Aggressions of the Slave Power: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on May 22, 1856
AGGRESSlONS OF THE SLAVE POWER: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, ON 22 MAY 1856
Frederick Douglass' Paper, 30 May 1856.
Speaking on the same day as Preston Brooks’s attack on Charles Sumner and one day after the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, by proslavery forces, Douglass told a gathering in Rochester that perhaps “the time for words is passed and the time for blows has come.” His lecture, delivered before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society on the evening of 22 May 1856, attracted the largest audience of the season to Corinthian Hall and was, according to Douglass, a positive statement “for the onward progress of the cause of Human Freedom in Rochester.” Douglass’s speech was apparently longer than reported. At the conclusion of the text reprinted here, Douglass ex- plained that “the press upon our columns by the extraordinary and exciting events of the past seven days, compels us to omit the remainder of the foregoing Lecture.” Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 23 May 1856, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU.
FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS:—My first sentiment is one of gratitude. My thanks are due, and are cordially tendered to you who have honored me with your presence, and especially to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, for affording me the opportunity of again addressing you on the
subject nearest my heart, and which subject, I may add, is now, by a combination of extraordinary circumstances, uppermost in the minds and hearts of all intelligent and patriotic American citizens.
I could wish that we met this evening under more auspicious events. The night is dark and stormy. I speak but the common judgment of all, when I affirm that this is a profoundly grave and serious, and even critical moment in the history of this Republic. and of the progress of the struggle between Slavery and Freedom, which has so long divided and agitated the public mind.
The times are more eloquent and impressive than a speech. I feel oppressed when I attempt to embody them in words. It seems as if the time for words is passed and the time for blows has come. Every word should be a flash of lightning and every sentence a thunderbolt. I can neither command the lightning nor the thunderbolt. My powers are limited to the simple facts in the case, and they are terrible and startling enough, if we could realize them.
There is, however, one consolation in the present aspect of matters touching this subject. The great problem involved in the struggle is, evidently, very near its solution. Freedom or Slavery must sooner or later yield. The conflict between these two elements of power, must become more fierce, bitter. and more determined, until one or the other is victorious. There can be no retreat, and no Peace Congress1Douglass spoke just two months after the convening of the Congress of Paris, a diplomatic conelave aimed at providing a final settlement for the Crimean War and laying the basis for peace throughout Europe. Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism, 1852—1871 (New York, 1935), 176—78. can be interposed. Every thing connected with the struggle portends the rapid coming of the final crisis. And for one I welcome it. Almost any thing is better than a suspense.
A survey of the field of contest between Slavery and Freedom, will show that as of old, on the side of the oppressor there is power. It is the misfortune of Abolitionism, that it has to contend with power—power made formidable by organization, and the veneration due to its office.
We have the political organizations against us. The Know Nothings, with Fillmore of the Fugitive Slave Bill [are] against us;2The American or “Know-Nothing“ party enjoyed a spectacular rise and suffered a sudden death in the mid—- I850s. The group traced its origins to the Order ofthe Star Spangled Banner, a secret patriotic society formed in New York in 1849) to support nativist, anti-Catholic political candidates that became the model for similar societies in other states. In July 1854 representatives of lodges in thirteen states met in New York City to form the American party. The secrecy required by the party, a key ingredient of its success, enjoined all members to reply “I know nothing" when questioned about the group‘s activities. The appellation of “Know-Nothing" stuck, and the party was spectacularly successful in the elections of 1854, winning 63 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, 40 percent in Pennsylvania, and 25 percent in New York. Electoral successes followed in 1855 in New York. Pennsylvania, and California as well as in New England and the southern states. However, during that same year schisms arose over the slavery question, particularly over the desire of southern nativists to place the party on record as favoring the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the l856 presidential election the South Americans, or Southern Know-Nothings, nominated Millard Fillmore, a Whig, for the presidency and faer poorly, receiving just 2| percent of the vote. The North Americans nominated Nathaniel P. Banks who refused the nomination, and later endorsed the Republican party‘s choice of John C. Fremont, who did not share in the nativism of the Know-Nothings. After this electoral defeat, the American party, in its southern variant, functioned only as a small organization in the border states. Potter, Impending Crisis, 248— 66; Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800—1860: A Study of the Origins of Americun Nativism. (Chicago, 1964), 380—430. and the Demo-
cratic Party, a powerful party with Gen. Pierce at its head, is against us. We have the wealth, and commerce of the country against us. We have the Federal Government, Executive, Judicial, and Legislative, against us; and worse than all, we have the press and the pulpit against us.
Fellow-citizens, facts of fearful import are daily transpiring, and are staring us in the face. They engross our earnest attention by day, and disturb our sleep by night. A feverish excitement pervades the whole land. It is more than apprehended that we are on the eve of civil war, the most dreadful and terrible of all wars, and there is much ground for the apprehension. A change has taken place in the contrast between the two great continents. Peace has been proclaimed in Europe. The thunders of Sebastopol, which a few months ago shook the world, are now silent. and Europe is tranquil. But not so is it with the American continent. A volcano is felt to be under us, and we are all anticipating the shock which is to make the earth vibrate under our feet. But civil war is not all that now threatens us. The chances are quite as great for foreign war. Slavery is the real cause of both calamities. Under the sway of the relentless and mad spirit of slavery, our Government has just reached out its paternal hand to General Walker, 3William Walker (1824—60), son of a Nashville, Tennessee, insurance executive. graduated from the University of Nashville in 1838 and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1843. Forsaking medicine for law, Walker settled in New Orleans, where in 1848 he became a coeditor of the New Orleans Crescent. Upon the failure of the Crescent and the death of a young woman whom he loved, Walker removed to San Francisco, where he edited the Daily Herald in 1849). After returning to the practice of law briefly in Marysville, California, he became a full-time military adventurer,or “filibuster,” in Latin America. His invasion of Lower California in 1853 ended in quick defeat and made his claims to the presidency of that territory and the Sonora region of Mexico appear ridiculous. The episode caused Walker to be tried in federal court in San Francisco in 1854 for violation of neutrality laws, but he won quick acquittal and by May l855 had outfitted a new expedition of sixty soldiers of fortune bound for Nicaragua. Within a year, through a combination of armed battles and diplomatic maneuvers, Walker established unrivaled influence in Nicaraguan politics. On 12 July 1856 he became president of Nicaragua, but within a year he lost the presidency and fled the country. In 1860, after a last filibustering attempt in Central America. Walker died at the hands of a firing squad in Honduras. Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill, 1980), 175- 218, 267—455; Lawrence Greene, The Flibuster: The Career of William Walker (Indianapolis, 1937); William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates (New York, 1916). and his band of Filibusters and Pirates who have invaded and effected a lodgement in Nicaragua. This is significant.
Ladies and Gentlemen. We know who General Walker is, and in whose service he is, and what the service expected of him is.4Douglass intimates that Walker served proslavery interests in the United States by launching projects designed to procure more territory to be made into slave states. The charge was plausible in light of Walker's overall goal of establishing a federation of Central American republics and Cuba and of introducing an American settler population, including slaveholders, into the region. While such expansionism certainly interested proslavery Americans, there is little evidence that they gave concrete financial support to Walker. Far more interested in Walker's Nicaraguan activities were northern promoters and investors, including the financier Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had a longstanding interest in building a canal through Nicaragua. When Walker began to favor the financial interests of Charles Morgan over those of Vanderbilt, the latter, originally a backer of Walker‘s filibuster, became instrumental in ending Walker‘s presidency. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers, 78-79, 211—13, 227—29. It may also turn out that other nations may feel an interest in his movements quite as deep as we entertain. A grave Senator (Crittenden) from Kentucky, has already warned us that the recognition of Walker’s Government may draw after it unpleasant consequences.5On 15 May 1856 Senator John J. Crittenden (1787—1863) of Kentucky replied to President Pierce's message to Congress that explained U.S. recognition of the Walker government in Nicaragua. Crittenden criticized the recognition as precipitous and ill-advised, adding, “I have rarely listened to a message from the President . . . which I considered more fraught with consequences. . . . evil consequences, than the message which has just been read.” A prominent Whig and later Know-Nothing political leader, Crittenden combined a legal career with public service, serving as a senator (1817-19, 1835-41, 1842-48, and 1854-61) and in other state and national offices, including Kentucky's governorship. Like his mentor Henry Clay. Crittenden urged sectional compromises to preserve the Union. The series of compromise peace proposals that Crittenden introduced on the eve of the Civil War brought the Kentuckian his greatest fame. Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1227, 1238; Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1962); DAB, 4: 546—49. I think it may drag this Republic into a war—a long and bloody war—a war in which we should have the sentiment of the whole civilized world against us—a war the end and consequences whereof, no living prophet can foretell.
The recognition of Walker’s Government in Nicaragua, rightly viewed, as I take it, is a part of the foreign policy of the slave power, which now rules everything at Washington. It is the first definite step, taken openly and before the world, by our Government, towards the extension of
Slavery over South America, the conquest of Cuba, and the final absorption of all the Caribbean Islands. The ceremonies of recognition of Walker’s Minister at Washington6Although William Walker did not become the president of Nicaragua until 12 July 1856, he had been the dominant force in the preceding administration of Patricio Rivas. That govemment‘s ambassador to Washington was Father Augustin Vijil, a priest, lawyer, and early political supporter of Walker. The Pierce administration accepted Vijil's credentials on May 1856, and Secretary of State William Marcy treated him with exceptional cordiality. The other Latin American ambassadors to the United States, however, loudly protested the American recognition of the Rivas-Walker regime. After six weeks of being snubbed by his colleagues. Vijil resigned his post and returned to Nicaragua. That autumn, when Walker's position in Nicaragua began to collapse, Vijil deserted the filibuster and fled to Colombia. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 343—50; Greene, Career of William Walker, 114-15, 199-201 , 235; Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers, 172. 174-76. is simply a re-enactment of that part of our history, which records the progress of events leading to the annexation of Texas. The cases are very similar in character, though they may prove materially different in consequences. The latter is worse than the first. No intelligent man can suppose for a moment, that the United States (after what has been known of the beginning and progress of this movement) can peaceably annex any part of South America to this Union.
Let us glance abroad. Let us balance the chances of success or failure. Neither France nor England can be expected to look with favor upon the success of measures so violent, piratical, and dangerous to the peace of nations, as those of Walker and his desperadoes. It is just this that compelled them to draw the sword against Russia. It is a significant fact, illustrative of the spirit and temper of the British Government, that that Government absolutely refuses, so far to gratify or soothe our wounded pride, and atone for the violation of our sacred laws of neutrality, as to
recall Mr. Crampton, at the peremptory demand of our Filibustering Government.7Sir John Fiennes Twisteton Crampton (1805—86) was a British diplomat who served in the United States from l845 until his controversial return to England in I856. During most of the period from May 1847 until January 1852, Crampton acted as British charge d‘affaires in the United States. In the latter month he received appointment as minister plenipotentiary and envoy extraordinary, the chief British diplomatic post in the United States. During the Crimean War Crampton alienated American opinion by participating in attempts to recruit British troops on American soil. This alleged violation of American neutrality was complicated by a series of charges and countercharges between the two countries regarding interference in Central American affairs. Douglass correctly predicted that Britain would regard American support for Walker‘s govemment as evidence that the United States had little regard for neutrality and ought not to condemn Crampton‘s recruiting effort too strongly. Britain did apologize for Crampton's behavior but did not comply with Secretary of State William L. Marcy's request that the ambassador and three other consuls be recalled. On 28 May 1856, President Franklin Pierce broke all diplomatic contact with Crampton, thereby forcing Crampton‘s return to England and creating rumors of an imminent war. Crampton later served in diplomatic positions in Russia and Spain. Roy Franklin Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia. 1931), 260—64, 460—64; Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers; 72—78, 174-75, 187-95; DNB, 5 : 6-7. It is probably thought, that a nation which does not prevent the fitting out of expeditions of pirates, to seize and plunder weak nations, has at heart no very profound regard for neutrality laws, or treaty stipulations, and the hasty recognition of Walker’s Government in Nicaragua may serve to confirm England in that impression.
Again: Spain, which for the last few years has been compelled to expend millions to protect her dominions from American Filibustering pirates has, of course, an unconquerable repugnance to the Filibustering policy of our Government, and would welcome an opportunity to aid in our chastisement and humiliation. Spain would readily unite with any power against us. And Spain is not to be despised when combined with other nations. How stands the case as to France, the most warlike people of modern times? It is notorious that Louis Nalpoleon8Louis Napoleon (1808—73) was the son of Napoleon l‘s brother Louis Bonaparte. Exiled from France after the fall of his uncle in I815. Louis Napoleon was raised in Switzerland and Germany. In 1836 and 1840 he unsuccessfully attempted to lead coups d‘etat against the govemment of King Louis Philippe. He returned to France following Louis Philippe‘s deposition in February 1848 and was elected president of the Second Republic in December. Barred from reelection at the end of his four- year term. he overthrew the constitution and proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon lll. Resistance to his coup was ruthlessly crushed. Ninety-five hundred opponents were transported to Algeria and another fifteen hundred were expelled from the country. Napoleon lll ruled until 1870, when he was deposed following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. J. M. Thompson, Louis Napoleon and the Second Empire (New York, 1955), 10—12, 37—43, 54—60, 94—96, 136—24; T. A. B. Corley, Democratic Despot: A Life of Napoleon III (London. 1961 ). is restive under the shower of taunts and reproaches. which constantly descend from the American press. And the French people themselves are not likely to forget or soon to forgive the fact, that our heart in the late terrible war with Russia,9The Crimean War. was entirely with the enemies of France. Every effort was made on the part of leading presses in America, to cast a doubt upon the honesty of England and France in that controversy, and to induce the belief that they were selfishly enlisted in the war, and that their ultimate aim was the dismemberment of Turkey. Then, again, it is a fact not to be lost sight of, nor flung away, in estimating our present position as a nation exposed to war, that neither among the crowned heads, nor the uncrowned heads of Europe, have we friends to rely upon. lreland curses us for our proscriptive Know Nothing tendencies. The conservatives of Europe hate us for our loud-mouthed professions of Liberty; and the Democrats of Europe despise us for our hypocrisy, and our shameless support of Slavery. Louis Kossuth has as little cause to respect our pretentions to Liberty, as Louis Napoleon
has to love us, or England has to rely upon our honor. But one tie, as I think, at present stays the arm of Europe, and that is commerce. And strong as is commerce, there are some things stronger. The prospect is dark when we look abroad. It is darker still when we look at home. Four millions of the people of this country, are sighing for deliverance from a cruel and bloody thraldom. It is natural that these should welcome, with joy, any hostile power to these shores which should promise to break their bands asunder. This fact is neither unnoticed by the European presses, nor the European powers, and should not escape our notice.
Then again, the North and South are divided as never before. It may be doubted that the device even of a foreign war would heal and cement the sectional divisions between the North and the South.
There is now no union between the North and the South. The form of the union only remains. I am a believer in the Union in accordance with the constitution, because I believe it can be made a means ofemancipation to my enslaved brothers and sisters. The forms of the Union are good enough. If the people were as good as those forms and appliances which form and characterize Union. But I say now, as ten years ago, if we are to go on for the future under the Union as the past, I welcome the bolt, whether from the North or from the South. whether from heaven or from hell, which shall shiver the American Union into fragments.
But to proceed. Slaveholding aggressors have assailed, and are assailing Liberty at this moment, upon her own sacred soil. The wall flung up more than thirty years ago, by American Statesmen to stay the black tide of Slavery, has been by traitor hands battered down,10Douglass alludes to the provision of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that forbade slavery north of the latitude 36°30' and to its repeal by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Potter, Impending Crisis, 55, 160—77. and now Slavery and Freedom, the deadliest enemies beneath the sky, are met face to face. How fiercely they glare upon each other, you know full well. Vengeance, wrath and fury, blacken and flash under the western horizon, terrible as the brazen gates of hell! The like has never been known before, and cannot long continue. The contagion will spread and burn. Men in favor of making Kansas a free State are shot down, by assassins and murderers, and the murderers escape unharmed. Northern men read of horrible outrages every morning, and proceed to their business with troubled hearts, almost reproaching themselves that they are not in Kansas.
I doubt not, fellow-citizens, that some of you, with warm and sympathetic hearts, dread to look in the papers, and to read the daily news from
your friends and fellow-citizens in Kansas: and well you may so dread. For it is but a succession of horrors and alarms. One day. Collins11Samuel A. Collins (?—1855) owned a sawmill in Doniphan, Kansas, and participated in a secret military society of Free State supporters known as the Kansas Legion. When Patrick Laughlin, an Irish emigrant who for a time was active in the Kansas Legion, broke with the group, denounced it, and revealed its secrets. Collins in turn denounced Laughlin. On 25 October 1855 the two men confronted each other with arms. Collins died as a result of the gunplay. Laughlin, seriously wounded, recovered and moved to Atchison. where he faced no legal action for his role in Collins's death. Lawrence (Kans.) Herald of Freedom, 17 November, 29 December 1855; Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After (Boston, 1910), 112-13; James C. Malin. John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-Six, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society. vol. 17 (Philadelphia. 1942), 521-22. is shot down like a dog, and his murderers are left at large, glorying in the deed. Another day we read that Dow,12Charles W. Dow (c. 1833—55) was an Ohioan who resettled in Kansas. Although from a Democratic family. he became a supporter of the Free State forces in Kansas. A proslavery settler from Virginia, Franklin N. Coleman, killed Dow on 21 November 1855, ostensibly after a quarrel over Coleman's cutting of timber on land claimed by Dow. Antislavery advocates were particularly angered when Coleman escaped to Missouri while Jacob Branson, an associate of Dow, was arrested on breach-of-peace charges after attending a meeting at Hickory Point to protest Dow's murder. Lawrence (Kans.) Herald of Freedom. 2-1 November. 15 December 1855; Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict (Lawrence, Kans., 1898), 183-88; Villard, John Brown, 113. another free State man, is murdered in cold blood. Still another, Barber13Thomas W. Barber (c. 1813—55) migrated from Ohio to Kansas, where he enlisted as a private in the Kansas Volunteers, a militia favoring admission of Kansas as a free state. Although accounts of his murder vary, it is certain that Barber died on 6 December 1855, and probable that he received his fatal gunshot wound when accosted by a band of proslavery sympathizers while he rode with his brother and brother-in-law near Lawrence. Both George E. Clarke. a CS. Indian agent. and James N. Bums. a Missourian. claimed responsibility for Barber's death. Neither was convicted. Lawrence (Kans.) Herald of Freedom, 15 December 1855; Villard. John Brown, 126; O. N. Merrill. A True History of the Kansas Wars (Cincinnati, 1856), 24-28.falls by the hands of assassins. A little further on, and you read the fact, and no one doubts it, that Mr. Brown, a brave and honest free State man. is set upon by a gang of Border Ruffians and murderers, and is literally hacked and chopped to pieces with knives, hatchets. axes and other implements of death in the hands of this infemal crew, and that the cruel and heartless wretches, after perfecting their hellish work, carried the mutilated body of the dead man and flung it at the feet of his frantic and heartbroken wife.14Rees P. Brown (1825— 56) was born in Logan County, Ohio, and reportedly received his formal education in South Bend, Indiana. For two years he taught school in Mississippi. where he developed a thorough hatred of slavery. After first moving to Michigan, Brown settled with his wife and children in Leavenworth,Kansas, in October 1855. A Free State supporter prominent in the defense of Lawrence, he was murdered in a dispute over the 17 January 1856 elections at Easton, Kansas. One account describes the murder as marking the “brutality” of a drunken mob. Douglass may not have known which Mr. Brown was murdered. For months the identity of the victim was confused with that of John Brown, and for years it was at times wrongly assumed to be John Brown's son. Lawrence (Kans.) Herald of Freedom, 26 January, 2 February, 22 March 1856; Robinson, Kansas Conflict, 222; Malin, John Brown, 35—37, 67, 282, 307. These murderers are all at large,
and are ready to pursue their work of death again at the nod of Slavery. The halter is for the innocent, and honor for the criminal. It was but the other morning that we learned that Mr. Joseph H. Mace,15Joseph N. Mace migrated to Lawrence from Massachusetts in 1854 and relocated near Douglas City, Kansas. shortly thereafter. An advocate of the admission of Kansas as a free state, Mace testified before the Howard Committee. a congressional investigating committee convened in Lawrence, on 28 April 1856. His statement concemed an alleged attack by a proslavery mob composed largely of Missourians that prevented Mace and seven companions from voting in the 30 March 1855 elections. Mace told of unfurling a small American flag to quiet the crowd, but he nonetheless remembered facing threats from persons armed with knives, guns, and clubs. Shortly after his testimony, on 7 May, two men accosted Mace and shot him in the leg. According to one account, the two left Mace for dead and rejoiced that he was “more abolition bait for the wolves. “ The attack on Mace may have been in retaliation for the wounding of the proslavery sheriff Samuel Jones, who was shot by an antislavery Kansan on 23 April and was wrongly reported as dead by the local proslavery press. Both Jones and Mace recovered from their wounds. Lawrence (Kans.) Herald of Freedom, 10 May 1856; Villard, John Brown, 141; U.S. Congress, House, Special Committee to investigate the troubles in the Territory of Kansas, Kansas Affairs, 34th Cong. lst sess., 1856, H. Rept. 200 (serial 1869), 117, 174—75. an inoffensive young man, formerly of Newburyport, Mass. , but now of Kansas, while attracted to the door ofhis hut, by the alarm cry of his faithful dog, was instantly shot down and distinctly, heard as he fell, for he was not killed, the foul murderer exclaimed, as he slunk away in the dark, “Ha! ha! another damned abolitionist given to the wolves.” It would not be strange if facts like these, should stir the blood, and kindle a flame of resistance among the people throughout the Northern States. It would be strange, indeed, if such were not kindled. But these murderers, foul and horrible as they are, are not the worst feature of the case, as you very well [know]. The Northern people are most basely and cruelly betrayed, and victimized by their rulers.
Where is the United States Govemment at this trying and critical moment? Aye where is this Government which your fathers inaugurated for the beneficent purposes of “welfare,” “justice,” and “liberty?”16Douglass alludes to the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Where is it when brave and peaceable men are shot down by hordes of Ruffians and Murderers? It is as silent as the grave, and as inactive as the cold arms of death. When a slave is to be hunted in Boston, the case is different. All is life and activity then. There you hear of Proclamations from the President, and you see US. troops, lining the streets and surrounding court houses.17When, in 1854, the fugitive slave Anthony Burns fell into the hands of authorities in Boston. President Pierce vigorously enforced the Fugitive Slave Law requiring Burns's return to bondage. On 27 May 1854 Pierce wired the federal marshal in Boston to support the latter's request for presidential backing and federal troops. Four days later, Pierce instructed the federal district attomey in Boston, Benjamin F. Hallett. to “incur any expense . . . to insure the execution of the law." The national govemment sent an adjutant general to supervise federal troops guarding Burns and provided, on Pierce's order., a revenue cutter to return Burns and his master to Virginia. Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 361: Pease and Pease, Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Barns, 41—43; Shapiro, “Rendition of Anthony Burns," 44; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 124—30; David R. Maginnes, “The Case of the Court House Rioters in the Rendition of the Fugitive Slave Anthony Burns,“ JNH, 56: 31—42 (January 1971). The fact is plain, that the arms and treasure of this
Republic, are no longer at the service of human welfare, justice, or human freedom. They are no longer to be employed to promote peace, protect persons, secure Liberty, or defend innocent citizens in the just pursuit of happiness. They are sold out to Slavery. and this you all very well know. To do any such work as to defend Liberty, our Commander in Chief, General Pierce, finds himself without constitutional authority. He has constitutional authority to hunt slaves in Boston, and to enforce the bloody decrees of Border Ruffians, but he is totally destitute of authority to protect free institutions in Kansas. He is a believer in the doctrine that the Federal Government cannot rightfully intervene against Slavery, but that it may rightly interfere as against Liberty. Such is the Democratic faith. Such is its cardinal doctrine of non-intervention as practically carried out. According to it, Slavery has a right to go any where in this Republic, and Liberty no where, except where Slavery will let it.
The tears of widows and orphans coming before President Pierce, seem to have made no impression upon him. The fact that such widows and orphans were the widows and orphans of free State men, was sufficient to seal his traitorous heart to their piteous wail for protection. He was appealed to when Lawrence was surrounded by the minions of lawless violence, but in vain.18During the Wakarusa War in late 1855 and again in May 1856, President Pierce, who regarded the efforts of the Free State party to organize a rival govemment as “of revolutionary character," declined to take any positive action to protect the antislavery settlers of Lawrence. Kansas, from their proslavery antagonists. In a message of 24 January 1856 he upheld the authority of the “bogus” proslavery legislature elected in March l855. declaring that “it is not the duty of the President of the United States to volunteer interposition by force to preserve the purity of elections, either in state or territory,“ and warned that the use of force against the recognized territorial govemment would be considered “treasonable insurrection." A month later, on 11 February, he responded to an appeal for protection by Free State leaders James H. Lane and Charles Robinson by issuing a proclamation calling for the cessation of hostilities by both sides. Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, 2: 416—19; Nichols, Franklin Pierce, 432—33, 441—46; Robinson, Kansas Conflict, 243—56; Alice Nichols, Bleeding Kansas (New York, 1954), 84—109. Nothing could be expected of him. It was his mean boast—a boast that will make his memory to rot; and all who bear his name
to be ashamed of it—that he never had entertained a sentiment inconsistent with Slavery. This debasing declaration was made before the election to the office he now degrades; and he has well redeemed by acts of infamy the atrocious sentiment by which he purchased the votes of the traders in the bodies and souls of men. But for him. freedom would now be safe in Kansas. The free State men in Kansas could at this moment easily take care of all the Border Ruffians, which Atchison19David Rice Atchison (1807-86) graduated from Transylvania University and studied law in his native Kentucky before moving to Missouri in 1830. There Atchison practiced law in Liberty. Clay County, won election to the state legislature in 1834 and 1838. and rose to the rank of major general in the state militia. In 1840 he became judge of the circuit court in Platte County, and later that year he received an appointment to the Senate to complete the term of the recently deceased Louis F. Linn. He stayed in the Senate until 1855 and was president pro tempore of that body for much of the period between 1846 and 1855. Atchison distinguished himself in the Senate as a friend of land grants to railroads and as a foe of his Missouri colleague Thomas Hart Benton, who took a more moderate stance on slavery than Atchison. Benton, defeated for reelection to the Senate in 1850 largely due to Atchison's efforts, ran for Atchison's seat in 1855. In a bitter campaign. Atchison appealed to proslavery sentiment in western Missouri by stressing his role in the passage of those provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise. Neither Benton nor Atchison won the 1855 election, but Atchison furthered his proslavery reputation in 1856 and 1857 by leading raids undertaken by Missourians against free soil supporters in Kansas. He later lived in Texas, where he supported the Confederate war effort, and, for his last two decades, on a farm in Gower, Missouri. Theodore C. Atchison, “David R. Atchison: A Study in American Politics," Missouri Historical Review, 24: 502—15 (July 1930); BDAC, 493-94; ACAB, 1: 114; NCAB, 10: 223; DAB, 1: 402-03. and Stringfellow20John H. Stringfellow ( 1819—1905) was a physician and a proslavery politician in Missouri and Kansas. Born into a prominent Virginia family. Stringfellow went to Missouri upon graduation from the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in I845. He practiced medicine in Carrollton and Platte City. Missouri, until 1854, when he moved his family to Atchison, Kansas, a town he helped to found and finance. Stringfellow served as Speaker ofthe House in the Kansas territorial legislature of 1855 and as a colonel in the territorial militia. He also founded the Squatter Sovereign a proslavery organ and Atchison's first newspaper. With the outbreak of the Civil War. Stringfellow entered the Confederate army as a captain. After the war he returned to Atchison and. in I877. moved to Saint Joseph. Missouri. where he lived the remainder of his life. Walter Williams and Floyd Calvin Shoemaker, eds., Missouri: Mother ofthe West. 5 vols. (Chicago. 1930), 4 : 389. could send against them, but for General Pierce and his Cabinet. He is the acknowl- edged head not only of the slave oligarchy at the South. but of their advanced guard in Kansas. In his office, he is evidently ready to trample in the dust every principle ofjustice. liberty, and humanity; and to commit any outrage which the slave oligarchy may require at his hands. It is not now the Border Ruffians—not Southern immigration, which peril the liberties of the people of Kansas; but the swords and bayonets ofthe United States, under the command of the President of the United States, which constitute the real danger.
A few months ago, while free State men were being tarred and feathered by Border Ruffians; while they were being driven from the ballot-box—denied the Elective Franchise proffered them under the Kansas-Nebraska Bill—which was the Law ofthe United States; while they were menaced in their homes, and at their firesides by Border Ruffians; while Lawrence was surrounded by a motley gang of ignorant invaders, blinded by the jugglery and cunning ofthe slaveholders; and infuriated by whiskey, threatening the people of Lawrence with fire and sword[,] Fort Leavenworth was silent—the President had no authority to interfere; and the star spangled banner was not seen.
But mark the change. As soon as Border Ruffians are likely to get the worst of it; as soon as light is about to dawn on the dark deeds done against free citizens in Kansas; as soon as one Border Ruffian is shot down, troops leap forth from Leavenworth at the call of the President.21Federal troops from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a military base and supply depot established in 1827, actually intervened in Kansas affairs before the first proslavery casualty by gunshot was registered. In fact, that casualty, the shooting of Sheriff Samuel Jones in Lawrence on 23 April 1856, came on the evening after Jones made arrests in Lawrence with the aid of a deputation of federal soldiers. After Jones’s wounding, a large number of federal troops moved into the Lawrence area in an attempt to execute a grand jury order to arrest three Free State leaders. On 21 May the U.S. marshal entered Lawrence, escorted by ten soldiers. Unable to find the indicted man, the marshal withdrew and dismissed the proslavery posse of several hundred men that had gathered around the federal troops outside Lawrence. Jones, partially recovered from his wound, reenlisted the men as a sheriff's posse that returned to Lawrence immediately and destroyed presses and other property in a prolonged riot. Robinson, Kansas Conflict, 231-65; Malin, John Brown, 51; Potter, Impending Crisis, 208—09. The talons, and the beak of the American Eagle prepare to devour the flesh of free Statemen; and the star spangled banner waves in brazen triumph over the murderers and assassins of Liberty. The ballot-box is overthrown. Lawless violence basks in the smiles of executive favor. Resistance to Ruffians is treason; and the friends of free Institutions are traitors, and to meet the traitor’s doom. Such, fellow-citizens, is a faint outline of our times.
What means this dreadful commotion? Why are stout hearts failing fornfear? Have we filled up the measure of our national iniquities? Are these the first signs of the certain coming ofjudgment? Who among us can answer these grave questions? and who can point out the way of escape from the appalling doom that seems impending? I may be ridiculed for these inquiries; but the case fully justifies them.
We are now in the third century of our crimes as a nation. We have enslaved, robbed and plundered the weak and helpless, in our country during a period of nearly two hundred and forty years. I say we have done
this. I should rather say you have done it. This nation has done it. For I stand among the outcast and plundered ones of the land, and not among the ruling—the Law making class.
As a nation we have rolled along in prosperous wickedness; inviting, if not daring the God of the oppressed to judgment. May not the roar that shakes the land, be the tramp, and the trump of the oppressor’s doom? To me it seems this Republic must speedily put down Slavery; or Slavery will speedily put down this Republic. This is the solemn lesson ofthe present—a lesson we shall do well to heed. Which shall it be is now the greatquestion.
Of one thing, the dullest among us have become convinced; and that is, the time for compromises on the question of Slavery in this country has [passed], and [passed] forever. The South is altogether too high in the ascendant to ask for compromises; and the North has no reason to believe that the South would adhere to a compromise, if one was entered into. The South, with the great Democratic party in power, ready to do all and more than all it can ask, is not so foolish as to consent to take half when it can have the whole. And beside this, the great difficulty in the way of any compromise, is the fact that the Missouri Compromise has been fraudulently repealed. Until that act of bad faith on the part ofthe South, the North continued to believe in the South. They can believe in it no longer, and
hence no compromise is possible.
The folly of believing in slaveholders has been thoroughly made manifest. There can be no compacts without common honesty, and this is an element of character that does not grow in a slaveholding country; nor among slaveholding people. As well look for grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles,22An allusion to Matt. 7:16. as to look for common honesty among slaveholders. Men will not keep faith with men when they have broken faith with God. When a man so far disregards the voice of reason, conscience, goodness, and duty, as to clutch the new born babe, stamped with innocence, and doom it to a life of bondage, of Slavery, cruelty, ignorance and shame, he is fit to violate any compact no matter how sacred. For there can be none more solemn or binding than that imposed by nature and nature’s God, among equal members of the human family.
Since compromises are out of the question, nothing remains but to fight the battle out. One or the other—Liberty or Slavery must be the Law giver in this country. Both cannot reign, and one must be put down. The
question is narrowed down to a single point, Slavery or Freedom. There is not a slaveholder in the land but who sees that to this complexion things may come at last; and indeed to which they have already come.
Ladies and Gentlemen—l propose this evening to say a few words to you on the designs of the slave power. I mean by the slave power, that force which operates unceasingly through all the channels of social and political influence from Slavery and for Slavery. This is the slave power. The physical embodiment of that power is in three hundred and fifty thousand owners of human flesh in the Southern States. These form the nucleus of that power. The ends and aims of this powerful body, may be learned in three ways:
lst. By ascertaining what is necessary to the preservation of Slavery; 2dly. By what they (the slaveholders) have already done for the preservation ofSlavery; and 3dly. By what they have declared by words or acts their intention to do, for the preservation of Slavery. lst. Then, let me say a word as to the nature of Slavery itself, and ofthe necessities growing out of its nature.
The very first element of Slavery is selfishness, extreme and bitter selfishness—selfishness that destroys the happiness of one man, to increase that of another. It is at the beginning, middle, and end, an open, violent. and unmitigated aggression of one man on the person, rights, and happiness of another; and is therefore a direct war upon human nature, and the Laws of God. Opposed to every idea of justice, of human nature, and the Laws of God, it can only perpetuate itself by successfully resisting these elements. First, as they operate through the slave; and secondly, as they operate through society in the neighborhood of Slavery. And thirdly, as they may operate through the Government.
The slave himself must be subdued. The slave master finds here no limited field for the exercise of his skill and power. The slave is a man. He has the right to Liberty. He is conscious of his rights; and above all he has an unconquerable love of liberty. To keep the slave in the slave relation requires constant aggression. That the slave loves liberty, and is conscious of his rights as a man, witness the sufferings, the hardships, and perils he endures in escaping his hated bondage. See him threading his way through the forest by night, (for he dare not travel by day), guided by the North Star. See him sleeping in tree tops by day, and travelling on by night, subsisting on roots, swimming rivers, enduring everything short of death, to gain his liberty. See that slave mother at Cincinnati, preferring to slaughter the child of her bosom, with her own hands, to seeing that child flung
into the hell of Slavery.23Margaret Gamer (c. 1833—61) fled from slavery in Kentucky in January 1856. Traveling in a party with sixteen other slaves, including her husband and four children, Garner reached the Ohio River by sled and walked across its frozen waters to Ohio. There the party divided, nine of them escaping to Canada, Garner and seven others fell into the hands of pursuers at Mill Creek, near Cincinnati. An armed battle ensued in which two captors received wounds before apprehending the fugitives. When her capture appeared certain, Garner grabbed a butcher knife and attempted to kill her children. One daughter died and the other children lay wounded before she was disarmed. A trial followed in which the prosecution pressed charges of escape. The defense argued that, since she had once been sent to a free state to serve as a nursemaid, Margaret Garner and her children were not legally slaves. When the judge rejected that argument, the defense asked that murder and complicity in murder charges be filed against the fugitives. Their counsel explained that the prisoners “have all assured me that they would go singing to the gallows rather than be returned to slavery. ” After a highly publicized trial, the judge ruled that no other warrant could take precedence over the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and remanded the fugitives to their owner in Kentucky. Soon after, Garner and her family were victims of a steamship collision on the Ohio while being shipped to the deep South to prevent further escape attempts. Garner fell into the river with one of her children; while the mother survived, the child drowned. Further efforts by Ohio authorities to leam of Garner‘s whereabouts and to obtain her requisition were unsuccessful. Julius Yanuck, “The (Earner Fugitive Slave Case.“ MVHR, 40: 47-66 (June 1953); Levi Coffin, Reminiseenees of Levi Coffin, The Reputed President of the Undergroimd Railroad . . . (Cincinnati, 1876), 557—67; Marion Gleason McDougall, Fugitive Slaves (1619- 1865), Publications of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women. Fay House Monographs. no. 3 (Boston. 1891). 46—47; San Francisco Pacific Appeal, 1 November 1862. Such love of Liberty. such burning hatred of Slavery, can only be kept under by acts of the cruelest aggression. The language of Slavery to the slave is—“you shall be a slave or die,” and the practice of Slavery is like unto it.
Then, too, the community must be corrupted. The moral sense must be bound and blunted. All that is holy in religion; all that is beautiful in society, and pure in morals, must be, and is marred, battered, defaced. and utterly perverted in a slaveholding community. All the natural forces of civilized society are against Slavery; and the horrid system lives only by crushing out these natural forces.
Hence the slaveholders have made themselves the absolute masters of society in every slave State in the Union. The whole South is their possession, and we speak of slaveholders now, and the South meaning the same thing. The slaves, four millions, are not the South; the free whites. five millions, are not the South; but three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders are the South, and wield the entire influence and power of the South in all important matters. They have dwarfed the free whites, the non-slaveholding part of the whites; they have put down freedom of speech; they have prohibited the spread of education; they have degraded labor by making it the vocation of slaves. and idleness, the privilege of gentlemen: they have abolished the freedom of speech; they have arrested and pun-
ished the circulation of the Bible as a crime; they have expurgated Northern Literature for Southern readers; they have gathered up the reins of Government, into their own fists. and have made it impossible for any but a slaveholder to be a legislator: they have made it easy for the rich slaveholder to escape the just consequences of crime, and made the poor a prey to rapacity and murder; they have made it unlawful to preach more than an adultered Gospel at the South; and have virtually abolished religious liberty there; they have exalted slave property above every other species of property in the eye of the Law; and abolished trial by jury in the cases of four million of the people! This is what the slaveholders have done in the slave States. And. what they have done in the slave States, gives us some clue to what they would do in all and every part of the American Union, when they get the power.
I have now spoken of what slaveholders have done. I shall next speak of what they evidently design to do. It is not in my power, nor any man’s power to tell all they mean to do, or will do. But I may speak of what they purpose to do in regard to certain points. and leave the rest for time and the natural progress of events to disclose.
lst. They design to put down freedom of speech in Congress and in the whole country.
2d. They design to extend Slavery over all the Territories in the United States.
3d. They mean to revive the foreign slave trade.
4th. They design to make Slavery national, and cause the right of property in man to be respected in every State in the Union, so that the rule of the South shall become the rule of the North.
5th. They mean to make Slavery the all controling, and all governing interest of the Federal Government, and thereby make it a national institution.
6th. They purpose the expatriation of the entire free colored population, to drive them out of this country. and off this continent.
7th. They purpose to plant Slavery in South America, to overthrow the Black government of Hayti; and possess themselves of the West India Islands, and to reduce this whole continent to the rule of Slavery.
This I take to be the programme for the future of the slave power of this country. Am I wrong in attributing such purposes to the slave power? Let us glance at them one by one, in the light of the past, and of events now passing before our eyes.
lst. As to freedom of speech. Is there any doubt of the disposition of
the slaveholders in regard to this right? The declarations of slaveholders, and the position of parties under their control, must silence all doubt on this point, as to the purposes of the slave power. The first effort to put down freedom of speech, and with it the right of petition in a wholesale manner, was in l836—when the following Resolution was adopted in Congress:
“That all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatever to the subject of Slavery, or the abolition of Slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table; and that no further action whatever shall be laid thereon. "24Douglass slightly modifies the text of the original resolution. U.S. Congress, House, Slavery in the District of Columbia, 24th Cong., lst sess., 1836, H. Rept. 691, 24.
This resolution was offered by Henry L. Pinckney of South Carolina, [and] adopted by a vote of 122 against 64.25Henry Laurens Pinckney (1794— 1863) ofCharleston, South Carolina, son ofthe Revolutionary soldier and political leader Charles Pinckney. was a prominent editor. politician, and advocate of states' rights. Pinckney graduated from South Carolina College, studied law under his brother-in-law, Robert Y. Hayne, and, starting in 1816, served seventeen consecutive years in the state legislature. In 1823 he began a nine-year stint as chief editor of the Charleston Mercury, a leading organ of pro-southem opinion during the nullification crisis. Although he inherited a great fortune, Pinckney championed the causes of Charleston's mechanic class. After serving three terms as mayor of Charleston, Pinckney won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served from 1833 to 1837. There he introduced the “Pinckney gag,“ a resolution that barred the printing or reading of abolitionist petitions to Congress and required that all such petitions be laid on the table without action. Although abolitionists deplored this rule, Pinckney also came to be disliked by the most passionately anti-abolitionist South Carolinians as a result of its adoption. Supporters of John C. Calhoun argued that even receiving the petitions to lay them on the table was too great a concession to antislavery forces. The controversy over the “gag rule“ caused Pinckney's defeat in the congressional election of 1836, and he never returned to national office. He did, however, occupy the mayor's chair in Charleston for three additional terms and served in a number of lesser municipal and state offices during his remaining years. Frances Leigh Williams, A Founding Family: The Pinckneys of South Carolina (New York, I978), 338, 355; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1965), 182, 351—55; Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830—1844 (New York, 1933), 11O—11, 119; BDAC, 1460; ACAB, 5: 23; NCAB, 11: 198—99. 51 Northern men voting with the majority—voting for the infamous gag. This effort to put down freedom of speech and the right of petition, was continued for several years. The repeal of this odious and unconstitutional resolution, is the last triumph of John Quincy Adams.26John Quincy Adams, who served in the House of Representatives from 1831 to 1848, led the resistance to the infamous “gag rule" that automatically tabled all antislavery petitions to that body. On the day the gag was first adopted in 1836 he denounced the action as an unconstitutional violation of the freedom of speech. For more than seven years he and a growing number of antislavery Whigs tried to circumvent the gag by various parliamentary strategems. Despite two unsuccessful attempts by southem members to censure him for violation of House rules, the former president remained determined in his opposition. liach year his resolution to repeal the gag gained more support, until it finally passed by a vote of l05 to 80 on 3 December 1843. Marie B. Hecht, John Quincy Adams: A Personal History of an Independent Man (New York, 1972), 545—51, 584—85, 590—95, 609—10, 613—15; Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York, 1956), 337—47, 371—72, 379, 420-22, 446—48; Leonard L. Richards, “The Jacksonians and Slavery," in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge, 1979), 109-15. The opening of the Congress of the United
States to Anti-Slavery discussion, was a signal victory for freedom. But the South has never ceased its efforts to gain what it lost on the right of petition, nor relinquished its purpose of putting down this precious right, and with it the right of speech and the liberty of the press. They know that freedom of speech is incompatible with the safety of Slavery.
They understand the philosophy of reform well enough to know, that the slave cannot be safely chained while the lips of freemen are unlocked. There is nothing more dangerous to Slavery than unfettered speech. Slaveholders themselves are not proof against it. They are men, and have hearts, and a moral sense; and when reasoned with of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come, they tremble, and send the preacher away. Tyrants the world over have evinced the same dread ofthe light, and for the same reason. South Carolina can as little endure freedom of speech, as Russia, France, or Austria. Only that righteousness which exalteth a nation27Douglass adapts Prov. 14: 34. can endure the light of free speech. Look at the whole South. You have only to drop a word against slavery, to set a whole community in a blaze, and bring down upon you the violence ofthe mob. Look at the bogus Legislature of Kansas. The first legislation is to punish free speech as crime.28The antislavery press commonly referred to the first territorial legislature of Kansas. elected in March I855, as the “bogus legislature. " Despite the casting of numerous illegal votes by proslavery Missourians who crossed the border, the newly appointed govemor, Andrew H. Reeder, ordered reelections only in those few districts where the results had been formally contested. When the legislature met in July, the proslavery majority removed all antislavery members and proceeded to enact laws, over the govemor‘s veto, that established slavery in the territory. “Imprisonment at hard labor" awaited anyone who published or circulated material “calculated to promote a disorderly, dangerous, or rebellious disaffection among the slaves" or who “by speaking, or by writing, assert[ed] or maintain[ed] that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory." The legislature’s actions prompted the organization of a Free State party that drafted its own antislavery constitution at Topeka later that fall. Robinson, Kansas Conflict, 151—60, 169—80; James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1969), 86-96; Potter, Impending Crisis, 199-204. Look at the slaveholders in Congress foaming with rage, when the moral character of Slavery is under faithful discussion. Hear the ruffian threats against the matchless orator, statesman, and scholar, Charles
Sumner.29 Charles Sumner delivered his celebrated and vitriolic “Crime Against Kansas" speech in the Senate on 19, 20 May 1856. and immediately became the object of published and unpublished insults and threats. On 22 May Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Sumner in the Senate chamber in response to the oration on Kansas. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1961), 282—97. The low ribaldry, which greets the utterances of John P. Hale—the diabolical ferocity with which the incomparable speeches of your own serene and dignified Senator, are assailed. Unable to meet his argument, he is assailed with misrepresentation and vituperation of the bitterest kind—thus attesting, by unfailing evidence, that of all men at Washington, Wm. H. Seward is most feared and hated by slaveholders. and should be most trusted and loved by the friends of Freedom.
But we are not left to infer anything as to purpose of the slaveholders to put down freedom of speech in any part of this country. That purpose is declared in the most explicit and comprehensive manner by the Democratic party, the party in power. and the old Whig party. The measure suppressing free speech was a plank in the platform of both political parties, in the last Presidential election.30In 1852 the Democrats resolved to “resist all attempts at renewing. in Congress or out of it. the agitation of the slavery question" and maintained that “all efforts . . . to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery . . . are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences“ and therefore “ought not be countenanced by any friend of freedom.“ The Whigs pledged to “discountenancc all efforts to continue or renew such agitation [over slavery] whenever,wherever, or however the attempt may be made“ and identified “all further agitation of the question . . . as dangerous to our peace." Johnson and Porter, National Party Platforms, 17, 21. and will be again at the coming election of all parties, which, in any measure. rely upon the votes of the slaveholding States. What these parties declare in their political platforms. should not be considered lightly of by the people. Every sentiment in these platforms may become law, may be backed up by the swords and guns of this Republic; and there can be no doubt if Slavery is allowed to go on removing one landmark of Freedom after another. and framing such laws as it likes. liberty of speech here will be placed under the ban as much as in any country on the globe. We shall speak and write only as our masters please. The apology for this shameless measure, put forth by the Whigs and Democrats, is, peace of the slaveholder, and the safety of the Union. (Mr Douglass ridiculed the idea that the slaveholders would dissolve the Union, and showed that peace was impossible while Slavery existed at the South. He dwelt at much length on the importance of free speech, and the necessity of maintaining it at all hazards. It was the great renovator of the body politic, without which the nation would perish of its own impurities. With freedom of speech we could gain all; with the loss of it we should lose all.)
The second measure of the slaveholders, or the Slave Power, is the extension of Slavery over the Territories. This is a cherished measure, and stands out without anything like concealment. Relying on their ability to command the support of every candidate for the executive office in the time of need, the slaveholders have met every Presidential election since 1840, with some scheme for the spread of Slavery. This policy of the Slave Power was inaugurated by Mr. Calhoun during the latter part of the reign of John Tyler, the last of the Virginia Presidents. The annexation of Texas was then the question. The heart of the Slave Power was then fixed upon the measure.
Mr. Clay had long been in the field. and his election was deemed almost without the shadow of a doubt. His enemies were silent, and seemed to concede in advance, that Henry Clay must be the next President of the United States. Mr. Van Buren was, as you know, the rightful candidate of the Democratic party. He had the promise of the nomination, and the race for Presidential honors—a race which is now abandoned—— was to be run between Mr. Clay and Mr. Van Buren. Do you remember what happened at that hour of great expectation? If you do not, I will tell you. The question arose, What are your views, gentlemen, on the annexation of Texas? And these gentlemen answered, if not negatively, at least doubtingly. They hesitated. This was enough for the imperious Slave Power. Van Buren was dashed aside, for Mr. James K. Polk; and Clay was defeated, and Texas, a slaveholding country. as large as France, was annexed, to strengthen the Slave Power."31James K. Polk unequivocally supported the annexation of Texas throughout the 1844 campaign, while Henry Clay attempted to straddle the issue by opposing annexation “at this time." In the latter days of the campaign, however, Clay made overtures toward the pro-annexation forces in his “Alabama letters,“ which stressed that his opposition to annexation was conditional and perhaps temporary. Former president Martin Van Buren opposed annexation and consequently lost the southern support necessary to win the Democratic nomination in 1844. A joint resolution approving the annexation of Texas passed the Senate on 27 February 1845 and the House on the following day. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life Henry Clay (Boston, 1937), 358—78; Frederick Jackson Turner, The United States, 1830—1850 (1935; Gloucester, Mass. 1958), 522—25.