“Although this bill will not have as great an influence as I could desire, yet, as far as it goes, it will benefit the laboring man as much, and probably more than any other class of society. What is it he ought most to desire? Constant employment, regular wages, and uniform reasonable prices for the necessaries and comforts of life which he requires. Now, sir, what has been his condition under our system of expansions and contractions? He has suffered more by them than any other class of society. The rate of his wages is fixed and known; and they are the last to rise with the increasing expansion and the first to fall when the corresponding revulsion occurs. He still continues to receive his dollar per day, whilst the price of every article which he consumes is rapidly rising. He is at length made to feel that, although he nominally earns as much, or even more than he did formerly, yet, from the increased price of all the necessaries of life, he cannot support his family. Hence the strikes for higher wages, and the uneasy and excited feelings which have at different periods, existed among the laboring classes. But the expansion at length reaches the exploding point, and what does the laboring man now suffer? He is for a season thrown out of employment altogether. Our manufactures are suspended; our public works are stopped; our private enterprises of different kinds are abandoned; and, whilst others are able to weather the storm, he can scarcely procure the means of bare subsistence.
“Again, sir; who, do you suppose, held the greater part of the worthless paper of the one hundred and sixty-five broken banks to which I have referred? Certainly it was not the keen and wary speculator, who snuffs danger from afar. If you were to make the search, you would find more broken bank notes in the cottages of the laboring poor than anywhere else. And these miserable shinplasters, where are they? After the revulsion of 1837, laborers were glad to obtain employment on any terms; and they often received it upon the express condition that they should accept this worthless trash in payment. Sir, an entire suppression of all bank notes of a lower denomination than the value of one week’s wages of the laboring man is absolutely necessary for his protection. He ought always to receive his wages in gold and silver. Of all men on the earth, the laborer is most interested in having a sound and stable currency.
“All other circumstances being equal, I agree with the Senator from Kentucky that that country is most prosperous where labor commands the highest wages. I do not, however, mean by the terms ‘highest wages,’ the greatest nominal amount. During the revolutionary war, one day’s work commanded a hundred dollars of continental paper; but this would have scarcely purchased a breakfast. The more proper expression would be, to say that that country is most prosperous where labor commands the greatest reward; where one day’s labor will procure not the greatest nominal amount of a depreciated currency, but most of the necessaries and comforts of life. If, therefore, you should, in some degree, reduce the nominal price paid for labor, by reducing the amount of your bank issues within reasonable and safe limits, and establishing a metallic basis for your paper circulation, would this injure the laborer? Certainly not; because the price of all the necessaries and comforts of life are reduced in the same proportion, and he will be able to purchase more of them for one dollar in a sound state of the currency, than he could have done, in the days of extravagant expansion, for a dollar and a quarter. So far from injuring, it will greatly benefit the laboring man. It will insure to him constant employment and regular prices, paid in a sound currency, which, of all things, he ought most to desire; and it will save him from being involved in ruin by a recurrence of those periodical expansions and contractions of the currency, which have hitherto convulsed the country.
“This sound state of the currency will have another most happy effect upon the laboring man. He will receive his wages in gold and silver; and this will induce him to lay up, for future use, such a portion of them as he can spare, after satisfying his immediate wants. This he will not do at present, because he knows not whether the trash which he is now compelled to receive as money, will continue to be of any value a week or a month hereafter. A knowledge of this fact tends to banish economy from his dwelling, and induces him to expend all his wages as rapidly as possible, lest they may become worthless on his hands.
“Sir, the laboring classes understand this subject perfectly. It is the hard-handed and firm-fisted men of the country on whom we must rely in the day of danger, who are the most friendly to the passage of this bill. It is they who are the most ardently in favor of infusing into the currency of the country a very large amount of the precious metals.”
Lewis Cass on the Missouri Compromise.
From a speech made on the 20th of February, 1854.
Mr. President: I have not withheld the expression of my regret elsewhere, nor shall I withhold it here, that this question of repeal of the Missouri compromise, which opens all the disputed points connected with the subject of Congressional action upon slavery in the territories of the United States, has been brought before us. I do not think the practical advantages to result from the measure will outweigh the injury which the ill-feeling, fated to accompany the discussion of this subject through the country, is sure to produce. And I was confirmed in this impression from what was said by the Senator from Tennessee, (Mr. Jones,) by the Senator from Kentucky, (Mr. Dixon,) and from North Carolina, (Mr. Badger,) and also by the remarks which fell from the Senator from Virginia, (Mr. Hunter,) and in which I fully concur, that the South will never receive any benefit from this measure, so far as respects the extension of slavery; for, legislate as we may, no human power can establish it in the regions defined by these bills. And such were the sentiments of two eminent patriots, to whose exertions we are greatly indebted for the satisfactory termination of the difficulties of 1850, and who since passed from their labors, and, I trust, to their reward. Thus believing, I should have been better content had the whole subject been left as it was by the bill when first introduced by the Senator from Illinois, without any provision regarding the Missouri compromise. I am aware that it was reported that I intended to propose the repeal of that measure, but it was an error. My intentions were wholly misunderstood. I had no design whatever to take such a step, and thus resuscitate a deed of conciliation which had done its work, and done it well, and which was hallowed by patriotism, by success, and by its association with great names, now transferred to history. It belonged to a past generation; and in the midst of a political tempest which appalled the wisest and firmest in the land, it had said to the waves of agitation, Peace, be still, and they became still. It would have been better, in my opinion, not to disturb its slumber, as all useful and practical objects could have been attained without it. But the question is here without my agency.
Clement L. Vallandigham on Slavery.
October 29, 1855.