3. That his “voice and vote shall on all occasions be exercised in extending and securing liberty to the human race.”
Permit me to reäffirm these sentiments with my whole heart. Should the responsibilities of that successorship ever be devolved upon me, I shall endeavor so to fulfil them, that these dead words should become a living soul. I should deem it not only an object of duty, but of the highest ambition, to contend for the noble principles you have here expressed, as Mr. Adams contended for them; though, unhappily, it would be only as a David in Saul’s armor. Bear with me for a moment while I enlarge upon these sentiments.
1. “In consonance with his principles.”—I believe it was the sovereign rule of Mr. Adams’s life to act in obedience to his convictions of duty. Truth was his guide. His conscience was non-elastic. He did not strain at a gnat before company, on account of its size, and then, privately, swallow a camel. His patriotism was coëxtensive with his country; it could not be crushed and squeezed in between party lines. Though liable to err,—and what human being is not?—yet his principles were believed by him to be in accordance with the great moral laws of the universe. They were thought out from duty and religion, and not carved out of expediency. When invested with patronage, he never dismissed a man from office because he was a political opponent, and never appointed one to office merely because he was a political friend. Hence he drew from Mr. Holmes, of South Carolina, this noble eulogium,—a eulogium, considering the part of the country from which it came, as honorable to its author as to its object,—that “he crushed no heart beneath the rude grasp of proscription; he left no heritage of widows’ cries or orphans’ tears.” Could all the honors which Mr. Adams ever won from offices held under the first five Presidents of the United States, and from a public service, which, commencing more than fifty years ago, continued to the day of his death, be concentrated in one effulgent blaze, they would be less far-shining and inextinguishable than the honor of sacrificing his election for a second presidential term, because he would not, in order to obtain it, prostitute the patronage and power which the constitution had placed in his hands. I regard this as the sublimest spectacle in his long and varied career. He stood within reach of an object of ambition doubtless dearer to him than life. He could have laid his hands upon it. The “still, small voice” said, No! Without a murmur, he saw it taken and borne away in triumph by another. Compared with this, the block of many a martyr has been an easy resting-place.
2. “Unwavering fidelity to the great principles of human freedom.”—The Declaration of American Independence, in 1776, was the first complete assertion of human rights, on an extensive scale, ever made by mankind. Less than three quarters of a century have elapsed, and already the greatest portion of the civilized world has felt the influence of that Declaration. France, for years, has had a constitutional monarchy; perhaps, to-day, her government is republican. Holland and Belgium are comparatively free. Almost all the states of the Germanic Confederation have a written constitution, and a legislature with a popular branch. Prussia has lately commenced a representative system. The iron rule of Austria is relaxed under the fervent heat which liberty reflects from surrounding nations. Naples and Sicily have just burst the bonds of tyranny. In Rome and the States of the Church, where, under the influence of religious and political despotism, the heart of Freedom was supposed to be petrified into insoluble hardness, that heart is now beginning to pulsate with a new life, and to throb with sympathy for humanity. Great Britain and Denmark have emancipated their slaves in the West Indies. Measures are now in progress to ameliorate the condition of Russian serfs. Even half-barbarous, Mahometan Tunis has yielded to the tide of free principles. To what bar of judgment will our own posterity bring us, what doom of infamy will history pronounce upon us, if the United States shall hereafter be found the only portion of Christendom where the principles of our own Declaration of Independence are violated in the persons of millions of our people?
3. “The exercise, on all occasions, of voice and vote, in extending and securing liberty to the human race.”—There is a crisis in our affairs. A territory, in extent far exceeding that of the thirteen original states, when they repelled the power of Great Britain, has lately been added, or is, doubtless, about to be added, to our national domain. The expanse of this territory is so vast, that it may be divided into a dozen sections, and these sections may be erected into separate states, each one of which shall be so large that Massachusetts would seem but an inconsiderable court-yard, if placed in front of it. Parts of this territory are fertile and salubrious. It is capable of supporting millions and millions of human beings, of the same generation. The numbers of the successive generations, which in the providence of God are to inhabit it, will be as the leaves of the forest, or the sands on the sea-shore. Each one of these is to be a living soul, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and fears, its susceptibilities of exaltation or of abasement. Each one will be capable of being formed into the image of God, or of being deformed into the image of all that is anti-godlike.
These countless millions are to be our kindred; many of them, perhaps, our own descendants; at any rate, our brethren of the human family; for has not God “made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth”? In rights, in character, in happiness; in freedom or in vassalage; in the glorious immunities and prerogatives of knowledge, or in the debasement and superstitions of ignorance; in their upward-looking aspiration and love of moral excellence, or in their downward-looking, prone-rushing, and brutish appetites and passions, what shall these millions of our fellow-creatures be? I put it as a practical question, What shall these millions of our fellow-creatures be?—for it is more than probable that this very generation,—nay, that the actors in public affairs, before the sands of the present year shall have run out,—will prescribe and foreördain their doom. That doom will be what our present conduct predestines.
If we enact laws and establish institutions, under whose benign influences that vast tract of territory shall at length teem with myriads of human beings, each one a free-born man; each one enjoying the inalienable right of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” each one free for the cultivation of his capacities, and free in the choice and in the rewards of his labor;—if we do this, although the grand results may not manifest themselves for a thousand years, yet when the fulness of time shall come, the equity and the honor of framing these laws and institutions will belong to us, as much as though the glorious consummation could be realized to-morrow. On the other hand, if we so shape the mould in which their fortunes are to be cast, that, for them or for any portion of them, there shall be servitude instead of liberty, ignorance instead of education, debasement instead of dignity, the indulgence of bestial appetites instead of the sanctities and securities of domestic life,—then, until the mountains shall crumble away by age, until the arches of the skies shall fall in rottenness, these mountains and these arches will never cease to echo back the execrations upon our memory of all the great and good men of the world. And this retribution, I believe, will come suddenly, as well as last forever.
In one of the South-western States a vast subterranean cave has been discovered, deep down in whose chambers there is a pool of water, on which no beam of sunlight ever shines. A sightless fish is said to inhabit this rayless pool. In this animal, indeed, the rudiments of a visual organ are supposed to be dimly discernible; but of an orb to refract the rays of light, or of a retina to receive them, there is no trace. Naturalists suppose that the progenitors of these animals, in ages long gone by, possessed the power of vision; but that, being buried in these depths by some convulsion of nature, long disuse at first impaired, at length extinguished, and has at last obliterated the visual organ itself. The animal has sunk in the scale of being, until its senses are accommodated to the blackness of darkness in which it dwells. Were this account wholly fabulous, it has the strongest verisimilitude, and doubtless describes what would actually occur under the circumstances supposed.
Thus will it be with faculties above the surface of the earth, as well as below it. Thus will it be with human beings, as well as with the lower orders of creation. Thus will it be with our own brethren or children, should we shut up from them the book of knowledge, or seal their senses so that they could not read it. Thus will it be with all our God-given faculties, just so far as they are debarred from legitimate exercise upon their appropriate objects. The love of knowledge will die out, when it ceases to be stimulated by the means of knowledge. Self-respect will die out, under the ever-present sense of inferiority. The sentiments of truth and duty will die out, when cunning and falsehood can obtain more gratifications than frankness and honesty. The noblest impulses of the human soul, the most sacred affections of the human heart, will die out, when every sphere is closed against their exercise. When such a dreadful work is doing, or threatens to be done, can any one stand listlessly by, see it perpetrated, and then expect to excuse himself, under the false, impious pretext of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
Fully, then, do I agree with you and the delegates of the convention you represent, in saying that the successor of Mr. Adams should be one “whose voice and vote shall, on all occasions, be exercised in extending and securing liberty to the human race.” Of course I do not understand you to imply any violation of the constitution of the United States, which every representative swears to support.