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under that name.

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equal, or are accepted as such, and so become conditions of the mutual arrangement.

Fourthly, by this mutual exchange of conditions, the transaction takes on the nature and character of a contract, compact, or treaty, between the parties represented; and so, according to well-settled principles of morality and public law, the statute which embodies it is understood, by those who uphold this system of legislation, to be irrevocable and irrepeala

In 1819, Missouri, which was then but thinly peopled, and had an inconsiderable number of slaves, applied for admission into the Union, and her application brought the question of extending the policy of the Ordinance of 1787 to that State, and to other new States in the region acquired from France, to a direct issue. The House of Representatives insisted on a prohibition against the further introduction of slavery in the State, as a condition of her admission. The Senate dis-ble, except by the mutual consent of both, or agreed with the House in that demand. The non-slaveholding States sustained the House, and the slaveholding States sustained the Senate. The difference was radical, and tended towards revolution.

One party maintained that the condition demanded was constitutional, the other that it was unconstitutional. The public mind became intensely excited, and painful apprehensions of disunion and civil war began to prevail in the country.

of all the parties concerned. Not, indeed, that it is absolutely irrepealable, but that it cannot be repealed without a violation of honor, justice, and good faith, which it is presumed will not be committed.

Such was the Compromise of 1820. Missouri came into the Union immediately as a slaveholding State, and Arkansas came in as a slaveholding State, sixteen years afterward. Nebraska, the part of the Territory reserved exclusively for free Territories and free States, has remained a wilderness ever since. And now it is proposed here to abrogate, not, indeed, the whole Compromise, but only that part of it which saved Nebraska as free terri tory, to be afterwards divided into non-slave holding States, which should be admitted in to the Union. And this is proposed, notwithstanding an universal acquiescence in the Compromise, by both parties, for thirty years, and its confirmation, over and over again, by many acts of successive Congresses, and notwithstanding that the slaveholding States have peaceably enjoyed, ever since it was made, all their equivalents, while, owing to circumstances which will hereafter appear, the non-slaveholding States have not practically enjoyed those guarantied to them.

In this crisis, a majority of both Houses agreed upon a plan for the adjustment of the controversy. By this plan, Maine, a nonslaveholding State, was to be admitted; Missouri was to be admitted without submitting to the condition before mentioned; and in all that part of the Territory acquired from France, which was north of the line of 36 deg. 30 min. of north latitude, slavery was to be forever prohibited. Louisiana, which was a part of that Territory, had been admitted as a slave State eight years before; and now, not only was Missouri to be admitted as a slave State, but Arkansas, which was south of that line, by strong implication, was also to be admitted as a slaveholding State. I need not indicate what were the equivalents which the respective parties were to receive in this arrangement, further than to say that the slaveholding States practically were to receive slaveholding States, It is a question of transcendent importance. the free States to receive a desert, a solitude, in The proviso of 1820, to be abrogated in Newhich they might, if they could, plant the braska, is the Ordinance of the Continental germs of future free States. This measure was Congress of 1787, extended over a new part of adopted. It was a great national transaction—the national domain, acquired under our preshe first of a class of transactions which have ince come to be thoroughly defined and well understood, under the name of compromises. My own opinions concerning them are well known, and are not in question here. According o the general understanding, they are marked by peculiar circumstances and features, viz:

This is the question now before the Senate of the United States of America.

ent Constitution. It is rendered venerable by its antiquity, and sacred by the memory of that Congress, which, in surrendering its trust, after establishing the Ordinance, enjoined it upon posterity, always to remember that the cause of the United States was the cause of Human Nature. The question involves an issue of First, there is a division of opinion upon public faith, and national morality and honor. ome vital national question between the two It will be a sad day for this Republic, when such Houses of Congress, which division is irrecon- a question shall be deemed unworthy of grave ilable, except by mutual concessions of inter-discussion and shall fail to excite intense interest. sts and opinions, which the Houses deem contitutional and just.

Secondly, they are rendered necessary by npending calamities, to result from the failure Flegislation, and to be no otherwise averted an by such mutual concessions, or sacri

ces.

Thirdly, such concessions are mutual and

Even if it were certain that the inhibition of slavery in the region concerned was unnecessary, and if the question was thus reduced to a mere abstraction, yet even that abstraction would involve the testimony of the United States on the expediency, wisdom, morality, and justice, of the system of human bondage, with which this and other portions of the world have been

so long afflicted; and it will be a melancholy day for the Republic and for mankind, when her decision on even such an abstraction shall command no respect, and inspire no hope into the hearts of the oppressed. But it is no such abstraction. It was no unnecessary dispute, no mere contest of blind passion, that brought that Compromise into being. Slavery and Freedom were active antagonists, then seeking for ascendency in this Union. Both Slavery and Freedom are more vigorous, active, and self-aggrandizing now, than they were then, or ever were before or since that period. The contest between them has been only protracted, not decided. It is a great feature in our national Hereafter. So the question of adhering to or abrogating this Compromise is no unmeaning issue, and no contest of mere blind passion now.

To adhere, is to secure the occupation by freemen, with free labor, of a region in the very centre of the continent, capable of sus taining, and in that event destined, though it may be only after a far-distant period, to sustain ten, twenty, thirty, forty millions of people and their successive generations forever!

To abrogate, is to resign all that vast region to chances which mortal vision cannot fully foresee; perhaps to the sovereignty of such stinted and short-lived communities as those of which Mexico and South America and the West India Islands present us with examples; perhaps to convert that region into the scene of long and desolating conflicts between not merely races, but castes, to end, like a similar conflict in Egypt, in a convulsive exodus of the oppressed people, despoiling their superiors; perhaps, like one not dissimilar in Spain, in the forcible expulsion of the inferior race, exhausting the State by the sudden and complete suppression of a great resource of national wealth and labor; perhaps in the disastrous expulsion, even of the superior race itself, by a people too suddenly raised from slavery to liberty, as in St. Domingo. To adhere, is to secure forever the presence here, after some lapse of time, of two, four, ten, twenty, or more Senators, and of Representatives in larger proportions, to uphold the policy and interests of the non-slaveholding States, and balance that ever-increasing representation of slaveholding States, which past experience, and the decay of the Spanish American States, admonish us has only just begun; to save what the nonslaveholding States have in mints, navy yards, the military academy and fortifications, to balance against the capital and federal institutions in the slaveholding States; to save against any danger from adverse or hostile policy, the culture, the manufactures, and the commerce, as well as the just influence and weight of the national principles and sentiments of the slaveholding States. To adhere, is to save, to the non-slaveholding States, as well as to the slaveholding States, always, and in every event, a

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right of way and free communication across the continent, to and with the States on the Pacific coasts, and with the rising States on the islands in the South Sea, and with all the eastern nations on the vast continent of Asia.

To abrogate, on the contrary, is to commit all these precious interests to the chances and hazards of embarrassment and injury by legis lation, under the influence of social, political, and commercial jealousy and rivalry; and in the event of the secession of the slaveholding States, which is so often threatened in their name, but I thank God without their authority, to give to a servile population a La Vendee at the very sources of the Mississippi, and in the very recesses of the Rocky Mountains.

Nor is this last a contingency against which a statesman, when engaged in giving a Constitution for such a Territory, so situated, must veil his eyes. It is a statesman's province and duty to look before as well as after. I know, indeed, the present loyalty of the American People, North and South, and East and West. I know that it is a sentiment stronger than any sectional interest or ambition, and stronger than even the love of equality in the non-slaveholding States; and stronger, I doubt not, than the love of slavery in the slaveholding States. But I do not know, and no mortal sagacity does know, the seductions of interest and ambition, and the influences of passion, which are yet to be matured in every region. I know this, however: that this Union is safe now, and that it will be safe so long as impartial political equality shall constitute the basis of society, as it has heretofore done, in even half of these States, and they shall thus maintain a just equilibrium against the slaveholding States. But I am well assured, also, on the other hand, that if ever the slaveholding States shall multiply themselves, and extend their sphere, so that they could, without association with the nonslaveholding States, constitute of themselves a commercial republic, from that day their rule, through the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative powers of this Government, will be such as will be hard for the non-slaveholding States to bear; and their pride and ambition, since they are congregations of men, and are moved by human passions, will consent to no Union in which they shall not so rule.

The slaveholding States already possess the mouths of the Mississippi, and their territory reaches far northward along its banks, on on side to the Ohio, and on the other even to th confluence of the Missouri. They stretch thei dominion now from the banks of the Delaware quite around bay, headland, and promontory to the Rio Grande. They will not stop, al though they now think they may, on the sum mit of the Sierra Nevada; nay, their arme pioneers are already in Sonora, and their eye are already fixed, never to be taken off, on th island of Cuba, the Queen of the Antilles. ] we of the non-slaveholding States surrender t

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Under this section, as in the case of the Mexican

them now the eastern slope of the Rocky fully reclaimed, and conveyed to the person claiming Mountains, and the very sources of the Missis- his or her labor or service, as aforesaid.' sippi, what territory will be secure, what terri- law in New Mexico and Utah, it is a disputed point tory can be secured hereafter, for the creation whether slavery is prohibited in the Nebraska counand organization of free States, within our try by valid enactment. The decision of this quesocean-bound domain? What territories on this tion involves the constitutional power of Congress to pass laws prescribing and regulating the domestic incontinent will remain unappropriated and un-stitutions of the various Territories of the Union. In occupied, for us to annex? What territories, the opinion of those eminent statesmen who hold that even if we are able to buy or conquer them Congress is invested with no rightful authority to from Great Britain or Russia, will the slave- legislate upon the subject of slavery in the Territoholding States suffer, much less aid, us to an- ries, the 8th section of the act preparatory to the adnex, to restore the equilibrium which by this mission of Missouri is null and void; while the prevailing sentment in large portions of the Union susunnecessary measure we shall have so un-tains the doctrine that the Constitution of the United States secures to every citizen an inalienable right to wisely, so hurriedly, so suicidally subverted? move into any of the Territories with his property, of whatever kind and description, and to hold and enjoy the same under the sanction of law. Your Committee do not feel themselves called upon to enter into the discussion of these controverted questions. They involve the same grave issues which produced the agitation, the sectional strife, and the fearful struggle of 1850. As Congress deemed it wise and prudent to refrain from deciding the matters in controversy then, either by affirming or repealing the Mexican laws, or by an act declaratory of the true intent of the Constitut on, and the extent of the protection afforded by it to slave property in the Territories, so your Committee are not prepared now to recommend a departure from the course pursued on that memorable occasion, either by affirming or repealing the 8th section of the Missouri act, or by any act declaratory of the meaning of the Constitution in respect to the legal points in dispute.”

Nor am I to be told that only a few slaves will enter into this vast region. One slaveholder in a new Territory, with access to the Executive ear at Washington, exercises more political influence than five hundred freemen. It is not necessary that all or a majority of the citizens of a State shall be slaveholders, to constitute a slaveholding State. Delaware has only 2,000 slaves, against 91,000 freemen; and yet Delaware is a slaveholding State. The proportion is not substantially different in Maryland and in Missouri; and yet they are slaveholding States. These, sir, are the stakes in this legislative game, in which I lament to see, that while the representatives of the slaveholding States are unanimously and earnestly playing to win, so many of the representatives of the non-slaveholding States are with even greater zeal and diligence playing to lose.

This report gives us the deliberate judgment of the Committee on two important points. First, that the Compromise of 1850 did not, by Mr. President, the Committee who have rec-its letter or by its spirit, repeal, or render necesommended these twin bills for the organization of the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas hold the affirmative in the argument upon their

passage.

What is the case they present to the Senate and the country?

They have submitted a report; but that report, brought in before they had introduced or even conceived this bold and daring measure of abrogating the Missouri Compromise, directs all its arguments against it.

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The Committee say, in their report :

Such being the character of the controversy, in respect to the territory acquired from Mexico, a similar question has arisen in regard to the right to hold slaves in the proposed Territory of Nebraska, when the Indian laws shall be withdrawn, and the country thrown open to emigration and settlement. By the 8th section of an act to authorize the people of the Missouri Territory to form a Constitution and State Government, and for the admission of such State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States, and to prohibit Slavery in certain Territories,' approved March 6, 1820, it was provided:__'That in all that Territory ceded by France to the United States under the name of Louisiana, which lies north of thir: ty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude, not included within the limits of the State contemplated by this act, slavery and involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall have been duly convicted, shall be, and is hereby, forever prohibited: Provided, always, That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any State or Territory of the U▴ited States, such fugitive may be law.

sary, or even propose, the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise; and, secondly, that the Missouri Compromise ought not now to be abrogated. And now, sir, what do we next hear from this Committee? First, two similar and kindred bills, actually abrogating the Missouri Compromise, which, in their report, they had told us ought not to be abrogated at all. Secondly, these bills declare on their face, in substance, that that Compromise was already abrogated by the spirit of that very Compromise of 1850, which, in their report they had just shown us, left the Compromise of 1820 absolutely unaffected and unimpaired. Thirdly, the Committee favor us, by their chairman, with an oral explanation, that the amended bills abrogating the Missouri Compromise are identical with their previous bill, which did not abrogate it, and are only made to differ in phraseology, to the end that the provisions contained in their previous, and now discarded, bill, shall be absolutely clear and certain.

I entertain great respect for the Committee itself, but I must take leave to say that the inconsistencies and self-contradictions contained in the papers it has given us, have destroyed all claims, on the part of those documents, to respect, here or elsewhere.

The recital of the effect of the Compromiseof 1850 upon the Compromise of 1820, as finally revised, corrected, and amended, here in the

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ace of the Senate, means after all substantially what that recital meant as it stood before it was perfected, or else it means nothing tangible or worthy of consideration at all. What if the spirit, or even the letter, of the Compromise laws of 1850 did conflict with the Compromise of 1820? The Compromise of 1820 was, by its very nature, a Compromise irrepealable and unchangeable, without a violation of honor, justice, and good faith. The Compromise of 1850, if it impaired the previous Compromise to the extent of the loss to free labor of one acre of the Territory of Nebraska, was either absolutely void, or ought, in all subseqent legislation, to be deemed and held void.

What if the spirit or the letter of the Com promise was a violation of the Compromise of 1820? Then, inasmuch as the Compromise of 1820 was inviolable, the attempted violation of it shows that the so-called Compromise of 1850 was to that extent not a Compromise at all, but a factitious, spurious, and pretented Compromise. What if the letter or the spirit of the Compromise of 1850 did supersede or impair, or in any way, in any degree, conflict with the Compromise of 1820? Then that is a reason for abrogating, not the irrepealable and inviolable Compromise of 1820, but the spurious and pretended Compromise of 1850.

public attention, to raise complex and immaterial issues, to perplex and bewilder and comfound the People by whom this transaction is to be reviewed. Look again at the vacillation betrayed in the frequent changes of the structure of this apology. At first the recital told us that the eighth section of the Compromise act of 1820 was superseded by the principles of the Compromise laws of 1850-as if any one had ever heard of a supersedeas of one local law by the mere principles of another local law, enacted for an altogether different region, thirty years afterwards. On another day we were told, by an amendment of the recital, that the Compromise of 1820 was not superseded by the Compromise of 1850 at all, but was only "inconsistent with" it—as if a local act which was irrepealable was now to be abrogated, because it was inconsistent with a subsequent enactment, which had no application whatever within the region to which the first enactment was confined. On a third day the meaning of the recital was further and finally elucidated by an amendment, which declared that the first irrepealable act protecting Nebraska from slavery was now declared "inoperative and void," because it was inconsistent with the present purposes of Congress not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom.

But take this apology in whatever form it may be expressed, and test its logic by a simple process.

Mr. President, why is this reason for the proposed abrogation of the Compromise of 1820 assigned in these bills at all? It is unnecessary. The assignment of a reason adds nothing to the force or weight of the abrogation itself. Either The law of 1820 secured free institutions in the fact alleged as a reason is true or it is not the regions acquired from France in 1803, by true. If it be untrue, your asserting it here the wise and prudent foresight of the Congress will not make it true. If it be true, it is ap- of the United States. The law of 1850, on the parent in the text of the law of 1850, without contrary, committed the choice between free the aid of legislative exposition now. It is un- and slave institutions in New Mexico and usual. It is unparliamentary. The language Utah-Territories acquired from Mexico nearly of the lawgiver, whether the sovereign be fifty years afterward-to the interested cupidity Democratic, Republican, or Despotic, is al- or the caprice of their earliest and accidental ways the same. It is mandatory, imperative. occupants. Free Institutions and Slave InstiIf the lawgiver explains at all in a statute the tutions are equal, but the interested cupidity of reason for it, the reason is that it is his pleas- the pioneer is a wiser arbiter, and his judgment ure-sic volo, sic jubeo. Look at the Compro- a surer safeguard, than the collective wisdom mise of 1820. Does it plead an excuse for its of the American People and the most solemn and commands? Look at the Compromise of 1850, time-honored statute of the American Congress. drawn by the master-hand of our American Therefore, let the law of freedom in the terriChatham. Does that bespeak your favor by a tory acquired from France be now annulled quibbling or shuffling apology? Look at your and abrogated, and let the fortunes and fate of own, now rejected, first Nebraska bill, which, Freedom and Slavery, in the region acquired by conclusive implication, saved the effect of from France, be, henceforward and forever, dethe Missouri Compromise. Look at any other termined by the votes of some seven hundred bill ever reported by the Committee on Territo- camp followers around Fort Leavenworth, and ries. Look at any other bill now on your cal- the still smaller number of trappers, Governendar. Examine all the laws on your statute ment schoolmasters, and mechanics, who atbooks. Do you find any one bill or statute tend the Indians in their seasons of rest from which ever came bowing, stooping, and wrig- hunting in the passes of the Rocky Mountains. gling into the Senate, pleading an excuse for Sir, this syllogism may satisfy you and other its clear and explicit declaration of the sover-Senators; but as for me, I must be content to eign and irresistible will of the American Peo- adhere to the earlier system. Stare super ple? The departure from this habit in this antiquas vias. solitary case betrays self-distrust, and an attempt on the part of the bill to divert the

There is yet another difficulty in this new theory. Let it be granted that, in order to

carry out a new principle recently adopted in New Mexico, you can supplant a compromise in Nebraska, yet there is a maxim of public law which forbids you from supplanting that compromise, and establishing a new system there, until you first restore the parties in interest there to their statu quo before the compromise to be supplanted was established. First, then, remand Missouri and Arkansas back to the unsettled condition, in regard to slavery, which they held before the Compromise of 1820 was enacted, and then we will hear you talk of rescinding that Compromise. You cannot do this. You ought not to do it, if you could; and because you cannot and ought not to do it, you cannot, without violating law, justice, equity, and honor, abrogate the guarantee of freedom in Nebraska.

There is still another and not less serious difficulty. You call the Slavery laws of 1850 a compromise between the slaveholding and non-slaveholding States. For the purposes of this argument, let it be granted that they were such a compromise. It was nevertheless a compromise concerning slavery in the Territories acquired from Mexico, and by the letter of the compromise it extended no further. Can you now, by an act which is not a compromise between the same parties, but a mere ordinary law, extend the force and obligation of the principles of that Compromise of 1850 into regions not only excluded from it, but absolutely protected from your intervention there by a solemn Compromise of thirty years' duration, and invested with a sanctity scarcely inferior to that which hallows the Constitution itself?

intended or understood. I appeal to the honorable and distinguished Senator, the senior representative.from Tennessee, [Mr. BELL,] who performed a distinguished part also. Did he so understand the Compromise of 1850? He is silent. I appeal to the gallant Senator from Illinois? [Mr. SHIELDS.] He, too, is silent. I now throw my gauntlet at the feet of every Senator now here, who was in the Senate in 1850, and challenge him to say that he then knew, or thought, or dreamed, that, by enacting the Compromise of 1850, he was directly or indirectly abrogating, or in any degree impairing, the Missouri Compromise? No one takes it up. I appeal to that very distinguished-nay, sir, that expression falls short of his eminence-that illustrious man, the Senator from Missouri, who led the opposition here to the Compromise of 1850. Did he understand that that Compromise in any way overreached or impaired the Compromise of 1820? Sir, that distinguished person, while opposing the combination of the several laws on the subject of California and the Territories, and Slavery, together, in one bill, so as to constitute a Compromise, nevertheless voted for each one of those bills, severally; and in that way, and that way only, they were passed. Had he known or understood that any one of them overreached and impaired the Missouri Compromise, we all know he would have perished before he would have given it his support.

Sir, if it was not irreverent, I would dare to call up the author of both of the Compromises in question, from his honored, though yet scarcely grass-covered grave, and challenge any advocate of this measure to confront that imperious shade, and say that, in making the Compromise of 1850, he intended or dreamed that he was subverting, or preparing the way for a subversion of, his greater work of 1820. Sir, if that eagle spirit is yet lingering here over the scene of his mortal labors, and watching over the welfare of the Republic he loved so well, his heart is now moved with more than human indignation against those who are perverting his last great public act from its legit

Can the Compromise of 1850, by a mere ordinary act of legislation, be extended beyond the plain, known, fixed intent and understand ing of the parties at the time that contract was made, and yet be binding on the parties to it, not merely legally, but in honor and conscience? Can you abrogate a compromise by passing any law of less dignity than a compromise? If so, of what value is any one or the whole of the Compromises? Thus you see that these bills violate both of the Compro-imate uses, not merely to subvert the column, mises—not more that of 1820 than that of 1850.

Will you maintain in argument that it was understood by the parties interested throughout the country, or by either of them, or by any representative of either, in either House of Congress, that the principle then established should extend beyond the limits of the territories acquired from Mexico, into the territories acquired nearly fifty years before, from France, and then reposing under the guarantee of the Compromise of 1820? I know not how Senators may vote, but I do know what they will say. I appeal to the honorable Senator from Michigan, [Mr. CASS,] than whom none performed a more distinguished part in establishing the Compromise of 1850, whether he so

but to wrench from its very bed the base of the column that perpetuates his fame.

And that other proud and dominating Senator, who, sacrificing himself, gave the aid without which the Compromise of 1850 could not have been established-the Statesman of New England, and the Orator of America— who dare assert here, where his memory is yet fresh, though his unfettered spirit may be wandering in spheres far hence, that he intended to abrogate, or dreamed that, by virtue of or in consequence of that transaction, the Missouri Compromise would or could ever be abrogated? The portion of the Missouri Compromise you propose to abrogate is the Ordinance of 1787 extended to Nebraska. Hear what Daniel Webster said of that Ordinance

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