Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

And yet the late convention, the first one that has met since the resolution which I have just read was adopted, has endorsed the present administration, which has done more to corrupt and deaden public sentiment at the north, as to the wrongs of slavery to the enslaved, and its injury to the free, and to aggrandize the pro-slavery south, and foster and encourage, ay, and reward its aggressions;—has done more, I say, than any other administration that ever existed under this government. History will bear me out in this statement. Yet, at this crisis in human affairs, the one idea, the master purpose of the address and resolutions of that convention, seems to have been, to disparage and depreciate the great, eternal principles of freedom, and to bring odium and contempt upon the only party now organized for their support.

Gentlemen, the Whig leaders, in this respect, and in regard to this most important and paramount attribute of the Whig party, have lurched and lurched round, until they have got into the very trough of the pro-slavery sea. Its members, I admit, are free to follow them to their ruin, if they will; but free, too, I thank God, to go on in their old course, steering for the haven of honor and liberty. I give the great majority even of the Whig leaders the credit of having yielded to this pressure reluctantly, and under what they deemed a sort of political duress; for, gentlemen, a new and most alarming fact in the history of the Whig party of this country has been developed within the last two years. It is this: formerly, and universally, the Whig administration was supposed to be chosen to carry out the views of the Whig party; but the present administration, having abandoned the grounds on which it obtained power, and having, for its own purposes, taken new grounds, now demands of the Whig party to carry out,—not the old policy of the Whigs, but the new policy of the administration.

Fellow-citizens, could Mr. Fillmore by any possibility have been elected, in 1848; could he have got so many as ten thousand votes among all the Whigs of the Northern States, had his present attitude on the subject of slavery been foreseen?

Was there ever an hour when Mr. Webster could have obtained one tenth part,—one fiftieth part,—of the votes of the Massachusetts legislature for the office of senator, had the curtain of the future been lifted up, and his present position been revealed? You know there never was. But, during the year 1850, without any initial change, or symptom of a change, on the part of northern Whigs, the administration, prompted by its own purposes, or yielding from its own weakness, faced square about; and ever since that time it has been striving, by all the lures of patronage and the terrors of denunciation, to force the Whigs of the north on to a kind of political turn-table, like those railroad turn-tables you see at a car-house, so that the whole party, too, should be faced square about, made to retrace their course, by going backward among the same people who had seen them go forward, shouting down all they had shouted up, and forswearing all the glorious doctrines of liberty to which the whole world had heard them swear. Gentlemen, if, in this stress of circumstances, any body asks me, “Where shall I go?” my reply is, Don’t get on to that political turn-table which the administration has prepared for the Whig party, and not the Whig party for the administration; for it will carry your country to ruin, and yourself to dishonor.

During the canvass last autumn for a member of Congress for the eighth district, when, as you all know, there were such “godlike” exertions made against my election, I was asked, as a test question, by numbers of most respectable members of the Whig party, what I thought of the Free Soil party, and their proposed coalition at that time. I replied to them in the following words, and my answer is now on record in the hands of my constituents: “I say, as I have often said, that, if the Whigs will live up to their professions a hundred times made, I see no reason or warrant for separate organizations or coalitions. But if the great body of the Whigs mean to belie all their professions, and to persecute and punish all who remain faithful to the lessons which the Whig party itself has been teaching so strenuously for so many years, then what true Whig can blame any man for attempting to carry out what the Whigs themselves have promised to do, but have abandoned?”

But the Massachusetts Whig State Convention at that time passed the most pointed and emphatic resolution, affirming anew what they avowed themselves to have affirmed and reäffirmed so often before, on the subject of slavery. I reposed trust in their honesty; I believed in their veracity; and, as a consequence of my faith, I voted the entire Whig state ticket. Having read their last address and resolutions, I must now say, that if they desire any more votes of mine, they must revive my faith by some new evidence of their good works.

Let me advert to a few of the more salient points in that address. It labors to sustain a charge of coalition against the Free Soil party. Well, before I either approve or condemn a “coalition,” I must know by whom, and for what purpose, it was formed. A coalition, I suppose, like other acts, must be right or wrong according to the motive that prompts it.

But it is said the Free Soil party formed an alliance with those who, on some important points, had no sympathy with it. And where is this said? Why, in a land where our revolutionary fathers, fighting for freedom and for a republic, formed an alliance or coalition with monarchical and despotic France, and with monarchical and despotic Spain. What were the points of resemblance or unison between the American Confederation on the one side, and France or Spain on the other? In government, in policy, in manners, in education, in religion, nothing could have been more different. In what did they agree? In hostility to Great Britain alone; but not in a single one of the reasons for that hostility, nor in but one of the objects to be accomplished by it,—the humiliation of a haughty and overbearing power.

At the same time, Great Britain formed coalitions with the North American savages, to extinguish the rising dawn of freedom. And in this they have been too faithfully imitated by the old hunkers of both parties;—imitated, I say, not only in the object and spirit of the coalition, but in the weapons with which the warfare is waged. Yes, fellow-citizens; for there is an attempt, and that attempt is to be followed up, to overwhelm the Free Soil party by obloquy and denunciation. There is to be a cry of “bargain and corruption” to put down the Free Soil party, just as the administration of Mr. John Quincy Adams was put down by the same cry. Who now believes any thing about the charge of “bargain and corruption” against Mr. Adams,—except that it was a villanous charge? I believe the same charge against the Free Soil party will have come, twenty years hence, to the same result,—that of conferring honor upon its object, and infamy upon its authors.

But it is said the Free Soil party have seized the offices and emoluments of the state. I was absent last January at the time of the organization of the state government; but I have heard that those who were distinctively called Free Soilers received only the office of secretary of state, and president of the senate, and two or three out of the nine councillors;—all of them nearly or quite without patronage. I suppose all their emoluments combined would not equal what is received by the Boston postmaster, or the collector of the Boston port. Vast “ways and means” these for the corruption of the people! The whole of them would not suffice a cabinet officer for a bonne bouche or a tidbit.