The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes

by J. Q. Howard

The great idea to which the Nation, according to Mr. Lincoln, was dedicated by the fathers is expressed in the Declaration in these familiar phrases: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

An intelligent audience will not wish to hear discussion as to the import of these sentences. Their language is simple, their meaning plain, and their truth undoubted. The equality declared by the fathers was not an equality of beauty, of physical strength, or of intellect, but an equality of rights. Foolish attempts have been made by those who hate the principles of the fathers to destroy the great fundamental truth of the Declaration, by limiting the application of the phrase "all men" to the men of a single race.

But Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration leaves no room to doubt what he meant by these words. The gravest charge he made against the King of Great Britain in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence was the following:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep open market where MEN should be bought and sold."

In this sentence the word "men" is written by Jefferson in capital letters, showing with what emphasis he wished to declare that the King of Great Britain was making slaves of a people to whom belonged the rights of men.

Unfortunately for our country, that King, and others who "waged cruel war against human nature itself," had already succeeded in planting in the bosom of American society an element implacably hostile to human rights, and destined to become the enemy of the Union, whenever the American people, in their National capacity, should refuse assent to any measures which the holders of slaves should deem necessary or even important for the security or prosperity of their "peculiar institution."

I need not, upon this occasion, repeat what is now familiar history—how, by the invention of the cotton-gin, and the consequent enormous increase of the cotton crop, slave labor in the cotton States, and slave breeding in the Northern slave States, became so profitable that the slaveholders were able, for many years, largely to influence, if not control, every department of the National Government. The slave power became something more than a phrase—it was a definite, established, appalling fact. The Missouri controversy, South Carolina nullification, the Texas controversy, the adoption of the compromise measures of 1850, and the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854, were all occasions when the country was compelled to see the magnitude, the energy, the recklessness, and the arrogance of the slave power.

Precisely when the men who wielded that power determined to destroy the Union it is not now necessary to inquire. Threats of disunion were made in the first Congress that assembled under the constitution. Upon various pretexts they were repeated from time to time, and no one doubts that slavery was at the bottom of them. In 1833 General Jackson wrote to Rev. A. J. Crawford: "Take care of your nullifiers; you have them among you; let them meet with the indignant frown of every man who loves his country. The tariff, it is now known, was a mere pretext ... and disunion and a Southern Confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro or slavery question." General Jackson was no doubt right as to the existence of a settled purpose to break up the Union, and to establish a Southern Confederacy, as long ago as 1832. But why was there such a purpose? On what ground did it stand?

Great political parties, whether sectional or otherwise, do not come by accident, nor are they the invention of political intrigue. A faction born of a clique may have some strength at one or two elections, but the wisest political wire-workers can not, by merely "taking thought," create a strong and permanent party. The result of the Philadelphia Convention last summer probably taught this truth to the authors of that movement. Great political movements always have some adequate cause.

Now, on what did the conspirators who plotted the destruction of the Union and the establishment of a Southern Confederacy rely? In the first place, they taught a false construction of the National constitution, which was miscalled State rights, the essential part of which was that "any State of the Union might secede from the Union whenever it liked." This doctrine was the instrument employed to destroy the unity of the Nation. The fact which gave strength and energy to those who employed this instrument was that in the southern half of the Union, society, business, property, religion, and law were all based on the proposition that over four millions of our countrymen, capable of civilization and religion, were, because of their race and color, "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The practice, founded upon this denial of the Declaration of Independence, protected by law and sanctioned by usage, was our great National transgression, and was the cause of our great National calamity.