"The honorable senator from South Carolina argues that the constitution declares itself to be the law of the land, and that, therefore, it must extend over the territories. 'The land,' I take it, means the land over which the constitution is established, or, in other words, it means the States united under the constitution. But does not the gentleman see at once that the argument would prove a great deal too much? The constitution no more says that the constitution itself shall be the supreme law of the land, than it says that the laws of Congress shall be the supreme law of the land. It declares that the constitution and the law of Congress passed under it shall be the supreme law of the land."
The question took a regular slavery turn, Mr. Calhoun avowing his intent to be to carry slavery into the territories under the wing of the constitution, and openly treated as enemies to the South all that opposed it. Having taken the turn of a slavery question, it gave rise to all the dissension of which that subject had become the parent since the year 1835. By a close vote, and before the object had been understood by all the senators, the amendment was agreed to in the Senate, but immediately disagreed to in the House, and a contest brought on between the two Houses by which the great appropriation bill, on which the existence of the government depended, was not passed until after the constitutional expiration of the Congress at midnight of the third of March, and was signed by Mr. Polk (after he had ceased to be President) on the 4th of March—the law and his approval being antedated of the 3d, to prevent its invalidity from appearing on the face of the act. Great was the heat which manifested itself, and imminent the danger that Congress would break up without passing the general appropriation bill; and that the government would stop until a new Congress could be assembled—many of the members of which remained still to be elected. Many members refused to vote after midnight—which it then was. Mr. Cass said:
"As I am among those who believe that the term of this session has expired, and that it is incompetent for us now to do business, I cannot vote upon any motion. I have sat here as a mere looker on. I merely desire to explain why I took no part in the proceedings."
Mr. Yulee, of Florida, moving an adjournment, said:
"I should be very sorry, indeed, to make any proposition which may in any degree run counter to the general sentiment of the Senate; but I feel bound, laboring under the strong conviction that I do, to arrest at every step, and by every means, any recorded judgment of the Senate at a time when we are not legally engaged in the discharge of our senatorial duties. I agree entirely in the view taken by the senator from Michigan."
Mr. Turney, of Tennessee, said:
"I am one of those who believe that we have no right to sit here. The time has expired; one-third of this body are not present at all, and the others have no right to sit here as a part of Congress. But a motion has been made for adjournment, and the presiding officer has refused to entertain that motion. This being the case, I must regard all that is done as done in violation of the constitution, or, rather, not in pursuance of it. It appears to me that we sit here more in the character of a town meeting than as the Senate of the United States, and that what we do is no more binding on the American people than if we did it at a town meeting. I shall express no opinion by saying yea or nay on the question before the Senate. At the same time, I protest against it, as being no part of the constitutional proceedings of the Senate of the United States."
Mr. Benton, and many others, declined to vote. The House of Representatives had ceased to act, and sent to the Senate the customary message of adjournment. The President who, according to the usage, had remained in the capitol till midnight to sign bills, had gone home. It was four o'clock in the morning of the fourth, and the greatest confusion and disorder prevailed. Finally, Mr. Webster succeeded in getting a vote, by which the Senate receded from the amendment it had adopted, extending the constitution to the territories; and that recession leaving the appropriation bill free from the encumbrance of the slavery question, it was immediately passed.
This attempt, pushed to the verge of breaking up the government in pursuit of a newly invented slavery dogma, was founded in errors too gross for misapprehension. In the first place as fully shown by Mr. Webster, the constitution was not made for territories, but for States. In the second place, it cannot operate any where, not even in the States for which it was made without acts of Congress to enforce it. This is true of the constitution in every particular. Every part of it is inoperative until put into action by a statute of Congress. The constitution allows the President a salary: he cannot touch a dollar of it without an act of Congress. It allows the recovery of fugitive slaves: you cannot recover one without an act of Congress. And so of every clause it contains. The proposed extension of the constitution to territories, with a view to its transportation of slavery along with it, was then futile and nugatory, until an act of Congress should be passed to vitalize slavery under it. So that, if the extension had been declared by law, it would have answered no purpose except to widen the field of the slavery agitation—to establish a new point of contention—to give a new phase to the embittered contest—and to alienate more and more from each other the two halves of the Union. But the extension was not declared. Congress did not extend the constitution to the Territories. The proposal was rejected in both Houses; and immediately the crowning dogma is invented, that the constitution goes of itself to the territories without an act of Congress, and executes itself, so far as slavery is concerned, not only without legislative aid, but in defiance of Congress and the people of the territory. This is the last slavery creed of the Calhoun school, and the one on which his disciples now stand—and not with any barren foot. They apply the doctrine to existing territories, and make acquisitions from Mexico for new applications. It is impossible to consider such conduct as any thing else than as one of the devices for "forcing the issue with the North," which Mr. Calhoun in his confidential letter to the member of the Alabama legislature avows to have been his policy since 1835, and which he avers he would then have effected if the members from the slave States had stood by him.