I answer, as before; the injustice consists in giving a false meaning to true “words” and “syllables,”—a meaning which both the subject-matter and context of my speech repudiate. I do not see that it is less unjustifiable to attach false meanings to words correctly quoted, than to forge quotations. Surely, the honorable senator is too good a lawyer to be ignorant of the maxim, “qui hæret in litera” &c.; and too good a theologian not to have read that “the letter killeth” if divorced from the spirit. When Beaumont and Fletcher were closeted together to devise the plan of one of their joint plays, in which a king was to be killed, they were severally overheard to say, “I will kill the king,” and “I will kill the king;” whereupon they were arrested, transported to London, and arraigned for conspiring the death of the reigning sovereign. Suppose them to have been convicted of treason and gibbeted; could not the perjured informer, with a charming and childlike simplicity, have used the exact language of Mr. Badger, and said, I testified to the exact “words” and “syllables.” “In what consists the injustice?”
But the honorable senator goes on to say, that he had no concern with my speech, but only with my conclusion. His language is, “I was not considering the course or validity of his reasoning, but the conclusion at which he arrived.” He then repeats the quotation, and adds, “To refer, therefore, to the speech in order to understand the import of this conclusion, is idle.”
With all deference to the senator,—and mine is unfeignedly great,—I submit that this is false logic and worse ethics. As well may one declare the judgment of a court to be legal or illegal, merciful or tyrannous, without looking back to the allegations and proofs on which it is founded. As well may one affirm or deny the “Q. E. D.” of the geometer, without reference to the problem or demonstration to which it is subjoined. When a discussion exists respecting “an extension of the bounds of slavery,” (and these were my words,) and I say that I would prefer certain enumerated evils rather than the extension in controversy, it surely becomes all-important to know whether that extension is to embrace the whole earth and to extend through all time, or whether it is only the addition of one atom or granule to existing slave territory, or of one respiration, or one heart-beat of an existing slave, on territory now free. I affirm, then, that a knowledge of the premises is indispensable to a judgment on the conclusion.
But he accepts my explanation, and then appeals from me to what he is pleased to call, (and I thank him for the justice that prompted the well-deserved compliment,) my “intelligent, patriotic, and humane constituents,”—“with entire confidence that it will not meet their approval.” I gladly join in this appeal. As “intelligent” men, my constituents foresee that the extension of slavery over our territories will not only be an unspeakable crime in itself, but will be converted into the means of future unspeakable crimes in further extensions. As “patriotic” men, they prefer to bear any calamity that may come upon themselves, rather than to devolve accumulated calamities, growing out of their own dereliction from duty, upon their posterity. As “humane” men, they would deprecate and forefend that greatest of inhumanities, the dooming of increased thousands and millions of their fellow-men to the dreadful inheritance of bondage. And as religious men,—as men who “tremble when they reflect that God is just, and that his justice will not sleep forever,”—they mean to use all constitutional means to arrest the slave-creating and slave-extending policy of this government, let the two or three hundred thousand slaveholders among our twenty millions of people do what they will.
That the bearings of the subject may be rightly understood, it should be remembered that my speech was made on the 15th of February, after ten weeks of threatened disunion on certain specified and not improbable contingencies. “My conclusion,” therefore, was not aggressive, but submissive. I only declared which branch of their proffered alternative I should prefer.
The closing paragraph of the respected senator’s communication alludes to the motives of those wide and painful differences which are made between the whites and the slaves in the criminal legislation of the Southern States. Nothing could be more edifying, as to the demoralizing nature of slavery and its effects upon men, who, like the senator, are otherwise honorable and generous, than a comparison of the two codes of law and the two systems of jurisprudence which the rulers have respectively established for themselves and for their bondmen. The laws or customs known to civilized men and to barbarians are not more diverse. It would be rash and reckless in me to encounter the distinguished senator on any other subject; but on this I would say, as was said by a knight in an old tournament, that he had such confidence in the justness of his cause that he would give his adversary the advantage of sun and wind.
HORACE MANN.
Washington, April 1, 1850.
LETTERS
On the Extension of Slavery Into California and New Mexico; and on the Duty of Congress To Provide The Trial by Jury for alleged Fugitive Slaves.