"The Senate has by voting to receive this petition, on the ground on which the reception was placed, assumed the principle that we are bound to receive petitions to abolish slavery, whether in this District or the States; that is, to take jurisdiction of the question of abolishing slavery whenever and in whatever manner the abolitionists may think proper to present the question. He considered this decision pregnant with consequences of the most disastrous character. When and how they were to occur it was not for him to predict; but he could not be mistaken in the fact that there must follow a long train of evils. What, he would ask, must hereafter be the condition on this floor of the senators from the slaveholding States? No one can expect that what has been done will arrest the progress of the abolitionists. Its effects must be the opposite, and instead of diminishing must greatly increase the number of the petitions. Under the decision of the Senate, we of the South are doomed to sit here and receive in silence, however outrageous or abusive in their language towards us and those whom we represent, the petitions of the incendiaries who are making war on our institutions. Nay, more, we are bound, without the power of resistance to see the Senate, at the request of these incendiaries, whenever they think proper to petition, extend its jurisdiction on the subject of slavery over the States as well as this District. Thus deprived of all power of effectual resistance, can any thing be considered more hopeless and degrading than our situation; to sit here, year after year, session after session, hearing ourselves and our constituents vilified by thousands of incendiary publications in the form of petitions, of which the Senate, by its decision, is bound to take jurisdiction, and against which we must rise like culprits to defend ourselves, or permit them to go uncontradicted and unresisted? We must ultimately be not only degraded in our own estimation and that of the world, but be exhausted and worn out in such a contest."
This was a most unjustifiable assumption on the part of Mr. Calhoun, to say that in voting to receive this petition, confined to slavery in the District of Columbia, the Senate took jurisdiction of the question in the States—jurisdiction of the question of abolishing slavery whenever, and in whatever manner, the abolitionists might ask. It was unjustifiable towards the Senate, and giving a false alarm to the South. The thirty-five senators voting to receive the petition wholly repudiated the idea of interfering with slavery in the States. Twelve of them were from the slaveholding States, so that Mr. Calhoun was outvoted in his own half of the Union. The petition itself was confined to the object of emancipation and the suppression of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, where it alleged, and truly that Congress possessed jurisdiction; and there was nothing either in the prayer, or in the language of the petition to justify the inferences drawn from its reception, or to justify the assumption that it was an insult and outrage to the senators from the slaveholding States. It was a brief and temperate memorial in these words:
"The memorial of Caln Quarterly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, respectfully represents: That, having long felt deep sympathy with that portion of the inhabitants of these United States which is held in bondage, and having no doubt that the happiness and interests, moral and pecuniary, of both master and slave, and our whole community, would be greatly promoted if the inestimable right to liberty was extended equally to all, we contemplate with extreme regret that the District of Columbia, over which you possess entire control, is acknowledged to be one of the greatest marts for the traffic in the persons of human beings in the known world, notwithstanding the principles of the constitution declare that all men have an unalienable right to the blessing of liberty. We therefore earnestly desire that you will enact such laws as will secure the right of freedom to every human being residing within the constitutional jurisdiction of Congress, and prohibit every species of traffic in the persons of men, which in as inconsistent in principle and inhuman in practice as the foreign slave trade."
This was the petition. It was in favor of emancipation in the District, and prayed the suppression of the slave trade in the District; and neither of these objects had any relation to emancipation or the slave trade, in the States. Mr. Preston, the colleague of Mr. Calhoun, gave his reasons for voting to reject the prayer of the petition, having failed in his first object to reject the petition itself: and Mr. Davis, of Massachusetts, repulsed the inferences and assumptions of Mr. Calhoun in consequence of the vote to receive the petition. He denied the justice of any suggestion that it portended mischief to the South, to the constitution, or to the Union; or that it was to make the District the headquarters of abolitionists, and the stepping-stone and entering wedge to the attack of slavery in the States: and said:
"Neither the petition on which the debate had arisen, nor any other that he had seen, proposed directly or indirectly to disturb the Union, unless the abolition of slavery in this District, or the suppression or regulation of the slave trade within it, would have that effect. For himself, Mr. D. believed no purpose could be further than this from the minds of the petitioners. He could not determine what thoughts or motives might be in the minds of men, but he judged by what was revealed; and he could not persuade himself that these petitioners were not attached to the Union and that they had (as had been suggested) any ulterior purpose of making this District the headquarters of future operation—the stronghold of anti-slavery—the stepping-stone to an attack upon the constitutional rights of the South. He was obliged to repudiate these inferences as unjust, for he had seen no proof to sustain them in any of the petitions that had come here. The petitioners entertained opinions coincident with their fellow-citizens as to the power of Congress to legislate in regard to slavery in this District; and being desirous that slavery should cease here, if it could be abolished upon just principles; and, if not, that the traffic carried on here from other quarters should be suppressed or regulated, they came here to ask Congress to investigate the matter. This was all; and he could see no evidence in it of a clandestine purpose to disregard the constitution or to disturb the Union."
The vote was almost unanimous on Mr. Buchanan's motion—34 to 6; and those six against it, not because they were in favor of granting the prayer of the memorialists, but because they believed that the petition ought to be referred to a committee, reported upon, and then rejected—which was the ancient mode of treating such petitions; and also the mode in which they were now treated in the House of Representatives. The vote was:
"Yeas—Messrs. Benton, Black, Brown, Buchanan, Clay, Crittenden, Cuthbert, Ewing of Illinois, Ewing of Ohio, Goldsborough, Grundy, Hill, Hubbard, King of Alabama, King of Georgia, Leigh, Linn, McKean, Moore, Nicholas, Niles, Porter, Preston, Robbins, Robinson, Ruggles, Shepley, Tallmadge, Tipton, Tomlinson, Walker, Wall, White, Wright—34.
"Nays—Messrs. Davis, Hendricks, Knight, Prentiss, Swift, Webster—6."
After this decision, Mr. Webster gave notice that he had in hand several similar petitions, which he had forborne to present till this one from Pennsylvania should be disposed of; and that now he should, on an early occasion, present them, and move to dispose of them in the way in which it had been his opinion from the first that all such petitions should have been treated; that is, referred to a committee for consideration and inquiry.
The action of the House of Representatives will now be seen on the subject of these petitions; for duplicates of the same generally went to that body; and there, under the lead of a South Carolina member, and with large majorities of the House, they were disposed of very differently from the way that Mr. Calhoun demanded in the Senate, and in the way that he deemed so fatal to the slaveholding States. Mr. Henry L. Pinckney, of the Charleston district, moved that it be—