Mr. Iredell of N. C. used this language: “Every person in the least conversant with the history of mankind, knows what dreadful mischiefs have been committed by religious persecution. Under the color of religious tests, the utmost cruelties have been exercised. Those in power have generally considered all wisdom centred in themselves, that they alone had the right to dictate to the rest of mankind, and that all opposition to their tenets was profane and impious. The consequence of this intolerant spirit has been that each church has in turn set itself up against every other, and persecutions and wars of the most implacable and bloody nature have taken place in every part of the world. America has set an example to mankind to think more rationally—that a man may be of religious sentiments differing from our own, without being a bad member of society. The principles of toleration, to the honor of this age, are doing away those errors and prejudices which have so long prevailed even in the most intolerant countries. In Roman Catholic lands, principles of moderation are adopted, which would have been spurned a century or two ago. It will be fatal, indeed, to find, at the time when examples of toleration are set even by arbitrary governments, that this country, so impressed with the highest sense of liberty, should adopt principles on this subject that were narrow, despotic, and illiberal.”
Speech of Henry W. Davis, of Maryland,
On the Mission of the American Party.
Extract from Mr. Davis’s speech in the House of Representatives, on the 6th of Jan., 1857, on the results of the recent Presidential election:—
“The great lesson is taught by this election that both the parties which rested their hopes on sectional hostility, stand at this day condemned by the great majority of the country, as common disturbers of the public peace of the country.
“The Republican party was a hasty levy, en masse, of the Northern people to repel or revenge an intrusion by Northern votes alone. With its occasion it must pass away. The gentlemen of the Republican side of the House can now do nothing. They can pass no law excluding slavery from Kansas in the next Congress—for they are in a minority. Within two years Kansas must be a state of the Union. She will be admitted with or without slavery, as her people prefer. Beyond Kansas there is no question that is practically open. I speak to practical men. Slavery does not exist in any other territory,—it is excluded by law from several, and not likely to exist anywhere; and the Republican party has nothing to do and can do nothing. It has no future. Why cumbers it the ground?
“Between these two stand the firm ranks of the American party, thinned by desertions, but still unshaken. To them the eye of the country turns in hope. The gentleman from Georgia saluted the Northern Democrats with the title of heroes—who swam vigorously down the current. The men of the American party faced, in each section, the sectional madness. They would cry neither free nor slave Kansas; but proposed a safe administration of the laws, before which every right would find protection. Their voice was drowned amid the din of factions. The men of the North would have no moderation, and they have paid the penalty. The American party elected a majority of this House: had they of the North held fast to the great American principle of silence on the negro question, and, firmly refusing to join either agitation, stood by the American candidate, they would not now be writhing, crushed beneath an utter overthrow. If they would now destroy the Democrats, they can do it only by returning to the American party. By it alone can a party be created strong at the South as well as at the North. To it alone belongs a principle accepted wherever the American name is heard—the same at the North as at the South, on the Atlantic or the Pacific shore. It alone is free from sectional affiliations at either end of the Union which would cripple it at the other. Its principle is silence, peace, and compromise. It abides by the existing law. It allows no agitation. It maintains the present condition of affairs. It asks no change in any territory, and it will countenance no agitation for the aggrandizement of either section. Though thousands fell off in the day of trial—allured by ambition, or terrified by fear—at the North and at the South, carried away by the torrent of fanaticism in one part of the Union, or driven by the fierce onset of the Democrats in another, who shook Southern institutions by the violence of their attack, and half waked the sleeping negro by painting the Republican as his liberator, still a million of men, on the great day, in the face of both factions, heroically refused to bow the knee to either Baal. They knew the necessities of the times, and they set the example of sacrifice, that others might profit by it. They now stand the hope of the nation, around whose firm ranks the shattered elements of the great majority may rally and vindicate the right of the majority to rule, and of the native of the land to make the law of the land.
The recent election has developed, in an aggravated form, every evil against which the American party protested. Again in the war of domestic parties, Republican and Democrat have rivalled each other in bidding for the foreign vote to turn the balance of a domestic election. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country—men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election—eagerly struggled for by competing parties, mad with sectional fury, and grasping any instrument which would prostrate their opponents. Again, in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests, without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.
The high mission of the American is to restore the influence of the interests of the people in the conduct of affairs; to exclude appeals to foreign birth or religious feeling as elements of power in politics; to silence the voice of sectional strife—not by joining either section, but by recalling the people from a profitless and maddening controversy which aids no interest, and shakes the foundation not only of the common industry of the people, but of the Republic itself; to lay a storm amid whose fury no voice can be heard in behalf of the industrial interests of the country, no eye can watch and guard the foreign policy of the government, till our ears may be opened by the crash of foreign war waged for purposes of political and party ambition, in the name, but not by the authority nor for the interests, of the American people.