The President in this impressive paragraph makes a just distinction between the conduct of misguided men, and of wicked emissaries, engaged in disturbing the harmony of the Union, and the patriotic people of the non-slaveholding States who discountenance their work and repress their labors. The former receive the brand of reprobation, and are pointed out for criminal legislation: the latter receive the applause due to good citizens.
The President concludes this message, as he had done many others, with a recurrence to the necessity of reform in the mode of electing the two first officers of the Republic. His convictions must have been deep and strong thus to bring him back so many times to the fundamental point of direct elections by the people, and total suppression of all intermediate agencies. He says:
"I felt it to be my duty in the first message which I communicated to Congress, to urge upon its attention the propriety of amending that part of the constitution which provides for the election of the President and the Vice-President of the United States. The leading object which I had in view was the adoption of some new provision, which would secure to the people the performance of this high duty, without any intermediate agency. In my annual communications since, I have enforced the same views, from a sincere conviction that the best interests of the country would be promoted by their adoption. If the subject were an ordinary one, I should have regarded the failure of Congress to act upon it, as an indication of their judgment, that the disadvantages which belong to the present system were not so great as those which would result from any attainable substitute that had been submitted to their consideration. Recollecting, however, that propositions to introduce a new feature in our fundamental laws cannot be too patiently examined, and ought not to be received with favor, until the great body of the people are thoroughly impressed with their necessity and value, as a remedy for real evils, I feel that in renewing the recommendation I have heretofore made on this subject, I am not transcending the bounds of a just deference to the sense of Congress, or to the disposition of the people. However much we may differ in the choice of the measures which should guide the administration of the government, there can be but little doubt in the minds of those who are really friendly to the republican features of our system, that one of its most important securities consists in the separation of the legislative and executive powers, at the same time that each is held responsible to the great source of authority, which is acknowledged to be supreme, in the will of the people constitutionally expressed. My reflection and experience satisfy me, that the framers of the constitution, although they were anxious to mark this feature as a settled and fixed principle in the structure of the government, did not adopt all the precautions that were necessary to secure its practical observance, and that we cannot be said to have carried into complete effect their intentions until the evils which arise from this organic defect are remedied. All history tells us that a free people should be watchful of delegated power, and should never acquiesce in a practice which will diminish their control over it. This obligation, so universal in its application to all the principles of a Republic, is peculiarly so in ours, where the formation of parties, founded on sectional interests, is so much fostered by the extent of our territory. These interests, represented by candidates for the Presidency, are constantly prone, in the zeal of party and selfish objects, to generate influences, unmindful of the general good, and forgetful of the restraints which the great body of the people would enforce, if they were, in no contingency, to lose the right of expressing their will. The experience of our country from the formation of the government to the present day, demonstrates that the people cannot too soon adopt some stronger safeguard for their right to elect the highest officers known to the constitution, than is contained in that sacred instrument as it now stands."
CHAPTER CXXX.
ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.
Mr. Buchanan presented the memorial of the religious society of "Friends," in the State of Pennsylvania, adopted at their Caln quarterly meeting, requesting Congress to abolish slavery and the slave trade, in the District of Columbia. He said the memorial did not emanate from fanatics, endeavoring to disturb the peace and security of society in the Southern States, by the distribution of incendiary publications, but from a society of Christians, whose object had always been to promote good-will and peace among men. It was entitled to respect from the character of the memorialists; but he dissented from the opinion which they expressed and the request which they made. The constitution recognized slavery; it existed here; was found here when the District was ceded to the United States; the slaves here were the property of the inhabitants; and he was opposed to the disturbance of their rights. Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the States. That was determined in the first Congress that ever sat—in the Congress which commenced in 1789 and ended in 1791—and in the first session of that Congress. The Religious Society of Friends then petitioned Congress against slavery, and it was resolved, in answer to that petition, that Congress had no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves, or with their treatment, in any of the States: and that was the answer still to be given. He then adverted to the circumstances under which the memorial was presented. A number of fanatics, led on by foreign incendiaries, have been scattering firebrands through the Southern States—publications and pictures exciting the slaves to revolt, and to the destruction of their owners. Instead of benefiting the slaves by this conduct, they do them the greatest injury, causing the bonds to be drawn tighter upon them; and postponing emancipation even in those States which might eventually contemplate it. These were his opinions on slavery, and on the prayer of this memorial. He was opposed to granting the prayer, but was in favor of receiving the petition as the similar one had been received, in 1790, and giving it the same answer; and, he had no doubt, with the same happy effect of putting an end to such applications, and giving peace and quiet to the country. He could not vote for the motion of the senator from South Carolina, Mr. Calhoun, to reject it. He thought rejection would inflame the question: reception and condemnation would quiet it. Mr. Calhoun had moved to reject all petitions of the kind—not reject upon their merits, after consideration, but beforehand, when presented for reception. This was the starting point of a long and acrimonious contest in the two Houses of Congress, in which the right of petition was maintained on one side, and the good policy of quieting the question by reception and rejection: on the other side, it was held that the rights, the peace, and the dignity of the States required all anti-slavery petitions to be repulsed, at the first presentation, without reception or consideration. The author of this View aspired to no lead in conducting this question; he thought it was one to be settled by policy; that is to say, in the way that would soonest quiet it. He thought there was a clear line of distinction between mistaken philanthropists, and mischievous incendiaries—also between the free States themselves and the incendiary societies and individuals within them; and took an early moment to express these opinions in order to set up the line between what was mistake and what was crime—and between the acts of individuals, on one hand, and of States, on the other; and in that sense delivered the following speech:
"Mr. Benton rose to express his concurrence in the suggestion of the senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Buchanan), that the consideration of this subject be postponed until Monday. It had come up suddenly and unexpectedly to-day, and the postponement would give an opportunity for senators to reflect, and to confer together, and to conclude what was best to be done, where all were united in wishing the same end, namely, to allay, and not to produce, excitement. He had risen for this purpose; but, being on his feet he would say a few words on the general subject, which the presentation of these petitions had so suddenly and unexpectedly brought up. With respect to the petitioners, and those with whom they acted, he had no doubt but that many of them were good people, aiming at benevolent objects, and endeavoring to ameliorate the condition of one part of the human race, without inflicting calamities on another part; but they were mistaken in their mode of proceeding; and so far from accomplishing any part of their object, the whole effect of their interposition was to aggravate the condition of those in whose behalf they were interfering. But there was another part, and he meant to speak of the abolitionists, generally, as the body containing the part of which he spoke; there was another part whom he could not qualify as good people, seeking benevolent ends by mistaken means, but as incendiaries and agitators, with diabolical objects in view, to be accomplished by wicked and deplorable means. He did not go into the proofs now to establish the correctness of his opinion of this latter class, but he presumed it would be admitted that every attempt to work upon the passions of the slaves, and to excite them to murder their owners, was a wicked and diabolical attempt, and the work of a midnight incendiary. Pictures of slave degradation and misery, and of the white man's luxury and cruelty, were attempts of this kind; for they were appeals to the vengeance of slaves, and not to the intelligence or reason of those who legislated for them. He (Mr. B.) had had many pictures of this kind, as well as many diabolical publications, sent to him on this subject, during the last summer; the whole of which he had cast into the fire, and should not have thought of referring to the circumstance at this time, as displaying the character of the incendiary part of the abolitionists, had he not, within these few days past, and while abolition petitions were pouring into the other end of the Capitol, received one of these pictures, the design of which could be nothing but mischief of the blackest dye. It was a print from an engraving (and Mr. B. exhibited it, and handed it to senators near him), representing a large and spreading tree of liberty, beneath whose ample shade a slave owner was at one time luxuriously reposing, with slaves fanning him; at another, carried forth in a palanquin, to view the half-naked laborers in the cotton field, whom drivers, with whips, were scourging to the task. The print was evidently from the abolition mint, and came to him by some other conveyance than that of the mail, for there was no post-mark of any kind to identify its origin, and to indicate its line of march. For what purpose could such a picture be intended, unless to inflame the passions of slaves? And why engrave it, except to multiply copies for extensive distribution? But it was not pictures alone that operated upon the passions of the slaves, but speeches, publications, petitions presented in Congress, and the whole machinery of abolition societies. None of these things went to the understandings of the slaves, but to their passions, all imperfectly understood, and inspiring vague hopes, and stimulating abortive and fatal insurrections. Societies, especially, were the foundation of the greatest mischiefs. Whatever might be their objects, the slaves never did, and never can, understand them but in one way: as allies organized for action, and ready to march to their aid on the first signal of insurrection! It was thus that the massacre of San Domingo was made. The society in Paris, Les Amis des Noirs, Friends of the Blacks, with its affiliated societies throughout France and in London, made that massacre. And who composed that society? In the beginning, it comprised the extremes of virtue and of vice; it contained the best and the basest of human kind! Lafayette and the Abbé Gregoire, those purest of philanthropists; and Marat and Anacharsis Clootz, those imps of hell in human shape. In the end (for all such societies run the same career of degeneration), the good men, disgusted with their associates, retired from the scene; and the wicked ruled at pleasure. Declamations against slavery, publications in gazettes, pictures, petitions to the constituent assembly, were the mode of proceeding; and the fish-women of Paris—he said it with humiliation, because American females had signed the petitions now before us—the fish-women of Paris, the very poissardes from the quays of the Seine, became the obstreperous champions of West India emancipation. The effect upon the French islands is known to the world; but what is not known to the world, or not sufficiently known to it, is that the same societies which wrapt in flames and drenched in blood the beautiful island, which was then a garden and is now a wilderness, were the means of exciting an insurrection upon our own continent: in Louisiana, where a French slave population existed, and where the language of Les Amis des Noirs could be understood, and where their emissaries could glide. The knowledge of this event (Mr. B. said) ought to be better known, both to show the danger of these societies, however distant, and though oceans may roll between them and their victims, and the fate of the slaves who may be excited to insurrection by them on any part of the American continent. He would read the notice of the event from the work of Mr. Charles Gayarre, lately elected by his native State to a seat on this floor, and whose resignation of that honor he sincerely regretted, and particularly for the cause which occasioned it, and which abstracted talent from a station that it would have adorned. Mr. B. read from the work, 'Essai Historique sur la Louisiane:' 'The white population of Louisiana was not the only part of the population which was agitated by the French revolution. The blacks, encouraged without doubt by the success which their race had obtained in San Domingo, dreamed of liberty, and sought to shake off the yoke. The insurrection was planned at Pointe Coupeé, which was then an isolated parish, and in which the number of slaves was considerable. The conspiracy took birth on the plantation of Mr. Julien Poydras, a rich planter, who was then travelling in the United States, and spread itself rapidly throughout the parish. The death of all the whites was resolved. Happily the conspirators could not agree upon the day for the massacre; and from this disagreement resulted a quarrel, which led to the discovery of the plot. The militia of the parish immediately took arms, and the Baron de Carondelet caused them to be supported by the troops of the line. It was resolved to arrest, and to punish the principal conspirators. The slaves opposed it; but they were quickly dispersed, with the loss of twenty of their number killed on the spot. Fifty of the insurgents were condemned to death. Sixteen were executed in different parts of the parish; the rest were put on board a galley and hung at intervals, all along the river, as far as New Orleans (a distance of one hundred and fifty miles). The severity of the chastisement intimidated the blacks, and all returned to perfect order.'
"Resuming his remarks, Mr. B. said he had read this passage to show that our white population had a right to dread, nay, were bound to dread, the mischievous influence of these societies, even when an ocean intervened, and much more when they stood upon the same hemisphere, and within the bosom of the same country. He had also read it to show the miserable fate of their victims, and to warn all that were good and virtuous—all that were honest, but mistaken—in the three hundred and fifty affiliated societies, vaunted by the individuals who style themselves their executive committee, and who date, from the commercial emporium of this Union, their high manifesto against the President; to warn them at once to secede from associations which, whatever may be their designs, can have no other effect than to revive in the Southern States the tragedy, not of San Domingo, but of the parish of Pointe Coupeé.
"Mr. B. went on to say that these societies had already perpetrated more mischief than the joint remainder of all their lives spent in prayers of contrition, and in works of retribution, could ever atone for. They had thrown the state of the emancipation question fifty years back. They had subjected every traveller, and every emigrant, from the non-slaveholding States, to be received with coldness, and viewed with suspicion and jealousy, in the slaveholding States. They had occasioned many slaves to lose their lives. They had caused the deportation of many ten thousands from the grain-growing to the planting States. They had caused the privileges of all slaves to be curtailed, and their bonds to be more tightly drawn. Nor was the mischief of their conduct confined to slaves; it reached the free colored people, and opened a sudden gulf of misery to that population. In all the slave States, this population has paid the forfeit of their intermediate position; and suffered proscription as the instruments, real or suspected, of the abolition societies. In all these States, their exodus had either been enforced or was impending. In Missouri there was a clause in the constitution which prohibited their emigration to the State; but that clause had remained a dead letter in the book until the agitation produced among the slaves by the distant rumbling of the abolition thunder, led to the knowledge in some instances, and to the belief in others, that these people were the antennæ of the abolitionists; and their medium for communicating with the slaves, and for exciting them to desertion first, and to insurrection eventually. Then ensued a painful scene. The people met, resolved, and prescribed thirty days for the exodus of the obnoxious caste. Under that decree a general emigration had to take place at the commencement of winter. Many worthy and industrious people had to quit their business and their homes, and to go forth under circumstances which rendered them objects of suspicion wherever they went, and sealed the door against the acquisition of new friends while depriving them of the protection of old ones. He (Mr. B.) had witnessed many instances of this kind, and had given certificates to several, to show that they were banished, not for their offences, but for their misfortunes; for the misfortune of being allied to the race which the abolition societies had made the object of their gratuitous philanthropy.