The next struggle in which they engaged for political aggrandizement, was the Mexican war. It could, indeed, hardly be called a struggle,—the north so readily and ignominiously yielded. They wanted more territory. Texas, already gravid with future slave states, was not sufficient. And though it was yet somewhat uncertain whether Congress would not interdict the extension of slavery over that country, even should they conquer it; still, as they had always triumphed in their contests with us, they assumed the risk, and trusted to their future prowess and skill to monopolize the plunder. The territory was conquered; and then, perhaps, the most important question arose which has ever come before this country since the Declaration of Independence. The most momentous consequences were suspended on the decision of this question. We had, as it were, a creative power put into our hands. We had the shaping of the destinies of half a continent intrusted to our keeping. Our authority once exercised, the act would be irrevocable, and the doom of all that region would be fixed, as by a decree of Omnipotence. When God gives to the world a generation of children, and they are ruined through parental neglect, he gives another generation, that another trial may be made. But if we once admit slavery into those immense regions, comprising all the unsettled residue of this continent, God will give us no new continent on which the error may be retrieved.
Now, on this great question, what has been done? I grieve to say that I fear the battle has been lost. If not lost, nothing can save it but a vigor and an energy on the part of the north, such as they have not lately put forth. So far as legislation is concerned, the whole battle field is in possession of the enemy. Let me read a passage from one of the acts of the last session of Congress, which settles this fact. By the law for creating the territorial government of New Mexico, it is expressly provided,—
“That when admitted as a state, the said territory, or any portion of the same, shall be received into the Union, WITH OR WITHOUT SLAVERY, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission.”
The act providing a territorial government for Utah contains a provision precisely similar. In regard to Texas, we have gratuitously given her a right to form one more slave state than she was authorized to do by the resolution of annexation. By the third article of the second section of that resolution, Texas was authorized to form new states, not exceeding four, of which those south of 36° 30´ should be admitted, with or without slavery, as their people should elect, while in the state or states, (and there must, therefore, be at least one,) which should be formed north of 36° 30´, there should be no slavery or involuntary servitude except for crime. But by the act of the last session, for establishing the boundary of Texas, though the United States buys up the claim of Texas to all the territory north of 36° 30´, yet it authorizes Texas to form as many slave states out of the residue of her territory, as she could have formed by the resolution of annexation, both of slave and free. This is manifest, by the following provision:—
“Provided, that nothing herein contained shall be construed to impair or qualify any thing contained in the third article of the second section of the joint resolution for annexing Texas to the United States, approved March 1, 1845, either as regards the number of states that may hereafter be formed out of the State of Texas, or otherwise.”
Here, then, instead of three states, four are provided for, with full consent that they shall all be slave states. Now, I ask, if this gift of a slave state is a trifle to be thrown in like the value of a small coin in the settlement of an account? In some of the pro-slavery papers of the north, which have professed to publish this act for the information of their readers, I have observed that this clause has been left out! They did not dare to trust their readers during the present political campaign with a knowledge of it.
I know it is said, by here and there an individual, that slavery cannot go into those territories. But it is to be remembered that all the south, almost as one man, dissent from this proposition. They say it can and shall; and is not their opinion, on such a subject, of greater weight than that of any northern man? They threaten to dissolve the Union if slavery be prohibited from going there. Are they such lunatics as to dissolve the Union, because we assume to prohibit what nature has already made impossible? Slave states border on those territories, and should there be any rush of emigration towards them, as, by the discovery of mines or other causes there may be, a cloud of slaves would immediately overspread them. If it be said that the local law of the territories prohibits slavery, I reply, so it did in Texas. Slavery had been abolished throughout Mexico, of which Texas was a province. But though slavery was no longer legal there, peonage was. Hence the southern planters, at least some of them, when about to remove to Texas, indented their own slaves to themselves, as peons, so that they might hold them by the Mexican law of peonage, until they should become strong enough to pass a law for slavery. It will be no more difficult to introduce slavery into New Mexico and Utah than it was into Texas.
I will not now go back to the questions which agitated the country and the Whig party at the time when General Taylor was nominated for the presidency. Whatever I may have thought of him, and of the propriety of nominating him, it is but justice to say that I now believe that he was a true man, and an anti-slavery man. He intended honestly to carry out the will of Congress, and execute the laws of his country, regardless of slaveholding dictation. He would have crushed the first movement for disunion; or rather, a knowledge of what he would do, would have prevented any such movement. With his own lips, in his own house, he told me that in case any state should attempt to nullify an act of Congress, he should immediately order a naval force to blockade its coast; he would allow nothing to pass into, or to come out of, the rebellious state; and in six months, said he, it would give up its resistance without the shedding of blood. It was President Taylor’s plan, as you well know, to leave the adjustment of the slavery question to the territories themselves; not that he was not prepared to have it settled by Congress, and a prohibition imposed, but because he saw that while a prohibitory act might be passed by the House, it would certainly be rejected by the Senate. He therefore threw himself forward to what he knew the condition of things must be, after all the ineffectual attempts at legislation on the subject had been made; and he adopted that future condition and result of things as his present plan of action. Should the northern members of the House prove true to their constituencies and their pledges, they would never allow the territories to be organized without the proviso; and the fear of such a prohibition would exclude slavery from the territories, as certainly as the prohibition itself. Slaveholders would not venture to carry slaves into a country, where, at any moment an act of Congress might emancipate them. And if slavery could only be kept out of the territories while they remained territories, it would, of course, be prohibited by the state itself, when the condition of territorial pupilage should be succeeded by that of state independence. A boy trained up to virtuous resolves until the day he is twenty-one, will not adopt all the vices the day after.
The recent act has given Texas more than fifty thousand square miles of free New Mexican territory, and the promise of ten millions of dollars in fourteen years, with interest at five per cent. up to that time; which, at compound interest, makes a prospective grant of twenty millions of dollars. This is done on pretence of discharging debts which she owed at the time of her annexation. But those debts, at the highest estimate, do not exceed seven millions, so that a clear gratuity is left to her of at least three millions in addition to the grant of another slave state. The interest of these three millions will support her government, and keep her supplied with the means of fighting the battles of slavery.
There is something most extraordinary in the claim of Texas to the territory for which she has obtained so extravagant a price. Her title was not by conquest, nor by purchase, but by an act of her own legislature. She claimed the territory merely because she had extended her legislation over it, when she had no more right to legislate for it than for Canada. I have brought with me for your inspection, if any of you desire to see them, a series of maps which illustrate the growth of Texas. By Humboldt’s map, of 1804, Texas contained 71,752 square miles. By Tanner’s map, of 1826, it contained 108,097 square miles. By Austin’s map, of 1839, it had grown to 179,567 square miles. The late claim of its legislature was the enormous quantity of 325,000 square miles, which the act of Congress cuts down only to 237,321! By its own legislative assumptions it grew from 70,000 to 325,000 square miles. By good husbandry, in this part of the country, we are able to make greater crops grow on the same land, but in Texas they make the land itself grow. I think Humboldt himself would have been astonished at any such geological theory of the uprising of the earth as would enlarge an area of 70,000 square miles, in an inland country, into more than 300,000, in less than fifty years.