been the chief theme of agitation. Petitions for this purpose, by thousands, poured into Congress, session after session. The rights and the wishes of the owners of slaves within the District were boldly disregarded. Slavery was denounced as a national disgrace, which the laws of God and the laws of men ought to abolish, cost what it might. It mattered not to the fanatics that the abolition of slavery in the District would convert it into a citadel, in the midst of two slaveholding States, from which the Abolitionist could securely scatter arrows, firebrands and death all around. It mattered not with them that the abolition of slavery in the District would be a violation of the spirit of the Constitution and of the implied faith pledged to Maryland and Virginia, because the whole world knows that those States would never have ceded it to the Union, had they imagined it could ever be converted by Congress into a place from which their domestic peace and security might be assailed by fanatics and Abolitionists. Nay, the Abolitionists went even still further. They agitated for the purpose of abolishing slavery in the forts, arsenals and navy-yards which the Southern States had ceded to the Union, under the Constitution, for the protection and defence of the country.

Thus stood the question when the Wilmot proviso was interposed, to add fuel to the flame, and to excite the Southern people to madness.

. . . . . . . .

It would be the extreme of dangerous infatuation to suppose that the Union was not then in serious danger. Had the Wilmot proviso become a law, or had slavery been abolished in the District of Columbia, nothing short of a special interposition of Divine Providence could have prevented the secession of most, if not all, the slaveholding States.

It was from this great and glorious old Commonwealth, rightly denominated the ‘Keystone of the Arch,‘ that the first ray of light emanated to dispel the gloom. She stands now as the days-man, between the North and the South, and can lay her hand on either party, and say, thus far shalt thou go, and no farther. The wisdom, moderation and firmness of her people qualify her eminently to act as the just and equitable umpire between the extremes.

It was the vote in our State House of Representatives, refusing to consider the instructing resolution in favor of the Wilmot Proviso, which first cheered the heart of every patriot in the land. This was speedily followed by a vote of the House of Representatives at Washington, nailing the Wilmot Proviso itself to the table. And here I ought not to forget the great meeting held in Philadelphia on the birthday of the Father of his Country, in favor of the Union, which gave a happy and irresistible impulse to public opinion throughout the State, and I may add throughout the Union.

The honor of the South has been saved by the Compromise. The Wilmot Proviso is forever dead, and slavery will never be abolished in the District of Columbia whilst it continues to exist in Maryland. The receding storm in the South still continues to dash with violence, but it will gradually subside, should agitation cease in the North. All that is necessary for us to do ‘is to execute the Fugitive Slave Law,‘ and to let the Southern people alone, suffering them to manage their own domestic concerns in their own way......

2. I shall proceed to present to you some views upon the subject of the much misrepresented Fugitive Slave Law. It is now evident, from all the signs of the times, that this is destined to become the principal subject of agitation at the present session of Congress, and to take the place of the Wilmot Proviso. Its total repeal or its material modification will henceforward be the battle cry of the agitators of the North.

And what is the character of this law? It was passed to carry into execution a plain, clear, and mandatory provision of the Constitution, requiring that fugitive slaves, who fly from service in one State to another, shall be delivered up to their masters. The provision is so explicit that he who runs may read. No commentary can present it in a stronger light than the plain words of the Constitution. It is a well-known historical fact, that without this provision, the Constitution could never have existed. How could this have been otherwise? Is it possible for a moment to believe that the slave States would have formed a union with the free States, if under it their slaves, by simply escaping across the boundary which separates them, would acquire all the rights of freemen? This would have been to offer an irresistible temptation to all the slaves of the South to precipitate themselves upon the North. The Federal Constitution, therefore, recognizes in the clearest and most emphatic terms, the property in slaves, and protects this property by prohibiting any State into which a slave might escape, from discharging him from slavery, and by requiring that he shall be delivered up to his master.

. . . . . . . .