The gentleman from Massachusetts speaks for the North. Massachusetts does not constitute the North. I venerate the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I have many friends there. I look with pride upon her connection with the Revolution; upon her public men, her manufactures, her public institutions. Her people who have accomplished so much, will not turn a deaf ear to our wants now. We wish to go to her people and obtain their judgment upon our propositions. But Massachusetts is not all the North. Rhode Island constitutes a part of it. She has always spoken for us. She will speak for us to-day. What does New Jersey say? What does the great State of Pennsylvania and the greater Northwest say? Surely they do not echo the sentiments of the gentleman from Massachusetts. They are with us, and we will trust to them.
I dislike this way of answering for sections of the country. I have heard similar language from Mr. Calhoun. He was fond of saying, "The South says—The South thinks—The South will do," this or that. I did not like it then. It stirred up all the rebellious sentiments of my nature; for I knew the statement was not true. I do not like such language better now. Let the people of Massachusetts speak. I know they will not refuse to fulfil the compact of their fathers.
We are brothers. I feel we can settle this important question which portends over us like an eclipse; we can leave this glorious country to our posterity. Once more let me refer to the noble and eloquent counsels of Madison, and I am done. As children of the same family, as fellow-citizens of a great, glorious, and proud Republic, he invoked the kindred blood of our people to consecrate our common Union, and to banish forever the thought of our becoming aliens.
Mr. EWING:—I have never in any manner countenanced the discussions of slavery and the questions connected with it, at the North. I have always, so far as possible, discouraged those discussions. No good can possibly come from them. Is the North the censor morum of the South? We have faults enough ourselves; let us consider and try to correct them, before we interest ourselves so much in those of our neighbors.
If there was any danger that slavery would be extended at the North, I would oppose its extension there, and I would teach my sons to oppose it. But this danger has never existed. Does any one fear that slavery will go into New York or Massachusetts? No sane man thinks or ever thought so.
But it exists, and we must deal with it as it is. As one northern man, I do not want the negroes distributed throughout the North. We have got enough of them now. I have watched the operation of this emigration of slaves to the North. Ten negroes will commit more petty thefts than one thousand white men. We cannot permit them to come into Ohio. Wherever they have been permitted to come, it has almost cost us a rebellion. Before we begin to preach abolition I think we had better see what is to be done with the negroes.
Thirty years ago the subject of abolishing slavery was agitated in Virginia. Some of the most eloquent speeches were made in favor of the abolition movement that I ever read. The act providing for gradual abolition, was, I believe, lost by a single vote. I thought then that the result was an unfortunate one. But there is something to be said on both sides of the question. Had the act passed, the negroes would have been sent South, and we should have had plantation slavery, instead of the humane form which now exists in Virginia. But Virginia would have had one great, one powerful advantage. Her power would have increased tenfold. Free labor would have come in to take the place of slave labor, and the banks of the Potomac and the James would have blossomed as the rose.
The North has taken the business of abolition into its own hands, and from the day she did so, we hear no more of abolition in Virginia. This was but the natural effect of the cause. Now, we can never coerce the Southern States into abolitionism. It is not the way to convert them to our views by saying that we abhor their institutions. But these northern men will not listen to reason. They keep on making eloquent speeches—their pulpits thunder against the sin of slaveholding. All grades of speech and thought are made use of, and the sickening sentimentalism of some of them is disgusting. They repeat poetry. They say:
"I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To watch me when I wake—to fan me when I sleep;"
and much more of the same stuff!