The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It

by Hinton Rowan Helper

CASSIUS M. CLAY.

Of the great number of good speeches made by members of the Republican party during the late Presidential campaign, it is, we believe, pretty generally admitted that the best one was made by Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, at the Tabernacle, in New-York City, on the 24th of October, 1856. From the speech of that noble champion of freedom, then and there delivered, we make the following graphic extract:—

“If there are no manufactures, there is no commerce. In vain do the slaveholders go to Knoxville, to Nashville, to Memphis and to Charleston, and resolve that they will have nothing to do with these abolition eighteen millions of Northern people; that they will build their own vessels, manufacture their own goods, ship their own products to foreign countries, and break down New-York, Philadelphia and Boston! Again they resolve and reresolve, and yet there is not a single ton more shipped and not a single article added to the wealth of the South. But, gentlemen, they never invite such men as I am to attend their Conventions. They know that I would tell them that slavery is the cause of their poverty, and that I will tell them that what they are aiming at is the dissolution of the Union—that they may be prepared to strike for that whenever the nation rises. They well know that by slave labor the very propositions which they make can never be realized; yet when we show these things, they cry out, ‘Oh, Cotton is King!’ But when we look at the statistics, we find that so far from Cotton being King, Grass is King. There are nine articles of staple productions which are larger than that of cotton in this country.”

“I suppose it does not follow because slavery is endeavoring to modify the great dicta of our fathers, that cotton and free labor are incompatible. In the extreme South, at New Orleans, the laboring men—the stevedores and hackmen on the levee, where the heat is intensified by the proximity of the red brick buildings, are all white men, and they are in the full enjoyment of health. But how about cotton? I am informed by a friend of mine—himself a slaveholder, and therefore good authority—that in Northwestern Texas, among the German settlements, who, true to their national instincts, will not employ the labor of a slave—they produce more cotton to the acre, and of a better quality, and selling at prices from a cent to a cent and a half a pound higher than that produced by slave labor. This is an experiment that illustrates what I have always held, that whatever is right is expedient.”

THE VOICE OF BENTON.

In his “Thirty Years’ View,” Thomas H. Benton says:—

“My opposition to the extension of slavery dates further back than 1844—forty years further back; and as this is a suitable time for a general declaration, and a sort of general conscience delivery, I will say that my opposition to it dates from 1804, when I was a student at law in the State of Tennessee, and studied the subject of African slavery in an American book—a Virginia book—Tucker’s edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries.”

Again, in a speech delivered in St. Louis, on the 3rd of November, 1856, he says:—

“I look at white people, and not at black ones; I look to the peace and reputation of the race to which I belong. I look to the peace of this land—the world’s last hope for a free government on the earth. One of the occasions on which I saw Henry Clay rise higher than I thought I ever saw him before, was when in the debate on the admission of California, a dissolution was apprehended if slavery was not carried into this Territory, where it never was. Then Mr. Clay, rising, loomed colossally in the Senate of the United States, as he rose declaring that for no earthly purpose, no earthly object, could he carry slavery into places where it did not exist before. It was a great and proud day for Mr. Clay, towards the latter days of his life, and if an artist could have been there to catch his expression as he uttered that sentiment, with its reflex on his face, and his countenance beaming with firmness of purpose, it would have been a glorious moment in which to transmit him to posterity—his countenance all alive and luminous with the ideas that beat in his bosom. That was a proud day. I could have wished that I had spoken the same words. I speak them now, telling you they were his, and adopting them as my own.”

THE VOICE OF MASON.