Northern Ballots and the Election of 1852: An Address Delivered in Ithaca, New York, on October 14, 1852
NORTHERN BALLOTS AND THE ELECTION OF 1852: AN
ADDRESS DELIVERED IN ITHACA, NEW YORK,
ON 14 OCTOBER 1852
Frederick Douglass' Paper, 22 October 1852. Another text in Foner, Life and Writings,
5 : 245—61.
By mid-October 1852 Douglass was hard at work stumping for Gerrit Smith,
who was making a bid for a seat in Congress. Douglass worked with charac-
teristic zeal, attending eighteen meetings in twelve towns in Tompkins
County, New York, between 5 and 14 October. The 14 October meeting, a
countywide Free Democrat affair, took place in Ithaca. Douglass’s efforts
were rewarded: Smith was elected. And, as he wrote Smith on 6 November
1852, “the cup of” his “joy” was “full.” Douglass to Gerrit Smith, 6
November 1852, Gerrit Smith Papers, NSyU; FDP, 1 October 1852; Pease
and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 200—02; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom,
246—47; Charles H. Wesley, “The Participation of Negroes in Anti-Slavery
Political Parties,” JNH, 29: 32-74 (January 1944).
Mr. Chairmanz—I esteem it a very great privilege to address this Conven-
tion.
I take you to represent the spirit of freedom and progress in Tompkins.
Sir, I am not sensible of possessing any special aptitude or qualifica-
tion, to instruct you in minute political questions, which may affect your
material interests. I know little of banks or tariffs, of commerce or cur-
rency. Yet, I have one great political idea, and so far as that can bear upon
your political relations and duties, I am willing to present it this evening.
That idea is an old one. It is widely and generally assented to; neverthe-
less, it is very generally trampled upon and disregarded. The best expres-
sion of it, I have found in the Bible. It is in substance, RIGHTEOUSNESS
EXALTETH A NATION—SIN IS A REPROACH TO ANY PEOPLE.1Douglass quotes from Prov. 14: 34.
Sir, this constitutes my politics, the negative and positive of my poli—
tics, and the whole of my politics.
I hold that nations, no more than individuals, may hope for peace
and prosperity while they trample upon the sacred principles of justice,
liberty, and humanity; and as a member of society, under the laws and
institutions of this country, I feel it my duty to do all in my power to infuse
this idea into the public mind, that it may speedily be recognized and
practiced upon by our people.
Fellow-citizens, I am not an old man, nor have I had great oppor-
tunities for studying the history of this country. My sphere of observation
and experience was, for more than twenty years, limited to the slave
plantation.
I have been a slave, and could learn but little, when a slave, of what
was going on in this country and world about me. A slave prison is worse
than a State’s prison. In the State’s prison a man may know something and
think something of the past; but the inmates of the slave prison know
nothing of the past, present or future. Clouds and darkness overshadow
them, and facts familiar to others are unknown to them.
Humble, however, as I am, and limited as is my knowledge, I must be
allowed to say that, never has there been a time when the great principles of
justice, liberty and humanity were put in more imminent peril than at the
present moment. Never was there a time when the friends of these great
principles were more loudly and imperatively called upon to stand by these
principles than now.
The ruling parties of the country have now flung off all disguises, and
have openly and shamelessly declared war upon the only saving principles
known to nations. Their platforms, adopted at Baltimore, embrace the
whole slave system, as worthy of their regard and support. To expose those
platforms, and to rebuke those parties, becomes the duty of every in-
telligent and patriotic voter in this republic.
These parties, fellow-citizens, are now soliciting you for your votes.
They want the reins of government to enable them to accomplish certain
objects.
What these objects are, you are to learn from their platforms. They
want power, and want you to give it to them; and in their platforms they tell
you what they mean to do with power when they get it.
There is quite a gain here; for in whatever else these parties are to be
condemned, they are certainly to be commended for their frankness. I
repeat, they want power, and ask you to give it to them; and they have
boldly and plainly told you just what use they mean to make of it when they
get it. No man who votes for General Scott2Winfield Scott (1786-1866), former general in chief of the U.S. Army (1841-48) and Whig presidential nominee. was born on his family's estate of Laurel Branch, near Petersburg. Virginia. During the war of 1812-15, he led victorious land campaigns on the Niagara frontier in 1814 and later commanded American troops in Mexico in 1846-47. He received presidential commissions to direct military operations against the Seminole and Creek Indians in 1836 and to remove the Cherokee Indians from South Carolina and Tennessee across the Mississippi River in 1838. In his almost sixty years of military service. Scott was presented two congressional gold medals (1825, 1848) and in 1852 became the first officer since George Washington to be voted the rank and privileges of lieutenant general. Charles W. Elliott, Winfield Scott: The Soldier and the Man (New York, 1937); ACAB, 5: 440—42; NCAB, 3: 502—03; DAB, 16: 505—11. or for General Pierce3Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce (1804-69), who was to become the fourteenth president (1853-57) of the United States, graduated from Bowdoin College (1824), sat in the New Hampshire legislature (1829-32), where he twice served as speaker. and represented his native state in the House of Representatives (1833-37) and in the Senate (1837-42). In 1842 Pierce resumed his law practice in Concord, New Hampshire, and became a leading organizer of the state Democratic party machine. Strongly favoring the annexation of Texas, Pierce volunteered in 1846 for military duty in the war with Mexico and was appointed a brigadier general the next year. Roy F. Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia, 1931); ACAB, 5: 7— 12; NCAB, 4: 145—46; DAB, 14: 576-80. can so
vote without knowing precisely the use to which his vote is to be put.
You all know, gentlemen, that there was an attempt, both in the Whig
and in the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, to nominate candidates
before adopting their platform. The motive for this was to leave candidates
room for double dealing, and to make them independent of the platforms.
But the South scouted this as a cowardly policy, and it failed. They cried
out principles, not men; and that cry prevailed.4At the 1852 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore on 2 June, B. D. Nabcrs, a member of the Mississippi delegation, moved that the convention adopt a platform before nominating candidates for president and vice president. Another Mississippi delegate challenged Nabers's resolution and Charged that it “ha[d] not the sanction of the Mississippi delegation, and was offered without consultation with them.“ Although Nabers withdrew his motion, Henry A. Wise of Virginia renewed it, demanding, “Shall the principles be made to confomi to the man, or the man to the principles?" Virginia governor John B. Floyd and Louisiana senator Pierre Soulé opposed the renewed resolution, which was tabled by a vote of 155 to 123, and the Democratic convention did nominate candidates before agreeing on a platform. Two weeks later a similar resolution offered by a Louisiana delegate to the Whig national convention was withdrawn because the question of contested seats in several delegations had not been decided by the Credentials Committee. The motion was not introduced again, and the convention proceeded to draw up a platform before nominating candidates without provoking debate. William Hincks and F. H. Smith, Proceedings of the Democratic Convention Held at Baltimore, June 1852 (Washington, DC, 1852), 12-15; Washington (D.C.) Daily National Intelligencer, 18, 19 June 1852.
The candidates are, therefore, subject, not superior, to the platforms.
The candidates are after, not before the platforms. The whole matter is here
in a nut shell. The candidates who have stepped upon these platforms,
pledge themselves, before God and the world, to carry out the policy set
forth in the platforms. There is no escape from this common sense view of
the case. There is no back door here. There is no other way which men can
climb. The way of entrance and the way of exit are the same.
The efforts of certain Whigs and Democrats to escape from this di-
lemma are very miserable. They tell us they mean to vote for the candidates
of their parties, but that they repudiate the platforms. They hold the
platforms to be simply the opinions of the men who voted for them in the
Convention [line obliterated] a grave matter, it strikes a death blow at all
political integrity and destroys confidence in all political creeds, and in all
the men who adopt them. Honesty is the best policy even in dealing with
slaveholders. Carry out this dodging doctrine, and no man voting would
know to what use his vote is to be put—what measures his vote will
support, and what measures his vote will defeat. Upon this theory, the
Whig slaveholders may vote for Scott, because he is on the platform, and
the Whig abolitionists may vote for him because he is too good to be on the
platform, and because he will cheat the South if he shall be elected. Now I
hold this to be a desperate piece of political dishonesty; eating the devil,
while piously repudiating his broth is nothing to this.
There is something really amusing in the evolutions of the anti-slavery
Whigs who have brought themselves to vote for the Whig candidates.
When we tell them that by voting for General Scott they vote for the
Baltimore platform, they say not at all. We vote for the candidate, not the
platform.
Now it would be quite as sensible to say we vote for the men, not their
principles. These candidates were selected to carry out the platforms upon
which they secured their nominations, and this everybody knows.
The authorship of this pro-candidates, anti-platform theory, must go to
the credit of Mr. Greeley of the N[ew] Y[ork] Tribune—a man whose moral
convictions are always kept beyond hearing distance behind his political
action. He tells us that he defies, repudiates and spits upon the Baltimore
platform; that he is not bound by it, and don’t mean to be. Yet he claims to
be a Whig, and gives his support to the Whig candidates.5Douglass refers to Horace Greeley's editorial, “That Hunker Platform," in which Greeley expressed his reservations about the 1852 Whig party platform. He condemned the eighth plank 's suggestion that party members regarded “all discussions, criticism, or remonstrance representing the existence of Slavery in this country as perilous and wrong." “We defy it, execrate it, spit upon it," he thundered. However, such objections did not diminish his support of Scott. “No man who has any clear, distinct, sharply defined views of his own," he reasoned, “can hope to see them precisely, exactly embodied and set forth in any creed, summary or formula which aims to express the common convictions of millions." New York Daily Tribune, 22 June 1852.
Gentlemen, I fight no shadow. Mr. Greeley is keeping back from our
cause in this country thousands whose hearts are with us. Almost every
man with whom I have met in your county who avows his intention to vote
for Scott and Graham,6William Alexander Graham (1804-75) was born in Lincoln County, North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1824, and later, while practicing law in Hillsboro, acquired a small plantation. He was a Whig member of the state General Assembly (1833-40), a U.S. senator (1840-43), and a two-term governor of North Carolina (1845-49). He resigned his post of secretary of the navy in 1852 when he became the Whig vice-presidential nominee. As a delegate to the Washington Peace Convention in February 1861 and as a member of the North Carolina secession convention, Graham opposed secession but altered his course after Lincoln's call for troops. In 1864 he represented his state in the Second Confederate Congress and by March 1865 had come to advocate separate state action for terms of peace. He was again elected to the U.S. Senate in 1866 but was not allowed to take his seat. As a delegate to the Philadelphia Union Convention in 1866, he endorsed Johnson's Reconstruction program. He subsequently retired from politics, serving as a trustee of the Peabody Fund for southern education from 1866 until his death. Ezra J. Warner and W. Buck Yearns, eds, Biographical Register of the Confederate Congress (Baton Rouge, 1975), 104-05; ACAB, 2: 701-02; NCAB, 4: 426. does so, with a kick at the Baltimore platforms.
They shield their inconsistency under this Greeley sophistry.
It is true, sir—this is a very shallow sophistry—a very miserable cov-
ering; but you know a drowning man will catch at a straw. Like almost all
sophistry, its effect is produced by a skilful substitution of a false for the
real issue. It calls attention from the vote to the state of mind of the voter,
from his pro-slavery vote to his anti-slavery character, from his actions to
his professions.
Now, we who call ourselves of the Free Democracy do not deny that
the Whig platform ought to be defied and spit upon. That is our doctrine
exactly. We not only think so, believe so, and feel so, but we are prepared
to act so.
We do not deny that Mr. Greeley and other anti-slavery Whigs, think,
believe and feel as we do. They spit, repudiate and defy; but that does not
meet the case. The question is not whether they thus spit and defy; but does
this spit and defiance go along with their vote, or does it, like spit to the
windward, come straight back in their faces?
We know you hate your platform in your hearts; but we complain that
you do not in your votes. You love liberty and vote against it. You hate
slavery and the fugitive slave act, and then vote for the twin abominations.
When we condemn your votes, you vindicate your opinions; when we
assail your deeds, you defend your motives. Is this honest? Is it manly?
What matter is it to the man in chains, whether his chains are voted on
by an anti-slavery or by a pro-slavery man, by a Christian or by an infidel?
It is not the motives nor the opinions of the voter, but it is the vote that either
rivets or breaks his fetters.
It does seem strange that men can be found who can act so inconsis-
tently.
The candidates of the two great parties have accepted their nomina-
tions, understandingly and distinctly. And these nominations have not been
more distinctly and understandingly accepted than have the platforms; both
came from the same bodies, and were presented at the same time, and
accepted at the same time. There can be no mistake about it.
Now, for these candidates to allow themselves to be voted for while on
these platforms, and then turn round after getting into power and violate the
principles and measures set forth in them, would be nothing less than
political treachery of the basest kind.
General Scott might well say of that class, save me from my friends; for
just in proportion to the success of Mr. Greeley at the North, must be
General Scott’s unpopularity at the South.
Sir, I leave this miserable paper castle to be disposed of by that Hale7John Parker Hale.
storm which is beginning to show itself in the political firmament. With the
remark, that considering how much the Whig party North has had to
complain of in the way of treachery, bad luck and the like; how much Mr.
Greeley belabored the unfortunate accidental President eleven years ago,8Greeley was not among the earliest Whig critics of John Tyler, who succeeded to the presidency upon the death of Whig president William H. Harrison in April 1841. Four months after Tyler assumed office, some fifty Whig members of Congress repudiated the president's veto of a national bank bill and read him out of the party. The Tribune editor continued to serve as New York correspondent of Tyler's Washington organ, the Madisonian, through the winter of 1841. By the summer of 1842, however, Greeley, outraged by Tyler's August veto of a tariff bill that would have continued to distribute the proceeds of land sales to the states, publicly withdrew his support from the president. On 10 September he began to carry Henry Clay's name on the Tribune's masthead as the Whig presidential candidate in the 1844 elections. Six days later he listed several of Tyler's post office appointments under the heading “Appointments by Judas Iscariot. " Van Deusen, Horace Greeley, 85-88; Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South (New York, 1939), 249; New York Daily Tribune, 10, 16 September 1842, 29 June 1843.
for treachery to Whig principles and Whig measures; it does seem that this
spit and repudiation theory should have emanated from another quarter
than the Whig party, and from another pen than that of Horace Greeley.
Whig principles and obligations were quite loose enough before this shock.
Whiggery cannot stand much more. I apprehend that this one will kill it, at
least in the South, where it has heretofore had little better than a name to
live.
But we are asked by the Whig and Democratic parties to give them
power. What they want with power they have frankly told us.
The question is, Can we innocently and wisely give them our votes,
and secure to them the reins of government which they crave? Ought we to
vote for them, or ought we to vote against them, is the question? Let us see.
There is, in this country, a system of injustice and cruelty, shocking to
every sentiment of humanity—a crime and scandal, making this country a
hissing and a by-word to the world, and liable to the judgments of a
righteous God.
This stupendous iniquity, this giant crime, this murderous system, is
Slavery.
There is nothing to which we can liken it. It is barbarous, monstrous,
and bloody. Crushed beneath this most horrible institution, are three mil-
lions of our countrymen. These are subject to the terrible inflictions of the
fetter, the lash, and the chain. These suffering men and women have been
held, and are now held, to gratify the pride, to indulge the indolence, to
minister to the lust and pleasure of three hundred thousand slaveholders.
For a long time, these slaveholders have, with greater or less com-
pleteness, ruled this nation. They have had the lion’s share in all the honors
and emoluments of office. They govern the states in which they are. They
monopolize all state offices, unless it be the office of negro-whipper. This
they are willing to have Northern ruffians to do for them. It is next to
impossible for any man in the Southern States, not a slaveholder, to get into
any respectable office above that of a constable or a negro-driver.
In South Carolina, a man who is not able to own ten slaves cannot be a
member of the Legislature.9Among the requirements for election to the state House of Representatives that were enumerated in Article I, Section 6, of the 1790 South Carolina constitution was the provision that members of the lower house either possess a freehold of at least five hundred acres and own at least ten slaves or hold title to real estate worth £l50. Article I, Section 15, of the 1861 state constitution retained the requirement. Thomas Cooper, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia. SC, l836—41 ), 1: 185; Journal of the Convention of the People of South Carolina Held in 1860, 1861, and 1862 (Columbia, SC, 1862), 807; William A. Schaper, Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina (Washington, DC, 1901), 379; John H. Wolfe, Jeffersonian Democracy in South Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, 1940), 46. He may be, in every respect, qualified as a
legislator, a sober, honest, intelligent and patriotic man; but if the blood of
his brother man be not in his skirts, he is, by law, disqualified to legislate in
South Carolina.
What is law in South Carolina, is custom in nearly all the slave states of
this Union. The slaveholders gather up the reins of the government, and
pocket the rewards of office, to the exclusion and degradation of the honest
and industrious free white man of the South. The thirst of the slaveholder
for power is insatiable. The more they get, the more they want. Every
concession is followed by a new and still more unreasonable demand. To
comply with one demand, is only to pave the way to a new exaction. The
history of this country shows that between freedom and slavery there has
been a constant systematic effort on the part of the latter to extinguish and
destroy the former. The struggle has been long and fierce, and the combat-
ants are still in the field.
It may be well, in this connection, to call to mind a few facts in the
history of this struggle, and to take a general view of the different phases of
the slave power.
Daniel Webster said at Springfield, Mass[achusetts], that nations, not
less than individuals, do well to pause at certain periods, and survey the
past, examine the present, and, in the light ofthese, contemplate the future.
This is but one of the many sage suggestions from the same quarter. What
of the night?10An adaptation of Isa. 21: 11. Whither are we tending? Is the ship of State sound, tight and
free? or is she leaky and liable to sink? Are we out of danger? or are we in
the midst of sharp and flinty rocks? Are we advancing? or are we retro-
grading? These questions concern every American citizen.
The Slavery power has aimed at two objects from the beginning. First,
to acquire a wide and fertile territory; second, to control the government. It
needs endless, limitless fields over which to pour its poisonous and blasting
influence. lts province is not to replenish, but to wear out the earth. lts
course is like that of the locusts of Egypt; ruin and desolation are in its
track.
The virgin soil of Virginia, once the most fertile, inviting and beauti-
ful, is now spread out like a withered branch on the Republic, cursed and
blighted by slavery. Whole villages, once thronged with people, are now
deserted, and crumbling in ruins.
North Carolina is rapidly going to decay; and all the older slave states
are witnesses to the ruinous influence of slavery. The contrast between
Kentucky and Ohio is familiar to you all; and the causes of that contrast are
known to every intelligent American. Cassius M. Clay, himself a Ken-
tuckian, has unfolded these causes, and demonstrated, beyond all question,
that emancipation tomorrow, so far from making his native state poorer,
would on the very instant make that State richer.11Kentucky-born free-labor advocate Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903) was the youngest son of a wealthy slaveowner of Madison County, Kentucky. He studied at Transylvania University and graduated from Yale College in 1832. Upon his father's death in 1828, Clay inherited seventeen slaves and several large tracts of land, including two thousand acres of White Hall, the family estate. He expressed his distaste for slavery as a labor system as early as 1835 while a Whig representative from Madison County in the state legislature. It was during his successful 1840 campaign for the legislature from Fayette County, locus of the state's Blue Grass slave-owning planter elite, that Clay began to elaborate his economic indictment of slavery. In that campaign, Clay appealed to large slaveowners and small farmers and artisans to endorse his support for the state's Negro Law of 1833, which prohibited the importation of slaves into Kentucky. He reasoned that the law not only increased the value of Kentucky slave property, whose owners remained the sole legal sellers of slaves in the state, but also promised, by gradually limiting the availability ofslave labor, to benefit free workers. In 1843, after the legislature repealed the 1833 restriction on slave imports, Clay emancipated his slaves and hired them on his plantation, where he specialized in raising beef for the Cincinnati market. That same year, in a series of articles in the New York Tribune that were later issued as the pamphlet Slavery: The Evil—The Remedy (New York, 1844), he called for a state constitutional convention to provide for the gradual abolition of slavery. In January 1845 his “Address to the People of Kentucky" attempted to explain why Ohio was more economically developed than her border state neighbor. He concluded that Ohio's higher land values, her rapidly growing white population buttressed by immigration, the expanding market which her towns and cities offered local farmers, and a system of public education supported by revenues had been denied Kentucky by slavery. Increasingly he addressed his appeal to white nonslaveowners who, he argued, were impoverished by slavery. From Lexington, in June 1845, he launched a weekly newspaper, the True American, to be devoted to the organization of a state antislavery political party. After local residents dismantled his press that August and shipped it to Cincinnati, Clay published the paper from Louisville as the Examiner until the summer of 1846, when he volunteered to serve in the war against Mexico. In the 1850s he donated land on which Kentucky antislavery minister John G. Fee established the school that later became Berea College, though he withdrew his support from the institution when Fee decided to admit black students. During the Civil War he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Russia (1861-62, 1863-69). Clay remained an advocate of southern industrial development, alternately identifying the interests of his region with the Democratic party, which he joined in 1874, and the Republican party, to which he returned a decade later. David L. Smiley, Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (Madison, Wisc., 1962), 36-57, 80-82, 217n; Horace Greeley, ed., The Writings of Cassius Marcellus Clay (New York, 1848), 173-83, 203-10; Martin, Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky, 112n; DAB, 4: 169-70. Yet, there she lies, in the
ruinous embrace of Slavery, venting her curses and repinings over the
prosperity, progress and intelligence of her neighboring sister. Her chil-
dren, instead of remaining with her, making all her hills, valleys, and
plains cheerful, are straying away into the limitless Southwest, to plant,
only to poison the virgin soil, with slavery. As with the slaveholders of
Kentucky, so with the slaveholders of all the older slave states.
When I was a boy, the most dreaded doom to which a slave could be
subjected, was that of being sold to Georgia. That was our Southern slave
market thirty years ago. Since then, the surplus increase of human stock has
demanded new outlets and new markets. Virginia has asked for fresh
markets for her human produce; and the North has consented and conceded
the request. We are starving, said Virginia. Our negroes are swarming
around us, and are literally eating us out of house and home. We must have
relief. We must have a market for human flesh, or we are ruined. We have
sometimes been told that Virginia was moving for the abolition of slavery;
but that the injudicious course of Northern abolitionists has put back the
cause in that State, and defeated the benevolent designs of Virginia in this
matter.
I am persuaded that this statement is far from the truth. The real cause
for the defeat of the anti-slavery movement in Virginia is found in the fact
that Northern pro-slavery men have, whenever slave property was de-
creased in value, opened new markets for human flesh, and raised its price.
Thus, when slavery was dying from its utter unprofitableness, new life and
vigor have been imparted to its expiring frame by Northern men and by
Northern votes.
The purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas, the war with the
Seminoles, and the war with Mexico, were all measures commenced and
carried on for the purpose of giving prosperity and perpetuity to slavery,
and for maintaining the sway of the slave power over the republic. Any man
who doubts this, has only to read “Jay’s view of the action of the federal
government, ” and his “Review of the Mexican war,"12A reference to William Jay, A View of the Action of the Federal Government, in Behalf of Slavery (New York, 1839) and idem, A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (Boston, 1849). to have his doubts
entirely removed.
Gentlemen, let us inquire, What was the state of the anti-slavery ques-
tion four years ago? I mean in its political aspects. Fourteen legislatures had
solemnly instructed their representatives in Congress to vote for the Wil-
mot Proviso.
Innumerable political conventions throughout the North had declared
in favor of excluding slavery from the newly acquired territories from
Mexico. This policy had the support of leading men of the North. Daniel
Webster had declared his unalterable determination to oppose the farther
extension of slavery. Whigs and Democrats vied with each other in profes-
sions of hostility to the slavery propagandism of the ultra slaveholding
politicians of the South. This sentiment became so strong that a powerful
party was organized, solemnly pledging itself to “fight on and fight ever"
against slavery and the ascendancy of the slave power in the councils of
the nation. The agitation in this direction was general and widespread. The
North was in flame. The eloquence of the Stantons,13Born in Griswold, Connecticut, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805—87). probably best remembered as the husband of feminist advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, became an abolitionist while a student at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati and was among the fifty “Lane Rebels" who, inspired by Theodore Dwight Weld, withdrew in 1834 when the school's trustees prohibited their antislavery efforts. After his resignation, Stanton joined recent antislavery convert James G. Birney on a lecture tour in the northeast. served as general agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, canvassing Rhode Island in 1835 to organize antislavery affiliates, and by 1837 was a member of the national society's Executive Committee. Between 1837 and 1840 Stanton increasingly challenged the Garrisonian doctrine of “non-resistance," insisting that abolitionists had a moral duty to use political means to achieve antislavery reforms. Unlike many of his “new organization" colleagues, with whom he agreed on the issue of antislavery politics, however, Stanton seems to have been inclined to endorse women abolitionists' right to hold office, lecture, and participate fully in the antislavery movement. By 1847, when he and his family moved from Boston, where he had practiced law, to Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton had become a leading member of the Liberty party. At the first national convention of the Free Soil party in Buffalo in August 1848, Stanton urged Liberty men to fuse with other antislavery dissidents and helped write the new party's platform. In 1849 and 1851 he was elected to the New York legislature. In 1852, much to Douglass's dismay, Stanton, convinced of the futility of third-party movements, endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Franklin Pierce. In 1855 he helped organize the Republican party in New York and supported it until Grant's administration, when he became a Democrat. A prolific writer, Stanton's articles appeared in abolitionist journals, political and religious papers, and Greeley's Tribune. After the Civil War he contributed regularly to the New York Sun. Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn, 1971). 63-67; Aileen Kraditor,Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics (New York, 1967). 68n, 120-24; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 156—59; Blue, Free Soilers, 74-178, 180; Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (Johnstown, N. Y., 1885), 26, 34, 52; FDP, 17 June 1852; NCAB, 2: 331; DAB, 17: 524-25. the Van Burens,14After the reintroduction of the Wilrnot Proviso in Congress in the winter of 1847, John Van Buren (1810-66), son of eighth U.S. president and Free Soil party presidential nominee Martin Van Buren (1782—1862), became one of the prime architects of the New York Barnburners' position on slavery extension. Having graduated from Yale College in 1828, he studied law with his father’s law partner, Benjamin F. Butler, was admitted to the Albany bar in 1831, and in 1845 served as state attorney general. In October 1847 he delivered one of the main addresses at the mass meeting in Herkimer, New York, where antislavery Democrats repudiated the state Democratic convention's refusal to adopt a resolution opposing the extension of slavery and vowed to oppose any Democratic nominee who did not endorse the Wilmot Proviso. In 1848 he continued his joint campaign to commit the Democratic party to the geographical containment of slavery and to wrest the state party from Hunker control, helping to write the platform of the June 1848 Utica convention that nominated his father for president on a Barnburner ticket and lobbying vigorously to make opposition to slavery extension the basis of cooperation among antislavery delegates to the August Free Soil convention. In 1849 Van Buren informed a New York state Democratic convention: “We expect to make the Democratic party of this State the great anti-slavery party of this State, and through it to make the Democratic party of the United States the great anti-slavery party of the United States." However, few Barnburners shared his initial reluctance to endorse the Compromise of 1850. A year after he urged popular resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law before a Vermont Free Democratic convention in May 1851, Van Buren changed his course and publicly declared his support for the Compromise. Douglass charged him with treachery and betrayal when he endorsed Pierce and the 1852 Democratic party platform. He remained in the Democratic party, running unsuccessfully for state attorney general in 1865. Charles H. Peck. “John Van Buren: A Study in By-gone Politics,” Magazine of American History, 17: 327-28 (April 1887); Walter L. Ferree, “The New York Democracy: Division and Reunion, 1847—1852" (Ph.D. diss.,University of Pennsylvania, 1953), 380, 461; Rayback, Free Soil, 60-75; Blue, Free Soilers, 31132, 66; FDP, 17 June 1852; NCAB, 3: 386; DAB, 19: 151—52. the
Butlers,15Douglass refers to Democratic politician, lawyer, and former U.S. attorney general (1833-38) Benjamin Franklin Butler (1795-1858) of New York, who should not be confused with the Civil War general from Massachusetts of the same name. Upon completion of his studies at Hudson Academy, Butler read law in the offices of Martin Van Buren and became his law partner in 1817. He served as district attomey of Albany County (1821-—25), was elected to the state legislature in 1828, and in 1833 was appointed a commissioner for New York to settle the state's boundary with New Jersey. In Jackson’s administration he was acting secretary of war for five months. He later served as U.S. district attorney for New York's Southern District (1838-41) while professor of law at the University of the City of New York. An influential member of his state's Democratic party, Butler counseled against an independent anti-extension movement in 1847 but later attended the Buffalo Free Soil convention, where he was chaimian of the Committee on Resolutions that drafted the party's platform. By 1849 Butler despaired of the independent Free Soil movement and as a member of the Barnburner General Committee he proposed that acceptance of Congressional power to prohibit slavery in the territories should be the basis of the reunion between Hunker and Barnburner Democrats. Douglass noted Butler's absence from the 1852 Free Democratic convention in August. He was to remain in the Democratic party until passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act led him to join the Republicans and campaign for Fremont in 1856. Ferree, “The New York Democracy," 239, 260, 268; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 147, 157; Blue, Free Soilers, 72, 76—77; FDP, 20 August 1852; NCAB, 5: 297—98; ACAB, 1: 476—77. the Kings,16Antislavery Democrat Preston King (1806-65) of Ogdensburg, New York, strongly supported the Wilmot Proviso and introduced in Congress in January 1847 a somewhat broader measure that would prohibit slavery “in any territory which shall hereafter be acquired or be annexed." Unsuccessful in an earlier attempt to have slavery barred from a portion of the Texas territory, he urged Congress to reserve the fruits of American expansion for free white settlers. “False and recreant to his race and to his constituency," he charged, “would be any Representative of free white men and women who should by his vote place free white labor upon a condition of social equality with the labor of the black slave." In 1847 King led New York Democrats in calling for an independent third party movement committed to free territory. He campaigned vigorously for anti-extension the following year, serving as chairman of the Committee on Organization at the Buffalo Free Soil convention and helping to write the party's platform. Though King supported Pierce in 1852, he bolted the Democratic party after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, taking many Barnburners with him. As a member of the U.S. Senate (1857-63), he supported Lincoln's war policies and later served as chairman (1860-64) of the National Committee of the Republican Party. In 1865 he was appointed collector of customs in New York but committed suicide after three months in office. Edward P. Muller, “Preston King: A Political Biography" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1957), 375, 378; Chaplain W. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy (Chapel Hill, NC., 1967), 31, 151, 153; Blue, Free Soilers, 65-66, 72-73, 85-86; Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited," JAH, 56: 271 (September 1969); ACAB, 3: 541—42; DAB, 10: 396—97. roused the Northern feeling and excited intense and
burning enthusiasm among the people. No more Slave States, No more
Slave Territory, Free States, Free Men, and Free Territory, leaped joyously
from Northern lips of all parties and creeds. The movement appeared
formidable. The South became alarmed, and it was evident that leading
men at the South felt that their crafty wisdom was about to be confounded,
and their counsels brought to nought. They changed their aggressive tactics
for a defensive attitude. They declared that Congress had no right to decide
what should be the character of the institutions established in the territories,
and that that question should be left to the territories themselves.
Such, gentlemen, was the state of this question four years ago. The
cause of freedom looked auspicious. For the first time in the political
history of this nation there did appear a strong likelihood that the people and
the politicians in the North would remain firm and unyielding; that they
would withstand the shock of Southern aggression with manly courage; and
that freedom would come off victorious.
But, alas! Northern integrity and spirit were no match for the dogged
persistence, seductive blandishments, and bribery of the South. The
slaveholders entirely outgeneralled the men of the North at the very outset
of the winter of ’49, with a boldness creditable to their sagacity. The
slaveholding members of Congress, under the lead of Mr. Calhoun, or-
ganized themselves into a sort of Congress of their own, and marked out
the kind of legislation which the legitimate Congress should adopt, and
threatened that direful consequences would ensue if Congress should, in its
wisdom, disregard the views and opinions held by them, the slavehold-
ers.17After the 1848 presidential election, John C. Calhoun, convinced that the organization of an independent political party committed to the exclusion of slavery from the territories portended political and social catastrophe for the slaveholding states, urged southern Whigs and Democrats to form a bipartisan party to defend the interests of slavery. On 22 December 1848, the day after New York Whig congressman Daniel Gott introduced a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, 18 senators and 51 members of the House, drawn from both major parties and representing all the slave states but Delaware, convened in the Senate chamber to consider the problem of formulating a southern strategy. The caucus selected a joint Committee of Fifteen to draft a statement on the need for a unified southern campaign against antislavery legislation and to consider a resolution, offered by Thomas H. Bayly of Accomac, Virginia, which proposed that Congress had no authority “to impair or destroy the right of property in slaves either in the States, the District of Columbia, the Territories of the United States, or any other place whatever." The preparation of the first draft of the “Address to the People of the Southern States" fell largely to Calhoun. Whig support for circulating the address declined in the face of congressional attempts to hammer out a compromise on the question of slavery in the territories and the efforts of some southern Democrats, particularly in South Carolina and Mississippi, to build popular support for secession. The final address, recast as an “Address to the People of the United States," was issued in late January 1849 and was signed by 48 southern congressmen, 46 of whom were Democrats. Wiltse, Calhoun: Sectionalist, 379, 381-88; Gerald M. Capers, John C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal (Gainesville, Fla., 1960), 239-41; Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848-1861 ([Baton Rouge], 1953), 52, 59; Richard K. Crallé, ed., The Works of John C. Calhoun, 6 vols. (New York, 1851-56), 6: 290—313. We all remember how this movement operated. The cry of Danger
to the Union was raised. FOOTE, the fire-eater and hangman, led the
American Senate in this cry. He was followed by the late Mr. Clay, who
boldly assailed the policy of Gen. Taylor, and drew vivid pictures of
“dismal terror and dire confusion,'' of “disunion,” and civil war. Cass
followed in the same course. Douglas, with characteristic wariness, en-
couraged the idea that something really terrible was at hand. He, of course,
was for concession; everything was to be done to save the Union.18By 1850 Democratic senators Henry Stuart Foote (1804-80) of Mississippi and Lewis Cass of Michigan were the acknowledged leaders of unionist forces in their respective states. Douglass broadly alludes to the role that they, together with Stephen Arnold Douglas (1813-61) of Illinois, played in securing passage of the 1850 compromise measures initially presented in the Senate in late January and early February 1850 by Henry Clay. Foote was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, graduated in 1819 from Washington College, studied law and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1823, and by 1826 had settled in Mississippi. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1847. A declared opposition to secession led him to join the small number of southern Democrats who endorsed the 1850 compromise measures as sufficient to protect the interests of the slaveholding states within the union. His support of the compromise alienated him from Mississippi's regular Democratic leadership, and under the banner of the Union party he defeated Jefferson Davis in the 1852 gubernatorial race. It was Foote who first called for the Senate to appoint a select committee, the resultant Committee of Thirteen chaired by Clay, to review Clay's compromise measures and link them in a single bill. Clay presented the committee's report to the Senate on 8 May and two weeks later contrasted the committee's bill with President Zachary Taylor's plan urging the admission of California as a free state. He insisted that the president's proposal demanded concessions only from the South and failed to relieve southern fears about subsequent attempts to apply the Wilmot Proviso. Denying that he was among those who believed “that there was any present actual danger to the existence of the Union," Clay insisted that Congress address not only the question of Califomia statehood but the problems raised by pending bills on the status of slavery in the territories, the rendition of fugitive slaves, and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia: “Unless some such measure prevail, instead of healing and closing the wounds of the country, instead of stopping the effusion of blood, it will flow in still greater quantities, with still greater danger to the Republic.” After the Senate dismembered Clay's “omnibus bill" on 31 July, Douglas, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, organized pro-compromise forces on the separate components of the bill, served as floor manager of the bills in the Senate, and coordinated Senate—House action to achieve passage of the bills by mid-September. A former chairman of the Committee on the Territories in the House of Representatives, to which he was first elected in 1843, Douglas was to play a major role in the organization of the Nebraska Territory and the framing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act during his tenure as chairman of the same committee in the Senate, where he represented Illinois for fourteen years. Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, 34, 62, 92; William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 284, 291, 300, 302-10; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848—1861 (New York, 1976), 104, 108, 110n; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), 172, 186; Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 1st sess, Appendix, 614, 616; BDAC, 826, 902; ACAB, 2: 213, 496; NCAB, 13: 490; DAB, 5: 397-403, 6: 500-01.
Gentlemen, the trick worked admirably. Man after man gave in his
adhesion, to the cry of Danger to the Union. Papers of all parties flamed
with it; and the land was filled with dread and apprehension.
Still, gentlemen, there was hope. The great “Expounder” had not
spoken. He stood before the country openly and strongly committed to the
principles of the Free Soil party; and he was known in private to have
encouraged the young Whigs of New England to stand by the principle of
the ordinance of ’87.19Douglass refers to the prohibition of slavery in territories northwest of the Ohio River by the sixth article of the Northwest Ordinance, adopted 13 July 1787. Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (New York, 1971 ), 381-82; Ford et al., Journals of the Continental Congress, 32: 343. But to the disappointment and mortification of all
who had confidence in him, Daniel Webster fell; and “what a fall was
there, my countrymen!”
“Then I, and you, and all of us fell down
And bloody treason flourished o’er us."20Douglass closely paraphrases Julius Caesar, act 3, sc. 2, lines 195—97.
The North stood appalled and paralyzed, deserted, abandoned, and
betrayed—cowed and bowed down under the proud domination and impu-
dence of the lords of the lash. Such was the state of this question after the
seventh of March, ’50.21On 7 March 1850, three days after John C. Calhoun had warned that the slavery question was endangering the Union, Daniel Webster addressed a crowded Senate chamber. “I wish to speak to-day not. . . as a northern man, but as an American," he declared. Announcing his support for the compromise resolutions introduced in January by Henry Clay, Webster reviewed the history of slavery and argued that a congressional ban on slavery in the former Mexican territories was unnecessary since "the law of nature" precluded the introduction of the institution there. Webster acknowledged the validity of southern complaints regarding the recovery of bondsmen who escaped to the North and promised his support for a revised fugitive slave law. Congressional Globe, 3lst Congress, 1st sess., Appendix, 269-76. The slaveholders waxed bolder every hour; and
the men of the North humbler. There was now no doubt that the South could
get its most extravagant demands complied with.
Texas, that most powerful and warlike State, wanted ten millions of
money. She only had to threaten that she would whip the United States, to
get every dollar of it.22As part of the Compromise of 1850, Texas abandoned its claims to large portions of present day New Mexico in exchange for the federal government's aid in repaying claims against the Texas Republic. Abolitionists charged that the threats of Texas governor P. H. Bell to occupy Santa Fe were bluffs to extort a larger sum from Congress. In the final settlement, the Texas state government received $5 million and Texas Republic bondholders eventually obtained $7.75 million. Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, 20-21, 103-04, 124-32, 137-38, 151-52, 154, 179-81; Edmund T. Miller, A Financial History of Texas (Austin, 1916), 82, 118-33. I am only surprised that she did not ask for twenty
millions, instead of ten. She might have got it easily. I drop this glance at
the past. It is a sickening theme. I have alluded to it with a view to refresh
your memories, and to awaken that indignation which it is fitted to inspire.
I come now to the more immediate question before us. I presume I
speak to some men who have not made up their minds as to who they shall
vote for in the coming election; and that they are candidly considering that
question. To them I would speak.
There are now three parties in the field—the Whig, the Democratic and
the Free Democratic party.
The two large parties are now, if they were not before, united on the
only great question which really and seriously divides the country.
Old differences have subsided; old issues have been laid aside.
The only question about which there seems a division of opinion,
respects the matter of river and harbor improvements; and here the dif-
ference is seeming, rather than reality.
The Whigs are in favor of making constitutional appropriations for this
purpose, and the Democrats are opposed to unconstitutional appropria-
tions.23On the question of internal improvements, the Whigs, meeting in Baltimore in mid-June, referred to Congress’s constitutional power to undertake projects for defense and commerce, “such improvements being, in every instance, national and general in their character.” The Democrats, meeting in Baltimore two weeks earlier, observed that “it is inexpedient and dangerous to exercise doubtful constitutional powers," and agreed that the “general government" did not possess the power to “commence and carry on a general system of internal improvements" or to assume state debts resulting from such projects. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789—1968, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), 2: 951—52, 956—57.So that there is after all, no direct issue—no great principle in the
matter of public policy which divides them.
The struggle seems purely one of men, which men shall have the
dispensing of power and place the next four years. Here, there is a strong
division, and the contest is warm. But what are the measures, sentiments,
and principles which both parties ask you to support?
This question is important. I will answer it in my homely way. They
ask you to give them power to make the compromise measures of 1850 a
final settlement of the slavery question. The resolutions on that point stand
at the head of many of their papers, as the comer-stone of those parties.
The first objection, and a very important one to those platforms, is the
idea that human enactments may be “final” in this country; that one
generation may tie the hands of another; that the darkness of the past shall
be preferred to the light of the present; that like the laws of the Medes and
Persians, the laws of the Republic shall remain unchanged.24Douglass may allude to Dan. 6: 8: “Now, O king, establish the decree, and sign the writing. that it be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not." The Medes, inhabitants of the northwestern portion of ancient Iran known as Media, were steppe dwellers noted for their breeding of horses. After their conquest by Cyrus of Anshan in 550 B.C., the laws and customs of the Medes combined with those of the Persians. Douglas et al., New Bible Dictionary, 801—02. 1 say that this
is an idea that every American citizen is bound to oppose. It strikes a deadly
blow at the spirit and the hope of progress; and reduces the growing limbs
of the Republic to cramping cast-iron moulds. The thing is unnatural, and
no more to be countenanced in this country, than iron shoes for the feet of
American women.
Besides, if one law can be put beyond the reach of future generations,
all laws may; and one generation may not only enjoy the right of making
laws for themselves, but do up the legislation for all generations to come.
Now, I think that one legislature ought to be satisfied with making such
laws as it in its wisdom or its folly may determine, without reaching its
death fingers into the living future and controlling future legislatures.
The next thing they ask you to do, is to authorize them to admit
unnumbered States into the Union, with slavery. You are to bind your-
selves, that when one of these States ask admission into this Union, you
will not raise the question of the wisdom or the wickedness of admitting
another slave-cursed member into this Republic. There is no fiction here.
Those States are to be admitted with or without slavery. But everybody
knows that the “without” means nothing and meant nothing at the time.
Hon. Horace Mann,25Educated in local “winter schools" until the age of sixteen, noted American educator Horace Mann (1796—1859) was the youngest son of a yeoman farmer of Franklin, Massachusetts, who was descended from one of the oldest families in the Bay Colony. After nearly a year of tutoring by an itinerant schoolteacher who had temporarily settled in Franklin and with a nearby Baptist minister, Mann entered the sophomore class at Brown University in 1816, graduating as valedictorian in 1819. He studied law at the academy in Litchfield, Connecticut, was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823, practiced in Dedham and Boston until 1833, and was elected to the Massachusetts General Court (1827-33) and the state senate (1833-37), where he advocated state care for the insane and manifested interest in what was to become a lifelong devotion to educational reform. As secretary (1837-48) of the first state Board of Education and as editor (1838-48) of his semimonthly Common School Journal, Mann promoted a tax-supported system of public school education, seeing a nonsectatian common school education as the foundation of democratic government, capable of sustaining an equality of opportunity otherwise denied by increasing inequities of wealth. In 1848 he succeeded John Quincy Adams as Whig representative from Massachusetts's eighth congressional district, and, upon moving to Washington, joined in the legal defense of Daniel Drayton and Edward Sayres, who were standing trial for their attempt to aid slaves to escape. Successfully reelected to Congress as a Free Soiler in 1850, Mann later served as the first president (1852—59) of the recently established Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Although it has not been possible to identify the speech by Mann to which Douglass refers, Mann was an outspoken opponent of the extension of slavery in the territories, declaring in a major speech in the House in February 1851, “better a civil or a servile war,—better any thing that God in his providence shall send than an extension of the bounds of slavery. " In a series of lectures and public letters, he excoriated Daniel Webster's endorsement of the 1850 compromise measures. He questioned Webster's assertion that climate and geography naturally barred slavery in New Mexico and urged the necessity ofcongressional action, reasoning that slavery could exist in the western territories: “[A]ll accounts concur in representing New Mexico to be rich in mines; and mines are the favorite sphere for slavery.” Jonathan Messerli, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York, 1972), 4n, 12, 263-64; Ernest Cassara, “Reformer as Politician: Horace Mann and the Anti-Slavery Struggle in Congress. 1848—1853,” Journal of American Studies, 5: 247-63 (December 1971); Larry Gara, “Horace Mann: Antislavery Congressman," The Historian, 32: 19-33 (November 1969); Horace Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches (Boston, 1853), 225, 324; Congressional Globe, 32nd Cong. 1st sess., Appendix, 1071—81; ACAB, 4: 190-91; NCAB, 3: 78-79; DAB, 12: 240-43. in a speech of surpassing power and eloquence,
has shown that slavery already exists in New Mexico. It has been long
known that slaveholders design to force the slave system upon Utah. In this
they may not succeed; but the question of success or failure depends upon
you.
The votes of the North are to decide the case. Should there be a strong
vote for Hale and Julian,26George Washington Julian (1817-99), born in Centreville, Indiana, had a long career as an antislavery and reform politician. Essentially self-educated, Julian taught elementary school for three years before becoming a lawyer in 1840. Despite a youthful conversion from Quakerism to Unitarianism, Julian retained great sympathy for the slave. He was elected to the Indiana legislature in 1845 as a Whig, but converted to Free Soilism in 1848 and served a term in Congress (1849-51). In April 1852 both Julian and Douglass were featured speakers at the Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Convention. Later that year, Julian was the unsuccessful Free Soil candidate for vice president. An early Republican, he returned to the House of Representatives in 1860 for five consecutive terms. As a congressman, Julian championed civil rights for the freedmen, woman suffrage, and public land policy reform. Offended by the corruption of the Grant administration, Julian supported the Liberal Republican movement and eventually became a Democrat. Patrick W. Riddleberger, George Washington Julian, Radical Republican: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Politics and Reform (Indianapolis, 1966); ACAB, 3: 486. slavery will be checked. Northern men will be
made to feel there is a North. Otherwise, slavery may run rampant.
Again; the Whig Party and the Democratic Party ask you for power; the
one to discountenance, and the other to resist agitation; or in other words, to
discountenance and resist the exercise of the right of speech. These patties
express themselves with great emphasis on this point, leaving no doubt of
the importance which they attach to this particular item of their creed.
The Whigs mean to discountenance, and the Democrats mean to resist
agitation. They are going to do so whenever and wherever the evil may
appear, whether in Congress or out of Congress, they will discountenance
and resist.
Here, then, is a deliberate, open, and decided attempt to discourage
and fetter the constitutional and national right of speech. Whigs and Demo-
crats, in their party and organized capacity, have resolved to discourage
and resist agitation at all times. in all places, in Congress or out of Con-
gress.
We are bound to regard this declaration on their part, not merely as a
vague sentiment, but one which may be incorporated into the legislation of
this country. It appears in their political platforms, and is presented with
other objects to be accomplished by the parties adopting them. If these
parties mean anything more than mere bravado, they mean to make their
discountenance and resistance a reality, even to the extent of suppressing
agitation by law, making it penal to discuss the question of slavery.
This right of speech is very dear to the hearts of intelligent lovers of
liberty. It is the delight of the lovers of liberty, as it is the dread and terror of
tyrants.
Why, then, have these two great parties arrayed themselves against its
exercise? Why have they imitated the crowned heads of the old world in
warring upon it?
The answer is, we have got in this country a system of wickedness
which cannot bear the light of free discussion. We have here 3,000,000 of
God’s children bound in chains, and who are murderously robbed of all
their dearest rights; and to save their atrocious system from the execration
of the American people, these parties have openly declared it to be their
purpose to abridge the right of speech. The purpose, and the means to
accomplish it, are alike worthy of each other. To chain the slave, these
parties have said we must fetter the free! To make tyranny safe, we must
endanger the liberties of the nation, by destroying the palladium of all
liberty and progress—the freedom of speech.
It is idle and short-sighted to regard this question as merely relating to
the liberties of the colored people of this country. The wrong proposed to be
done touches every man.
If, to-day, these parties can put down the right of speech on one
subject, to-morrow they may do so on another. If they can prohibit the
discussion of the rights of black men, they may also, bye and bye, prohibit
the discussion of the rights of white men. “Liberty for all, or chains for
all. ”
Daniel Webster said, in his earlier and better days:
“Important as I deem it, to discuss on all proper occasions the policy of
the measures at present pursued, it is still more important to maintain the
right of such discussion in its full and just extent. Sentiments lately sprung
up, and now growing fashionable, make it necessary to be explicit on this
point. The more I perceive a disposition to check the freedom of inquiry, by
extravagant and unconstitutional pretences, the firmer shall be the tone,
and the freer the manner in which I shall exercise it. It is the ancient and the
undoubted prerogative of the people to canvass public measures, and the
merits of public men. It is ‘a home-bred right,’ a fire-side privilege. It hath
ever been enjoyed in every house, cottage, and hamlet in the nation. It is
not to be drawn into the controversy. It is as undoubted as the right of
breathing the air, or walking on the earth. Belonging to private life as a
right, it belongs to public life as a duty; and it is the last duty which those
whose representative I am, shall find me to abandon. Aiming at all times to
be courteous and temperate in its use, except when the right itself shall be
questioned, I shall then carry it to its extent. I shall place myself on the
extreme boundary of my rights, and bid defiance to any arm that would
move me from my ground. This high constitutional privilege I shall defend
and exercise within this house, and without this house, in all places, in time
of peace, in time of war, and at all times. Living, I shall assert it, dying, I
shall assert it; and should I leave no other inheritance to my children, by the
blessing of God I will still leave them the inheritance of free principles, and
the example of a manly, independent, and conscientious discharge of
them."27Douglass quotes from Webster's speech on enlistments, delivered in the House of Representatives on 14 January 1814. The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, 18 vols., National ed. (Boston, 1903), 14: 25.
Now it is just this “high constitutional right” which you are called
upon by the Whig and Democratic parties to crush. Slavery is so false,
unnatural, brutal, and shocking, that it won’t bear the light of discussion;
and, therefore, discussion must be put down. The system is like Lord
Granby ’s character: it can only “pass without censure, as it passeth without
observation;”28A reference to the 3 March 1769 letter from “Junius” to Sir William Draper. The exchanges between “Junius” and Draper were precipitated by the former's attack on the character of John Manners, Marquis of Granby. Political Contest, 29. and, therefore, the nation must be blindfolded. Its lips
must be padlocked; and you, fellow-citizens, are called upon to aid by your
votes this blindfolding and padlocking system.
And this is to be done, fellow-citizens, to give peace to slaveholders.
These parties have attempted to do what God has declared impossible to be
done. “There can be no peace, saith my God, to the wicked."29Douglass adapts Isa. 48: 22 or 57: 21.
Suppose it were possible to put down the free speech, what would it
avail the guilty slaveholder? Pillowed as he is upon the bosoms of mined
souls, he would still be troubled. If the tongue of every abolitionist were cut
out, and every pamphlet and periodical treating of slavery were carried to
Washington and burnt in the presence of the assembled nation, and the
whole history of the abolition movement were blotted out, still the guilty
slaveholder could have “no peace,” bubbling up from the depths of his
sin-darkened soul, would come the terrible accusation. “Thou art verily
guilty concerning thy brother. “30Douglass alludes to Gen. 42: 21.
It would be easy to enlarge on this point, but I must pass on. They ask
you to give them power to violate the constitution and to make that viola-
tion “final. ” The constitution of the United States declares that, in suits
where the amount in controversy exceeds twenty dollars in value, the right
of trial by jury shall be preserved: and that no person shall be deprived of
life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.31Douglass refers to the Seventh and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
Now, the Fugitive Slave Act notoriously violates both these provisions
at once. It scouts the idea of a trial by jury. Instead of “due process,” it
gives a summary process, and that most scandalously destitute of all show
of justice. The judge is bound to hear only one side of the case. The oath of
any two villains may consign an American citizen to the hell of slavery for
life under this Fugitive Slave Act.
A man may not throw the noose of a rope over the horns of an ox
without having his right to do so submitted to a jury; but he may seize, bind
and chain a man—a being whose value is beyond all computation—and
doom him to life-long bondage by a summary process. Thus, the beast of
burden is more sacred in the eye of the law, than is the image of God! Thus,
the right of man to himself is deemed of less consequence than the right of
man to a brute. Man’s dearest interests may be passed upon by a single
judge; but the ownership to an ASS must be determined by a jury of twelve
impartial men!
Just this monstrous anomaly the Whig and the Democratic parties ask
the aid of your votes to make final.
Once more. It has ever been deemed a thing of immense importance
among free governments, that the judicial power be placed above every
temptation to make corrupt and unjust decisions. The founders of this
government had this point distinctly and constantly in view.
To place the judicial officers of this government beyond the possibility
of corruption, they inserted these plain and wisely arranged words in the
federal constitution: “The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts,
shall receive for their service a compensation which shall not be diminished
during their continuance in office."32Douglass quotes a portion of Article III, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution. Section 8 of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act provided that payment of the fugitive slave commissioners, who were appointed by judges of the district courts, be based on fees. Critics of the act doubted that Congress could constitutionally authorize the commissioners to exercise judicial power. Abolitionists argued that because the commissioners were not appointed by the president, because the commissioners' tenure of office was temporary and not during “good behavior," and because the commissioners' compensation was not based on “fixed salaries" they could not be invested with national judicial power. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 40-41; Public Statutes at Large of the United States, 9: 464-65. The Fugitive Slave Act violates both
in spirit and letter. The judges created under it are supported, not by a
regular salary, but are supported by their fees. Their support depends upon
the number of cases which they can get before them. They are not only to
try cases; but to get cases to try. They are made to feel a direct and personal
interest in getting cases before them. They are tempted to engage in setting
nets for the feet of their fellow-men; and when they have caught one, they
try him, and get the coveted fee.
Let it not be said that honorable men would not do this mean thing. An
honorable man would not hold such an office. The work to be done is a
work for scoundrels; and scoundrels will be found to do it.
But a still darker shade. This “slave act, ” and slave-acting judges, are
paid ten dollars for every man they decide to be a slave; and only five
dollars when they fail to do so. An honorable man would have his right
hand cut off before he would sit as a judge under such a disgusting bribe.
Yet this horrid law is “final!” Fellow-citizens, there was a time when it
was quite common to hear it asked, “what have we to do with slavery?" It
was affirmed that slavery is a local institution, with which we of the North
have nothing to do.
This Fugitive Slave Law has taken away this excuse. Slavery is no
longer “sectional” (if it ever were) but “national”—no longer a mere
State institution, but a United States institution. If it never was before, it is
now an American institution, to be maintained by all the powers of the
American government.
Within the limits of the American government, slavery knows no
limits. Wherever the star-spangled banner waves, there may men hold men
as slaves.
There is not one spot in the Republic sacred to freedom; but every inch
of soil is given up to slavery, slave-hunting, slave-catching, and slavehold-
ing.
Our citizens are compelled to fly from a Republic to a Monarchy for
liberty. They fly to the paw of the British Lion for protection from the
devouring talons and bloody beak of the American Eagle.
“Hail Columbia! Happy land!”33“Hail Columbia, happy land!" is the opening line of the patriotic hymn “Hail Columbia," written in 1798 by Joseph Hopkinson and set to the music of Philip Phile’s “President's March." One verse of an antislavery version declared: “Then let the glorious anthem peal,/And drown ‘Britannia rules the waves! ’/Strike up the song that men can feel—/‘Columbia rules four million slaves!' " Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Music For Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents: Harmonies and Discords of the First One Hundred Years (New York, 1975), 142—45; Brown, Black Man, 282.
The Israelites had their cities of refuge, to which even the guilty might
escape; but our model Republic, under the corrupt and debasing policy of
our two parties, has not even a refuge for innocent men. The murderer is
better protected than the man without crime. The robber is better protected
than the robbed. And this is to be “final.”
Gentlemen, I call attention to a matter of still deeper concern. You,
yourselves; you—fathers, sons, and brothers, freemen of the North—are
compelled, by this “final” act, to throw off the dignity of manhood, and
become bloodhounds; to scent out, and hunt down your fellow-men!
This is the Whig and Democratic entertainment, to which you are
invited. You are to leave off your honest and honorable employment when
you are called upon by the blood-thirsty man-hunters to join in the chase.
You are commanded, as good citizens, to do this; and subjected to pains
and penalties if you do it not. You are commanded to bound forth at the
sound of the hunter’s horn.
Are you prepared for this dignified avocation? I will not believe it; yet
this constitutes a part of the “finality” which the Whig and Democratic
party stand pledged to maintain, and to maintain which they ask your votes
in November.
In conclusion, I will present what I deem to be the greatest objection to
voting for the candidates of the old parties. It is this:—The system of
measures which they have pledged themselves to regard as a “final settle-
ment” of the slavery question, aim a death-blow to Christian, religious
liberty. A more deliberate or skillfully-aimed blow was never given against
Christianity, than is found in this fugitive slave act. I have shown that the
law is opposed to the Constitution. It would be quite as easy to show that it
is contrary to the gospel, and to the spirit and aim of Christianity. It is true
that this law does not interfere with the forms and ceremonies of the
Christian religion. It is, however, much worse; in that it is directed against
the fundamental principles of Christianity. It strikes at the weightier mat-
ters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
Christianity commands us, as we would inherit eternal life, to “feed
the hungry, ” clothe the naked, and take in the stranger.34Douglass adapts Matt. 25: 35-36. This law makes it
penal to obey Christ. In the language of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, “we are
asked by these political parties to damn our own souls.”
Again; it would be impossible to point out a more glaring contempt of
the religious sentiment of the religious people of this country, than is
furnished in these two platforms. They virtually say to the Christian people
of this country, we regard your conscience as mere convenience; your
religion as a sham; your faith in God, and love of Christ as things having no
connection with your daily practice; and, therefore, not to be considered in
connection with your political duties.
Now, I think, Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen, that it becomes the
Christian duty of the people of this country to rebuke the contemptuous
disregard of Christianity by our political organizations. Whether they will
do so or not, remains to be seen. But, in any event, sir, I trust that this
Convention has thoroughly made up its mind to go in and come out of the
contest with clean hands.