“Whence came the immortal truths of the Declaration? To me this was for years the riddle of our history. I have searched long and patiently through the books of the doctrinaires to find the germs from which the Declaration of Independence sprang. I found hints in Locke, in Hobbes, in Rousseau, and Fénelon; but they were only the hints of dreamers and philosophers. The great doctrines of the Declaration germinated in the hearts of our fathers, and were developed under the new influences of this wilderness world, by the same subtle mystery which brings forth the rose from the germ of the rose-tree. Unconsciously to themselves, the great truths were growing under the new conditions until, like the century-plant, they blossomed into the matchless beauty of the Declaration of Independence, whose fruitage, increased and increasing, we enjoy to-day.
“It will not do, Mr. Chairman, to speak of the gigantic revolution through which we have lately passed as a thing to be adjusted and settled by a change of administration. It was cyclical, epochal, century-wide, and to be studied in its broad and grand perspective—a revolution of even wider scope, so far as time is concerned, than the Revolution of 1776. We have been dealing with elements and forces which have been at work on this continent more than two hundred and fifty years. I trust I shall be excused if I take a few moments to trace some of the leading phases of the great struggle. And, in doing so, I beg gentlemen to see that the subject itself lifts us into a region where the individual sinks out of sight and is absorbed in the mighty current of great events. It is not the occasion to award praise or pronounce condemnation. In such a revolution men are like insects that fret and toss in the storm, but are swept onward by the resistless movements of elements beyond their control. I speak of this revolution not to praise the men who aided it, or to censure the men who resisted it, but as a force to be studied, as a mandate to be obeyed.
“In the year 1620 there were planted upon this continent two ideas irreconcilably hostile to each other. Ideas are the great warriors of the world; and a war that has no ideas behind it is simply brutality. The two ideas were landed, one at Plymouth Rock from the Mayflower, and the other from a Dutch brig at Jamestown, Virginia. One was the old doctrine of Luther, that private judgment in politics as well as religion, is the right and duty of every man; and the other that capital should own labor, that the negro had no rights of manhood, and the white man might justly buy, own, and sell him and his offspring forever. Thus freedom and equality on the one hand, and on the other the slavery of one race and the domination of another, were the two germs planted on this continent. In our vast expanse of wilderness, for a long time, there was room for both; and their advocates began the race across the continent, each developing the social and political institutions of their choice. Both had vast interests in common; and for a long time neither was conscious of the fatal antagonisms that were developing.
“For nearly two centuries there was no serious collision; but when the continent began to fill up, and the people began to jostle against each other; when the Roundhead and the Cavalier came near enough to measure opinions, the irreconcilable character of the two doctrines began to appear. Many conscientious men studied the subject, and came to the belief that slavery was a crime, a sin, or as Wesley said, ‘the sum of all villainies.’ This belief dwelt in small minorities for a long time. It lived in the churches and vestries, but later found its way into the civil and political organizations of the country, and finally found its way into this chamber. A few brave, clear-sighted, far-seeing men announced it here, a little more than a generation ago. A predecessor of mine, Joshua R. Giddings, following the lead of John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts, almost alone held up the banner on this floor, and from year to year comrades came to his side. Through evil and through good report he pressed the question upon the conscience of the nation.
“And so the contest continued; the supporters of slavery believing honestly and sincerely that slavery was a divine institution; that it found its high sanctions in the living oracles of God and in a wise political philosophy; that it was justified by the necessities of their situation; and that slave-holders were missionaries to the dark sons of Africa, to elevate and bless them. We are so far past the passions of that early time that we can now study the progress of the struggle as a great and inevitable development, without sharing in the crimination and recrimination that attended it. If both sides could have seen that it was a contest beyond their control; if both parties could have realized the truth that ‘unsettled questions have no pity for the repose of nations,’ much less for the fate of political parties, the bitterness, the sorrow, the tears, and the blood might have been avoided. But we walked in the darkness, our paths obscured by the smoke of the conflict, each following his own convictions through ever-increasing fierceness, until the debate culminated in ‘the last argument to which kings resort.’
“This conflict of opinion was not merely one of sentimental feeling; it involved our whole political system; it gave rise to two radically different theories of the nature of our Government: the North believing and holding that we were a Nation, the South insisting that we were only a confederation of sovereign States, and insisting that each State had the right, at its own discretion, to break the Union, and constantly threatening secession where the full rights of slavery were not acknowledged.
“Thus the defense and aggrandizement of slavery, and the hatred of Abolitionism, became not only the central idea of the Democratic party, but its master-passion—a passion intensified and inflamed by twenty-five years of fierce political contest, which had not only driven from its ranks all those who preferred freedom to slavery, but had absorbed all the extreme pro-slavery elements of the fallen Whig party. Over against this was arrayed the Republican party, asserting the broad doctrines of nationality and loyalty, insisting that no State had a right to secede, that secession was treason, and demanding that the institution of slavery should be restricted to the limits of the States where it already existed. But here and there, many bolder and more radical thinkers declared, with Wendell Phillips, that there never could be union and peace, freedom and prosperity, until we were willing to see John Hancock under a black skin.
“Mr. Chairman, after the facts I have cited, am I not warranted in raising a grave doubt whether the transformation occurred at all except in a few patriotic and philosophic minds? The light gleams first on the mountain peaks; but shadows and darkness linger in the valley. It is in the valley masses of those lately in rebellion that the light of this beautiful philosophy, which I honor, has not penetrated. It is safer to withhold from them the custody and supreme control of the precious treasures of the Republic until the midday sun of liberty, justice, and equal laws shall shine upon them with unclouded ray.
“In view of all the facts, considering the centuries of influence that brought on the great struggle, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will require yet more time to effect the great transformation? Did not the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. George F. Hoar] sum up the case fairly and truthfully when he said of the South, in his Louisiana report of 1874: ‘They submitted to the national authority, not because they would, but because they must. They abandoned the doctrine of State sovereignty, which they had claimed made their duty to the States paramount to that due to the nation in case of conflict, not because they would, but because they must. They submitted to the constitutional amendments which rendered their former slaves their equals in all political rights, not because they would, but because they must. The passions which led to the war, the passions which the war excited, were left untamed and unchecked, except so far as their exhibition was restrained by the arm of power.’