SLAVERY:
LETTERS AND SPEECHES,

BY
HORACE MANN,
THE FIRST SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION.

BOSTON:
PUBLISHED BY B. B. MUSSEY & CO.
1851.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1851, by
Horace Mann,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

STEREOTYPED AT THE
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.

TO
THE YOUNG MEN
OF
MASSACHUSETTS
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY
Dedicated
BY
THE AUTHOR.

This work comes from one in whose mind present Memories are taking the place of early Hopes. It is specially addressed to those in whose minds future Memories will soon take the place of present Hopes. Hence a fitting occasion presents itself for the statement of a few principles, by whose unerring guidance the exulting Hopes of Youth may always be transformed into the happy Memories of Age.

The Youth of all climes and times have a common attribute. The desire of happiness is a universal desire. God fixes this element in the core of life. Far back in our moral organization, before human conduct can come in to control or modify, this longing for happiness, this hope of future welfare, is radicated in the soul; so that it seems to have been the first attribute which was taken for the constitution of our nature, and around which the other attributes were gathered, rather to have been added to the rest as a secondary or incident. The desire of some form of happiness being secured, as a motive power, it seems to have been left very much to the option of each individual to select his own objects of enjoyment, whether noble or ignoble, and to devise his own means for obtaining them, whether righteous or unrighteous.

The emulous and aspiring youth of a Free People will always find much of their private, and most of their public welfare, indissolubly connected with the institutions and laws of their country. In these, therefore, their interest is both public and personal;—it pertains to the citizen as well as to the man. All great moral questions, though touching them but lightly at first, will come closer and closer home, as long as they live;—growing into greater importance for their posthumous memory than for their living fame, and affecting the fortunes of their posterity even more than their own.

Though all Young Men are substantially alike in their desire of well being, yet, in regard to the guiding principles by which the objects of hope are pursued, in order to obtain happiness, three marked distinctions, or classes, exist among them.

1. There are those who adopt with implicit and unquestioning faith the views of their parents, or of the circle, or caste, into which they were thrown by the accident of birth. They never venture to explore or wander outside of the ideas and opinions among which they were born and bred. For them, an hereditary boundary encloses thought, belief, hope. Whether the opinions amid which they live are insular in their narrowness, or continental in their breadth; whether they belong to the earth, came up from the dark regions below, or descended from the realms of purity above, they are taken into the receptive soul, as unfledged birds take whatever food is offered them, from friend or foe, with closed eye and opened mouth. Even if practically right, therefore, they are never rationally right, for they have never discerned between good and ill; and all their convictions, whether true or untrue, rest upon the foundation of bigotry alone.

2. The second class look eagerly beyond family or caste. They anxiously inquire what views, what dogmas, are in the ascendant among men,—what party predominates or outvotes, what avowals or professions will most readily open avenues to wealth, propitiate power, win patronage, insure advancement. Finding where the preponderance of forces lies, they attach themselves to the stronger. No matter whether the tide ebbs or flows, they drift with the current. If popular views change, they change, “like a wave driven with the wind and tossed;” like a chameleon, changing its color with every contact.

Some of this class, more sagacious, though not less false to principle, than the rest, ascend an eminence, whence they can survey the direction of forces, mark the future point and period of their union, and then they strike at once for the spot whither those forces are converging They, not less than their fellows, warp eternal principles to suit the vice of the hour, only it is an hour somewhat future, instead of the present one.

3. But there is a third class of Young Men who are true to the sacred instincts of virtue, and devoutly reverent of duty. They seek, not for the time-hallowed, but for the truth-hallowed. They have learnt that, in the divine classification, there are but two great objects in the universe,—God and Mankind. These are the only existences recognized in those two supreme laws, which, by divine prerogative, hold all other laws in their embrace. Hence the two resulting and all-comprehending duties,—love to God and love to Man. The convictions and sentiments which belong to the Brotherhood of the one, stand upon the same basis of authority as those which belong to the Fatherhood of the other. Hence all other entities and possibilities,—opulence, power, fame, genius, things present, or things to come,—are, and forever must be, secondary and subordinate to these primary and everlasting laws. No names so lofty, no multitude so large, that they can abolish these truths, or abstract one jot or tittle from their binding force, in this life, or in any life. They are coëternal with their Author; unchangeable as He, and moral life and moral death wait upon their award.

When the Young Man of this class looks within himself, he finds the constitution of his own moral nature to be such, that annihilation with truth is better than the most favored existence with error. And when he looks without himself, he sees there is a God enthroned above, mightier than every “god of this world,” and that there is a divine law higher than any laws of fallible men. Hence he knows that Right and Truth will assuredly triumph, and that all who oppose them will be scattered as the whirlwind scatters the chaff. The patriarchs sold Joseph into Egypt; yet God was with him, and raised him to honor, and at last put the lives of his treacherous brethren into his hands.

Whatever may be the peculiar madness of the hour, in whatever direction the gauds of wealth may beckon, or the prizes of ambition call, let the Young Man remember, that only can be honorable which is just, that only can be safe which is right. Hence, though the perfumed breezes of flattery may entice him on one side, and a storm of maledictions beat fiercely against him on the other, let him consecrate himself to Justice and Truth, and be inspired with the faith that, though the earth should quake or the heavens fall, an omniscient eye will over-watch, and an omniscient arm will protect him.

Among the wiles of the sorceress that beguile the young to their ruin there is no more seductive, yet fallacious temptation, than the value which seems to belong to the passing hour, and to the pleasures it may bring. How infinitely small a part of existence is the present day, or year! How insignificant its point compared with the ages to come! What are its huzzas, its ostentation, and its pride, when placed in the balance against the eternity of rewards that crown allegiance to duty? O, how insane and fatuous to barter the undecaying honors of the future for the transitory joys of the present! In the future, lies the wealth of every man; the present is only an opportunity to make its title secure. The temporizer must snatch from hour to hour at some new expedient, which, if he fails to seize, he sinks to perdition. The virtuous man binds himself to a principle, and soars securely through all worlds.

Nothing stands upon a more adamantine basis of truth than the principles which decide between Human Freedom and Human Slavery. These eternal principles happen now, in a peculiar degree, to be implicated in the shifting and uncertain current of politics; and political storms may seem for a time to overwhelm them. But the cloud which obscures the sun does not annihilate it; and these principles are sure to emerge and shine unclouded in their native splendor forever. Every act, whether of individuals or of governments, whether committed in past days or in our day, which compromises the sacred principles of Human Freedom, or postpones its interests to other interests, is set down, in the calendar of fate, for ultimate and universal execration. This is just as certain as it is that the great crimes of the race committed in past ages,—the persecutions of the early Christians, the tortures of the Inquisition, or the atrocities of the African Slave trade,—are now condemned by the awful verdict of history and the ever-sounding reprobation of mankind. In the spread of Christianity, in the advance of civilization, in the moral development of the people, a tribunal is now preparing, which will pronounce sentence of condemnation against the abetters of slavery, to be promulgated as from Sinai, and preserved in the archives of eternity. The Progress of the Age bears us on, not only to a forward, but to an upward point; and what we now say against the apostates to duty and the traitors of mankind, in past ages, however much they may have been honored, caressed, and rewarded in their day, will soon be said of every one amongst ourselves who leads or joins the band of conspirators against the Rights of Man.

Every Young Man, however obscure or powerless he may seem, can do something for the cause of freedom. Whatever disadvantages the youth may labor under, they have one all-compensating advantage. A longer period of life is before them, and deeds which can only be accomplished through years of labor, they can achieve. But our success depends infinitely less upon our strength than upon our motive. When we supply the virtuous will, God supplies the power; so that the result corresponds, not to our weakness, but to his omnipotence. We are thus made able

——“to join

Our partial movements with the master wheel

Of the great world, and serve that sacred end,

Which He, the unerring Reason, keeps in view.”

Those Young Men of Massachusetts, then, of the noble lineage of the Pilgrims, who have been nursed amid the influences of sanctuary and school, in whose bosoms is the sacred depository of future and boundless hopes, but who are now counselled to abandon their integrity, who are brought into peril of being corrupted by the lures of wealth, or fascinated by the dazzling of worldly honors, or swept away by the pressure of the multitude that do evil, I adjure to stand fast and immovable on those sacred and eternal principles of Human Liberty which came down to us through the fires of oppression and the agony and blood of martyrs, but came from God;—principles that can never suffer the decays of time, which kings nor senates of kings can ever abolish, and which, however much the passions of men may seek to taint or defile them, are ever beautiful and fair, as the names of all their disciples shall hereafter be. I call upon Young Men to throw themselves forward in imagination into middle life, or old age, and there behold how these mighty questions will look in the retrospect of time, when the brilliant robes which now gild the tempter are gone, and only the ghastly fiend remains; when the passion that prompted the crime is dead, and only the remorse survives. Think not of luxury, or wealth, or ignoble ease, but only of an heroic conflict, careless of the present strength of the foe. Take no bribe from the hand of power, in whatever disguise of beauty it may come, but spurn it and its author alike. Let your future manhood realize the generous aspirations of your youth; and, amid the seductions of the present hour, prize only the jubilant memories you can lay up for old age. It may grieve you to break friendships, but truth and duty are your nearest friends. It may be painful to live amongst those who upbraid and condemn you; but be a coward when virtue is in peril, and your own accusing conscience you must live with forever. Study those exemplars of excellence who came purified and resplendent out of fiery trials. It is said of Francis the First, that when he read the valorous exploits of Gaston de Foix, he wept tears of emulation. Rejoice, then, though marshalled in the fore front of battle when the Rights of Humanity are in danger, and you shall rejoice again and forever in their triumph. Read and ponder what was so nobly said by one of the heathen of the old world, and be ashamed, yea, weep for your country and your kind, if the Christianity of America has fallen below the paganism of Rome. Seneca says,—

“Virtue covets danger; and whatever may be her aim, she never stops to consider how much she may suffer, since her sufferings are a part of her glory. Military men glory in their scars. With exultation they point us to their blood flowing in an honorable cause. Though they who return unharmed from the field of battle may have done as many and as noble deeds, yet it is the wounded soldier who receives double honors. God provides for those whom he would make most honorable, by furnishing them with opportunities for achieving valiant and noble deeds. Hence he strews difficulties along their path. It is in the storm you see who is worthy to be a pilot; and in battle, who is the soldier.... How can I know with what constancy and endurance one will bear up against reproach and obloquy and popular odium, if he has grown old amidst the applauses of the world, if he has never encountered misfortune, and has been followed by the indiscriminating favor of men?... Be not affrighted, I beseech you, at the dangers which were intended by the immortal gods only as stimulants to exertion. The season of calamity is virtue’s opportunity. They, rather, are to be esteemed wretched, who lie torpid in luxurious ease, whom a sluggish calm detains on the great voyage, like vessels that lie weltering on a sea without a gale. Whom God approves and loves, he exercises, and tries them again and again, and thus inures them to hardship; but those whom he designs to enervate, he spares and indulges and saves them from impending ills.... The bravest of the army are they whom the commander selects for the most perilous service. The general details his choicest men to send on secret expeditions by night, or to explore an unknown way, or to dislodge a garrison from their entrenchments. No man chosen for such an enterprise is ever heard to say, ‘My commander has wronged and dishonored me,’ but rather, ‘He has known well whom to choose.’ Such, too, is the language of those who are required to suffer what would make the timid and the ignoble weep. We stand honored in the divine regards when the great experiment, how much human nature can endure for a virtuous cause, is tried in ourselves.... As teachers deal with their scholars, so God deals with good men. He demands most of those in whom he has most confidence.”

West Newton, October, 1851.

CONTENTS.

LETTER

Accepting the Nomination for the Thirtieth Congress, made by the Whig Convention of District No. 8, March, 1848.

Gentlemen;

Your communication of the 16th inst., being directed to Newton, (instead of West Newton, where I reside,) did not reach me until this morning. I thank you cordially for the kind expressions of personal regard with which you have been pleased to accompany it. You inform me that at a convention of delegates assembled in Dedham, on Wednesday, the 15th inst., I was nominated as a candidate to fill the vacancy in Congress occasioned by the death of the great and good man whose irreparable loss we, his constituents, with a nation for our fellow-mourners, deplore.

At first thought, the idea of being the immediate successor of John Quincy Adams in the councils of the nation might well cause any man to shrink back from the inevitable contrast. But it is obvious, on a moment’s reflection, that the difference is so trivial between all the men whom he has left, compared with the disparity between them and him, as to render it of little consequence, in this respect, who shall succeed him; and the people in the Eighth District, in their descent from Mr. Adams to any successor, must break and bear the shock of the fall, as best they can.

I most heartily concur with you in that estimate of the services, and veneration for the character, of our late representative, which your resolutions so eloquently express. To be fired by his example, to imitate his diligence and fidelity in the discharge of every trust, to emulate his moral intrepidity, which always preferred to stand alone by the right, rather than to join the retinue and receive the plaudits of millions, as a champion of the wrong,—this would be, in the beautiful language of the Roman historian, “to ascend to glory by the path of virtue.”

One of the resolutions adopted by your convention declares the three following things:—

1. That the successor of Mr. Adams, on the floor of Congress, should be a man “whose principles shall be in consonance with those of his predecessor.”

2. That his fidelity to the great principles of human freedom shall be unwavering. And,—

3. That his “voice and vote shall on all occasions be exercised in extending and securing liberty to the human race.”

Permit me to reäffirm these sentiments with my whole heart. Should the responsibilities of that successorship ever be devolved upon me, I shall endeavor so to fulfil them, that these dead words should become a living soul. I should deem it not only an object of duty, but of the highest ambition, to contend for the noble principles you have here expressed, as Mr. Adams contended for them; though, unhappily, it would be only as a David in Saul’s armor. Bear with me for a moment while I enlarge upon these sentiments.

1. “In consonance with his principles.”—I believe it was the sovereign rule of Mr. Adams’s life to act in obedience to his convictions of duty. Truth was his guide. His conscience was non-elastic. He did not strain at a gnat before company, on account of its size, and then, privately, swallow a camel. His patriotism was coëxtensive with his country; it could not be crushed and squeezed in between party lines. Though liable to err,—and what human being is not?—yet his principles were believed by him to be in accordance with the great moral laws of the universe. They were thought out from duty and religion, and not carved out of expediency. When invested with patronage, he never dismissed a man from office because he was a political opponent, and never appointed one to office merely because he was a political friend. Hence he drew from Mr. Holmes, of South Carolina, this noble eulogium,—a eulogium, considering the part of the country from which it came, as honorable to its author as to its object,—that “he crushed no heart beneath the rude grasp of proscription; he left no heritage of widows’ cries or orphans’ tears.” Could all the honors which Mr. Adams ever won from offices held under the first five Presidents of the United States, and from a public service, which, commencing more than fifty years ago, continued to the day of his death, be concentrated in one effulgent blaze, they would be less far-shining and inextinguishable than the honor of sacrificing his election for a second presidential term, because he would not, in order to obtain it, prostitute the patronage and power which the constitution had placed in his hands. I regard this as the sublimest spectacle in his long and varied career. He stood within reach of an object of ambition doubtless dearer to him than life. He could have laid his hands upon it. The “still, small voice” said, No! Without a murmur, he saw it taken and borne away in triumph by another. Compared with this, the block of many a martyr has been an easy resting-place.

2. “Unwavering fidelity to the great principles of human freedom.”—The Declaration of American Independence, in 1776, was the first complete assertion of human rights, on an extensive scale, ever made by mankind. Less than three quarters of a century have elapsed, and already the greatest portion of the civilized world has felt the influence of that Declaration. France, for years, has had a constitutional monarchy; perhaps, to-day, her government is republican. Holland and Belgium are comparatively free. Almost all the states of the Germanic Confederation have a written constitution, and a legislature with a popular branch. Prussia has lately commenced a representative system. The iron rule of Austria is relaxed under the fervent heat which liberty reflects from surrounding nations. Naples and Sicily have just burst the bonds of tyranny. In Rome and the States of the Church, where, under the influence of religious and political despotism, the heart of Freedom was supposed to be petrified into insoluble hardness, that heart is now beginning to pulsate with a new life, and to throb with sympathy for humanity. Great Britain and Denmark have emancipated their slaves in the West Indies. Measures are now in progress to ameliorate the condition of Russian serfs. Even half-barbarous, Mahometan Tunis has yielded to the tide of free principles. To what bar of judgment will our own posterity bring us, what doom of infamy will history pronounce upon us, if the United States shall hereafter be found the only portion of Christendom where the principles of our own Declaration of Independence are violated in the persons of millions of our people?

3. “The exercise, on all occasions, of voice and vote, in extending and securing liberty to the human race.”—There is a crisis in our affairs. A territory, in extent far exceeding that of the thirteen original states, when they repelled the power of Great Britain, has lately been added, or is, doubtless, about to be added, to our national domain. The expanse of this territory is so vast, that it may be divided into a dozen sections, and these sections may be erected into separate states, each one of which shall be so large that Massachusetts would seem but an inconsiderable court-yard, if placed in front of it. Parts of this territory are fertile and salubrious. It is capable of supporting millions and millions of human beings, of the same generation. The numbers of the successive generations, which in the providence of God are to inhabit it, will be as the leaves of the forest, or the sands on the sea-shore. Each one of these is to be a living soul, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and fears, its susceptibilities of exaltation or of abasement. Each one will be capable of being formed into the image of God, or of being deformed into the image of all that is anti-godlike.

These countless millions are to be our kindred; many of them, perhaps, our own descendants; at any rate, our brethren of the human family; for has not God “made of one blood all nations of men to dwell upon all the face of the earth”? In rights, in character, in happiness; in freedom or in vassalage; in the glorious immunities and prerogatives of knowledge, or in the debasement and superstitions of ignorance; in their upward-looking aspiration and love of moral excellence, or in their downward-looking, prone-rushing, and brutish appetites and passions, what shall these millions of our fellow-creatures be? I put it as a practical question, What shall these millions of our fellow-creatures be?—for it is more than probable that this very generation,—nay, that the actors in public affairs, before the sands of the present year shall have run out,—will prescribe and foreördain their doom. That doom will be what our present conduct predestines.

If we enact laws and establish institutions, under whose benign influences that vast tract of territory shall at length teem with myriads of human beings, each one a free-born man; each one enjoying the inalienable right of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” each one free for the cultivation of his capacities, and free in the choice and in the rewards of his labor;—if we do this, although the grand results may not manifest themselves for a thousand years, yet when the fulness of time shall come, the equity and the honor of framing these laws and institutions will belong to us, as much as though the glorious consummation could be realized to-morrow. On the other hand, if we so shape the mould in which their fortunes are to be cast, that, for them or for any portion of them, there shall be servitude instead of liberty, ignorance instead of education, debasement instead of dignity, the indulgence of bestial appetites instead of the sanctities and securities of domestic life,—then, until the mountains shall crumble away by age, until the arches of the skies shall fall in rottenness, these mountains and these arches will never cease to echo back the execrations upon our memory of all the great and good men of the world. And this retribution, I believe, will come suddenly, as well as last forever.

In one of the South-western States a vast subterranean cave has been discovered, deep down in whose chambers there is a pool of water, on which no beam of sunlight ever shines. A sightless fish is said to inhabit this rayless pool. In this animal, indeed, the rudiments of a visual organ are supposed to be dimly discernible; but of an orb to refract the rays of light, or of a retina to receive them, there is no trace. Naturalists suppose that the progenitors of these animals, in ages long gone by, possessed the power of vision; but that, being buried in these depths by some convulsion of nature, long disuse at first impaired, at length extinguished, and has at last obliterated the visual organ itself. The animal has sunk in the scale of being, until its senses are accommodated to the blackness of darkness in which it dwells. Were this account wholly fabulous, it has the strongest verisimilitude, and doubtless describes what would actually occur under the circumstances supposed.

Thus will it be with faculties above the surface of the earth, as well as below it. Thus will it be with human beings, as well as with the lower orders of creation. Thus will it be with our own brethren or children, should we shut up from them the book of knowledge, or seal their senses so that they could not read it. Thus will it be with all our God-given faculties, just so far as they are debarred from legitimate exercise upon their appropriate objects. The love of knowledge will die out, when it ceases to be stimulated by the means of knowledge. Self-respect will die out, under the ever-present sense of inferiority. The sentiments of truth and duty will die out, when cunning and falsehood can obtain more gratifications than frankness and honesty. The noblest impulses of the human soul, the most sacred affections of the human heart, will die out, when every sphere is closed against their exercise. When such a dreadful work is doing, or threatens to be done, can any one stand listlessly by, see it perpetrated, and then expect to excuse himself, under the false, impious pretext of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Fully, then, do I agree with you and the delegates of the convention you represent, in saying that the successor of Mr. Adams should be one “whose voice and vote shall, on all occasions, be exercised in extending and securing liberty to the human race.” Of course I do not understand you to imply any violation of the constitution of the United States, which every representative swears to support.

Permit me to say a word personal to myself. For eleven years, I have been estranged from all political excitements. During this whole period, I have attended no political meeting of any kind whatever. I have contented myself with the right of private judgment and the right of voting, though it has usually so happened that my official duties have demanded my absence from home at the time of the fall elections. I have deemed this abstinence from actively mingling in political contests both a matter of duty towards opposing political parties, and a proper means of subserving the best interests of the cause in which I had embarked. I hoped too, by so doing, to assist in rearing men even better than those now belonging to any party.

The nature of my duties also, and all my intercourse and associations, have attracted me towards whatever is worthy and beneficent in all parties, rather than towards what is peculiar to any one. Not believing in political pledges, I should have had the honor to decline giving any to you, had you not had the first and greater honor of asking none from me. After what I have said above in favor of liberty for all mankind, it would be a strange contradiction did I consent to be myself a slave of party. The hands which you raised in behalf of yourselves and your constituents, when you voted for the noble sentiments contained in the resolution I have quoted, could never degrade themselves by forging a fetter for the free mind of another, or fastening one upon it; and the hand with which I have penned my hearty response to those sentiments can never stretch itself out to take a fetter on. Should your nomination, therefore, be accepted and be successful, it must be with the explicit understanding between us that I shall always be open to receive the advice of my constituents, shall always welcome their counsel, always be most grateful for their suggestions, but that, in the last resort, my own sense of duty must be the only arbiter. Should differences arise, the law opens an honorable escape for both parties,—declination on my part, substitution on yours.

I must add, in closing, that so far as personal preferences are concerned, I infinitely prefer remaining in my present position, with all its labor and its thanklessness, to any office in the gift of the people. I had hoped and intended, either in a public or private capacity, to spend my life in advancing the great cause of the people’s education. Two considerations alone could tempt me to abandon this purpose. The first is important. The enactment of laws which shall cover waste territory, to be applied to the myriads of human beings who are hereafter to occupy that territory, is a work which seems to precede and outrank even education itself. Whether a wide expanse of country shall be filled with beings to whom education is permitted, or with those to whom it is denied,—with those whom humanity and the law make it a duty to teach, or with those whom inhumanity and the law make it a legal duty not to teach, seems preliminary to all questions respecting the best systems and methods for rendering education effective.

The other consideration is comparatively unimportant; though, for the time being, it has embarrassed me greatly. I now learn that expectations were excited at your convention, that if a nomination were tendered me, it would not be declined. Had I anticipated the favorable regards of the convention, or foreseen that such expectations would be raised, I should not have hearkened to the proposition for a moment; and I may be permitted to add, that when I saw my name announced in the papers, my first act was to prepare a letter of declination. It was only when I went to deliver the letter that I learnt what had been done, and that, in the opinion of persons whose judgment I am bound to respect, I had been so far committed by my too partial friends, as that no option remained.

Yielding to these considerations, I submit myself to the decision of my fellow-citizens.

With sentiments of high personal regard,
I am, gentlemen,
Your friend and servant,
HORACE MANN.

Hon. Thomas French, President; Samuel C. Mann, John K. Corbett, Edward Crehore, Esqs., Secretaries.

West Newton, March 21, 1848.

SPEECH

Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, June 30, 1848, on the Right of Congress to legislate for the Territories of the United States, and its Duty to exclude Slavery therefrom.

Mr. Chairman;

I have listened with interest, both yesterday and to-day, to speeches on what is called the “Presidential Question.” I propose to discuss a question of far greater magnitude,—the question of the age,—one whose consequences will not end with the ensuing four years, but will reach forward to the setting of the sun of time.

Sir, our position is this: The United States finds itself the owner of a vast region of country at the west, now almost vacant of inhabitants. Parts of this region are salubrious and fertile. We have reason to suppose, that, in addition to the treasures of wealth which industry may gather from its surface, there are mineral treasures beneath it,—riches garnered up of old in subterranean chambers, and only awaiting the application of intelligence and skill to be converted into the means of human improvement and happiness. These regions, it is true, lie remote from our place of residence. Their shores are washed by another sea, and it is no figure of speech to say that another sky bends over them. So remote are they, that their hours are not as our hours, nor their day as our day; and yet, such are the wonderful improvements in art, in modern times, as to make it no rash anticipation, that, before this century shall have closed, the inhabitants on the Atlantic shores will be able to visit their brethren on the Pacific in ten days; and that intelligence will be transmitted and returned between the eastern and the western oceans in ten minutes. That country, therefore, will be rapidly filled, and we shall be brought into intimate relations with it, and, notwithstanding its distance, into proximity to it.

Now, in the providence of God, it has fallen to our lot to legislate for this unoccupied, or but partially occupied, expanse. Its great future hangs upon our decision. Not only degrees of latitude and longitude, but vast tracts of time,—ages and centuries,—seem at our disposal. As are the institutions which we form and establish there, so will be the men whom these institutions, in their turn, will form. Nature works by fixed laws; but we can bring this or that combination of circumstances under the operation of her laws, and thus determine results. Here springs up our responsibility. One class of institutions will gather there one class of men, who will develop one set of characteristics; another class of institutions will gather there another class of men, who will develop other characteristics. Hence their futurity is to depend upon our present action. Hence the acts we are to perform seem to partake of the nature of creation, rather than of legislation. Standing upon the elevation which we now occupy, and looking over into that empty world, “yet void,” if not “without form,” but soon to be filled with multitudinous life, and reflecting upon our power to give form and character to that life, and almost to foreördain what it shall be, I feel as though it would be no irreverence to compare our condition to that of the Creator before he fashioned the “lord” of this lower world; for we, like Him, can ingraft one set of attributes, or another set of attributes, upon a whole race of men. In approaching this subject, therefore, I feel a sense of responsibility corresponding to the infinite,—I speak literally,—the infinite interests which it embraces.

As far as the time allowed me will permit, I propose to discuss two questions. The first is, “Whether Congress can lawfully legislate on the subject of slavery in the territories.”

On this question a new and most extraordinary doctrine has lately been broached. A new reading of the constitution has been discovered. It is averred that the 3d section of the 4th article, giving Congress power “to dispose of, and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States,” only gives power to legislate for the land as land. It is admitted that Congress may legislate for the land as land,—geologically or botanically considered,—perhaps for the beasts that roam upon its surface, or the fishes that swim in its waters; but it is denied that Congress possesses any power to determine the laws and the institutions of those who shall inhabit that “land.”

But compare this with any other object of purchase or possession. When Texas was admitted into the Union, it transferred its “navy” to the United States; in other words, the United States bought, and of course owned, the navy of Texas. What power had Congress over this navy, after the purchase? According to the new doctrine, it could pass laws for the hull, the masts, and the sails of the Texan ships, but would have no power to navigate them by officers and men. It might govern the ships as so much wood, iron, and cordage, but would have no authority over commanders or crews.

But we are challenged to show any clause in the constitution which confers an express power to legislate over the territories we possess. I challenge our opponents to show any clause which confers express power to acquire those territories themselves. If, then, the power to acquire exists, it exists by implication and inference; and if the power to acquire be an implied one, the power to govern what is acquired must be implied also. For, for what purpose does any man acquire property but to govern and control it? What does a buyer pay for, if it be not the right to “dispose of”? Such is the doctrine of the Supreme Court of the United States: “The right to govern,” says Chief Justice Marshall, “may be the inevitable consequence of the right to acquire.” Amer. Ins. Co. vs. Canter, 1 Peters, 542. See also McCullough vs. Maryland, 4 Wheat., 422. The Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, 5 Peters, 44. United States vs. Gratiot, 14 Peters, 537.

But I refer to the express words of the constitution, as ample and effective in conferring all the power that is claimed. “Congress may dispose of, and make all needful rules and regulations,” &c. If Congress may “dispose of” this land, then it may sell it. Inseparable from the right to sell is the right to define the terms of sale. The seller may affix such conditions and limitations as he pleases to the thing sold. If this be not so, then the buyer may dictate his terms to the seller. Answer these simple questions: Supposing the United States to own land in fee simple, then, is the government under guardianship, or disabled by minority? Is it non compos mentis? If no such disability applies to it, then it may sell. It may sell the fee simple, or it may carve out a lesser estate, and sell that. It may incorporate such terms and conditions as it pleases into its deed or patent of sale. It may make an outright quitclaim, or it may reserve the minerals for its own use, or the navigable streams for public highways, as it did in regard to the territory north-west of the river Ohio. It may insert the conditions and limitations in each deed or patent; or, where the grantees are numerous, it may make general “rules and regulations,” which are understood to be a part of each contract, and are therefore binding upon each purchaser. No man is compelled to buy; but if any one does buy, he buys subject to the “rules and regulations” expressed in the grant; and neither he, nor his grantees, nor his or their heirs after them, can complain. I want, therefore, no better foundation for legislating over the territories than the fact of ownership in the United States. Grant this, and all is granted. If I own a farm, or a shop, I may, as owner, prescribe the conditions of its transfer to another. If he does not like my conditions, then let him abandon the negotiation; if he accedes to the conditions, then let him abide by them, and hold his peace.

Sir, in the state to which I belong, we hold temperance to be a great blessing, as well as a great virtue; and intemperance to be a great curse, as well as a great sin. I know of incorporated companies there, who have purchased large tracts of land for manufacturing purposes. They well know how essential is the sobriety of workmen to the profitableness of their work; they know, too, how wasteful and destructive is inebriety. In disposing of their land, therefore, to the men whom they would gather about them and employ, they incorporate the provision, as a fundamental article in the deed of grant, that ardent spirits shall never be sold upon the premises; and thus they shut up, at once, one of the most densely-thronged gateways of hell. Have they not a right to do so, from the mere fact of ownership? Would any judge or lawyer doubt the validity of such a condition; or would any sensible man ever doubt its wisdom or humanity? Pecuniarily and morally, this comes under the head of “needful rules and regulations.” If tipplers do not like them, let them stagger away, and seek their residence elsewhere.

But the United States is not merely a land owner; it is a sovereignty. As such, it exercises all constitutional jurisdiction over all its territories. Whence, but from this right of sovereignty, does the government obtain its power of saying that no man shall purchase land of the natives, or aborigines; and that, if you wish to buy land in the territories, you shall come to the government for it? Is there any express power in the constitution authorizing Congress to say to all the citizens of the United States, “If you wish to buy ungranted land in the territories, you must come to us, for no one else can sell, or shall sell”? This right, sustained by all our legislation and adjudications, covers the whole ground. Lessee of Johnson et al. vs. McIntosh, 8 Wheaton, 543; 5 Cond. Rep. 515.

But, leaving the constitution, it is denied that there are precedents. The honorable gentlemen from Virginia [Mr. Bayly] has not only contested the power of Congress to legislate on the subject of slavery in the territories, but he has denied the existence of precedents to sustain this power. Sir, it would have been an assertion far less bold, to deny the existence of precedents for the election of a President of the United States; for the instances of the latter have been far less frequent than of the former. Congress has legislated on the subject of slavery in the territories all the way up from the adoption of the constitution to the present time; and this legislation has been sustained by the judiciary of both the general and state governments, and carried into execution by the executive power of both. See Menard vs. Aspasia, 5 Peters, 505; Phebe et al. vs. Jay, Breese’s Rep. 210; Hogg vs. The Zanesville Canal Co., 5 Ohio Rep. 410; Martin’s Louisiana Rep. N. S. 699; Spooner vs. McConnell, 1 McLean’s Rep. 341; Harvey vs. Deeker, Walker’s Mississippi Rep. 36; Rachael vs. Walker, 4 Missouri Rep. 350.

So far as the uniform practice of sixty years can settle a doubtful, or confirm an admitted right, this power of legislating over the territories has been taken from the region of doubt, and established upon the basis of acknowledged authority. In legislating for all that is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida, we have legislated on the subject of slavery in the territories. Sixty years of legislation on one side, and not a denial of the right on the other.

But the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bayly] says, that the action of Congress in regard to the territories has been rather that of constitution-making than of law-making. Suppose this to be true; does not the greater include the less? If Congress could make a constitution for all the territories,—an organic, fundamental law,—a law of laws,—could it not, had it so pleased, make the law itself? A constitution prescribes to the legislature what it shall do, and what it shall not do; it commands, prohibits, and binds men by oaths to support itself. It says, “Hitherto SHALT thou come, and no farther.” And if Congress can do this, can it not make the local law itself? Can aught be more preposterous? As if we could command others to do what we have no right to do ourselves, and prohibit others from doing what lies beyond our own jurisdiction! Surely, to decree on what subjects a community shall legislate, and on what they shall not legislate, is the exercise of the highest power.

But Congress has not stopped with the exercise of the constitution-making power. In various forms, and at all times, it has legislated for the territories, in the strictest sense of the word legislation. It has legislated again and again, and ten times again, on this very subject of slavery. See the act of 1794, prohibiting the slave trade from “any port or place” in the United States. Could any citizen of the United States, under this act, have gone into one of our territories and there have fitted out vessels for the slave trade? Surely he could, if Congress had no right to legislate over territories only as so much land and water.

By statute 1798, chapter 28, § 7, slaves were forbidden to be brought into the Mississippi Territory from without the United States, and all slaves so brought in were made free.

So the act of 1800, chapter 51, in further prohibition of the slave trade, applied to all citizens of the United States, whether living in territories or in organized states. Did not this legislation cover the territories?

By statute 1804, chapter 38, § 10, three classes of slaves were forbidden to be introduced into the Orleans Territory.

Statute 1807, chapter 22, prohibiting the importation of slaves after January 1, 1808, prohibited their importation into the territories in express terms.

Statute 1818, chapter 91, statute 1819, chapter 101, and statute 1820, chapter 113, prohibiting the slave trade, and making it piracy, expressly included all the territories of the United States.

Statute 1819, chapter 21, authorized the President to provide for the safe-keeping of slaves imported from Africa, and for their removal to their home in that land. Under this law, the President might have established a depot for slaves within the limits of our territories, on the gulf, or on the Mississippi.

By statute 1820, chapter 22, § 8, Congress established what has been called the Missouri compromise line, thereby expressly legislating on the subject of slavery. So of Texas. See Jo. Res. March 1, 1851.

By statute 1819, chapter 93, statute 1821, chapter 39, § 2, and statute 1822, chapter 13, § 9, Congress legislated on the subject of slavery in the Territory of Florida.

Does it not seem almost incredible that a defender and champion of slavery should deny the power of Congress to legislate on the subject of slavery in the territories? If Congress has no such power, by what right can a master recapture a fugitive slave escaping into a territory? The constitution says, “No person held to service, or labor, in one state, escaping into another,”—that is, another state,—“shall be discharged from such service, or labor,” &c. The act of 1793, chapter 7, § 3, provides that when a person held to labor, &c., “shall escape into any other of the said states, or territory,” he may be taken. By what other law than this can a runaway slave be retaken in a territory? If Congress has no power to legislate on the subject of slavery in any territory, then, surely, it cannot legislate for the capture of a fugitive slave in a territory. The argument cuts both ways. The knife wounds him who would use it to wound his fellow.

Further than this. If slavery is claimed to be one of the common subjects of legislation, then any legislation by Congress for the territories, on any of the common subjects of legislation, is a precedent, going to prove its right to legislate on slavery itself. If Congress may legislate on one subject belonging to a class, then it may legislate on any other subject belonging to the same class. Now, Congress has legislated for the territories on almost the whole circle of subjects belonging to common legislation. It has legislated on the elective franchise, on the pecuniary qualifications and residence of candidates for office, on the militia, on oaths, on the per diem and mileage of members, &c., &c. By statute 1811, chapter 21, § 3, authorizing the Territory of Orleans to form a constitution, it was provided that all legislative proceedings and judicial records should be kept and promulgated in the English language. Cannot Congress make provision for the rights of the people, as well as for the language in which the laws and records defining those rights shall be expressed? Any language is sweet to the ears of man which gives him the right of trial by jury, of habeas corpus, of religious freedom, and of life, limb, and liberty; but accursed is that language, and fit only for the realms below, which deprives an immortal being of the rights of intelligence and of freedom; of the right to himself, and the dearer rights of family.

But all this is by no means the strongest part of the evidence with which our statutes and judicial decisions abound, showing the power of Congress to legislate over territories. From the beginning, Congress has not only legislated over the territories, but it has appointed and controlled the agents of legislation.

The general structure of the legislature in several of the earlier territorial governments was this: It consisted of a governor and of two houses,—an upper and a lower. Without an exception, where a governor has been appointed, Congress has always reserved his appointment to itself, or to the President. The governor so appointed has always had a veto power over the two houses; and Congress has always reserved to itself, or to the President, a veto power, not only over him, but over him and both the houses besides. Congress has often interfered also with the appointment of the upper house, leaving only the lower house to be chosen exclusively by the people of the territory; and it has determined even for the lower house the qualifications both of electors and of elected. Further still: the power of removing the governor, at pleasure, has always been reserved to Congress, or to the President.

Look at this: Congress determines for the territory the qualifications of electors and elected,—at least in the first instance. No law of the territorial legislature is valid until approved by the governor. Though approved by the governor, it may be annulled by Congress, or by the President; and the governor is appointed, and may be removed at pleasure, by Congress or by the President.

To be more specific, I give the following outline of some of the territorial governments:—

Ohio Territory, statute 1789, chapter 8.—A governor for four years, nominated by the President, approved by the Senate, with power to appoint all subordinate civil and military officers.

A secretary for four years, appointed in the same way.

Three judges, to hold office during good behavior. Governor and judges the sole legislature, until the district shall contain five thousand free male inhabitants. Then,—

A House of Assembly, chosen by qualified electors, for two years.

A legislative council of five, to hold office for five years. The House of Assembly to choose ten men, five of whom are to be selected by the President and approved by the Senate. These five to be the “Legislative Council.”

A governor, as before, with an unconditional veto, and a right to convene, prorogue, and dissolve the Assembly.

Power given to the President to revoke the commissions of governor and secretary.

Indiana Territory, statute 1800, chapter 41.—Similar to that of Ohio. At first, the lower house to consist of not more than nine, nor less than seven.

Mississippi Territory, statute 1800, chapter 50.—Similar to that of Indiana.

Michigan Territory, statute 1805, chapter 5.—Similar to that of Indiana.

Illinois Territory, statute 1809, chapter 13.—Similar to that of Indiana.

Alabama Territory, statute 1817, chapter 59.—Similar to that of Indiana.

Wisconsin Territory, statute 1836, chapter 54.—Governor for three years, appointed as above, and removable by the President, with power to appoint officers and grant pardons. Unconditional veto.

Secretary for four years, removable by the President. In the absence, or during the inability, of the governor, to perform his duties.

Legislative Assembly to consist of a Council and a House of Representatives, to be chosen for two years. Congress to have an unconditional veto, to be exercised on laws approved by the governor.

Louisiana Territory, statute 1803, chapter 1.—Sole dictatorial power given to the President of the United States; and the army and navy of the United States placed at his command to govern the territorial inhabitants.—(This was under Mr. Jefferson, a strict constructionist.)

Territory of Orleans, statute 1804, chapter 38.—Governor nominated by the President, approved by the Senate, tenure of office three years. Removable by the President. Secretary for four years, to be governor in case, &c.

Legislative Council of thirteen, to be annually appointed by the President.

Governor and Council, of course, a reciprocal negative on each other. Congress an unconditional veto on both.

District of Louisiana, statute 1804, chapter 38.—To be governed by the governor and judges of the Territory of Indiana.

Congress an unconditional veto on all their laws.

Missouri Territory, statute 1812, chapter 95.—A governor, appointable and removable as above.

Secretary, the same.

A Legislative Council of nine. Eighteen persons to be nominated by the House of Representatives for the territory; nine of these to be selected and appointed by the President and Senate. A House of Representatives, to be chosen by the people.

Arkansas Territory, statute 1819, chapter 49.—A governor and secretary, appointable and removable as above.

All legislative power vested in the governor and in the judges of the superior court.

When a majority of the freeholders should elect, then they might adopt the form of government of Missouri.

East and West Florida, statute 1819, chapter 93.—Statute 1821, chapter 29.—Statute 1822, chapter 13. From March 3, 1819, to March 30, 1822, the government vested solely in the President of the United States, and to be exercised by such officers as he should appoint.

After March 30, 1822, a governor and secretary, appointable and removable as above.

All legislative power vested in the governor, and in thirteen persons, called a legislative council, to be appointed annually by the President.

Yet, sir, notwithstanding all this legislation of Congress for the territories, on the subject of slavery itself; notwithstanding its legislation on a great class of subjects of which slavery is acknowledged to be one; notwithstanding its appointment, in some cases, of the legislative power of the territory,—making its own agent, the governor, removable at pleasure,—giving him a veto, in the first place, and reserving to itself a veto when he has approved; notwithstanding the exercise, in other cases, of full, absolute sovereignty over the inhabitants of the territories, and all their interests; and, notwithstanding such has been the practice of the government for sixty years, under Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and others, it is now denied that Congress has any right to legislate on the subject of slavery in the territories. Sir, with a class of politicians in this country, it has come to this, that slavery is the only sacred thing in existence. It is self-existent, like a god, and human power cannot prevent it. From year to year, it goes on conquering and to conquer, and human power cannot dethrone it.

Sir, I will present another argument on this subject, and I do not see how any jurist or statesman can invalidate it.

Government is one, but its functions are several. They are legislative, judicial, executive. These functions are coördinate; each supposes the other two. There must be a legislature to enact laws; there must be a judiciary to expound the laws enacted, and point out the individuals against whom they are to be enforced; there must be an executive arm to enforce the decisions of the courts. In every theory of government, where one of these exist, the others exist. Under our constitution they are divided into three parts, and apportioned among three coördinate bodies. Whoever denies one of these must deny them all.

If the government of the United States, therefore, has no right to legislate for the territories, it has no right to adjudicate for the territories; if it has no right to adjudicate, then it has no right to enforce the decisions of the judicial tribunals. These rights must stand or fall together. He who takes from this government the law-making power, in regard to territories, strikes also the balances of justice from the hands of the judge, and the mace of authority from those of the executive. There is no escape from this conclusion. The constitution gives no more authority to adjudge suits in the territories, or to execute the decisions of the territorial courts, than it does to legislate. If Congress has no power over territory, only as land, then what does this land want of judges and marshals? Is it not obvious, then, that this new reading of the constitution sets aside the whole legislative, judicial, and executive administration of this government over territories, since the adoption of the constitution? It makes the whole of it invalid. The Presidents, all members of Congress, all judges upon the bench, have been in a dream for the last sixty years, and are now waked up and recalled to their senses by the charm of a newly-discovered reading of the constitution.

Hitherto, sir, I have not directed my remarks to the actual legislation by Congress on the subject of slavery in the North-western Territory, so called. That territory was consecrated to freedom by the ordinance of 1787. It has been said that the Confederation had no power to pass such an ordinance. But whether this be so or not, is immaterial, for Congress has ratified the ordinance again and again. The first Congress at its first session passed an act whose preamble is as follows: “Whereas, in order that the ordinance of the United States, in Congress assembled, for the government of the territory north-west of the river Ohio, may continue to have full effect,” &c. It then proceeds to modify some parts of the ordinance, and to adopt all the rest.[1]

In the second section of the act of 1800, chapter 41, establishing the Indiana Territory, it is expressly provided that its government shall be “in all respects similar to that provided by the ordinance of 1787.”

In the act of 1802, chapter 40, section 5, authorizing Ohio to form a constitution and state government, this ordinance of 1787 is three times referred to as a valid and existing engagement, and it has always been held to be so by the courts of Ohio.

So in the act of 1816, chapter 57, section 4, authorizing the erection of Indiana into a state, the ordinance is again recognized, and is made a part of the fundamental law of the state.

So in the act of 1818, chapter 67, section 4, authorizing Illinois to become a state.

So in the act of 1805, chapter 5, section 2, establishing the Territory of Michigan.

So of Wisconsin. See act of 1847, chapter 53, in connection with the constitution of Wisconsin.

But all this is tedious and superfluous. I have gone into this detail, because I understand the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bayly] to have denied this adoption and these recognitions of the ordinance. I hazard nothing in saying that the ordinance of 1787 has been expressly referred to as valid, or expressly or impliedly reënacted, a dozen times, by the Congress of the United States; and, in the state courts of Ohio, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri, it has been adjudged to be constitutional. How, then, is it possible for any mind, amenable to legal rules for the decision of legal questions, to say that Congress cannot legislate, or has not legislated, (except once or twice inadvertently,) on the subject of slavery in the territories?

On this part of the argument, I have only a concluding remark to submit. The position I am contesting affirms generally that Congress cannot legislate upon the subject of slavery in the territories. The inexpediency of so legislating is further advocated on the ground that it is repugnant to democratical principles to debar the inhabitants of the territories from governing themselves. Must the free men of the territories, it is asked, have laws made for them by others? No! It is anti-democratic, monarchical, intolerable. All men have the right of self-government; and this principle holds true with regard to the inhabitants of territories, as well as the inhabitants of states.

Now, if these declarations were a sincere and honest affirmation of human rights, I should respect them and honor their authors. Did this doctrine grow out of a jealousy for the rights of man, a fear of usurpation, an assertion of the principle of self-government, I should sympathize with it, while I denied its legality. But, sir, it is the most painful aspect of this whole case, that the very object and purpose of claiming these ample and sovereign rights for the inhabitants of the territories is, that they may deny all rights to a portion of their fellow-beings within them. Enlarge, aggrandize, the rights of the territorial settlers! And why? Because, by so doing, you enable them to abolish all rights for a whole class of human beings. This claim, then, is not made for the purpose of making freemen more free, but for making slaves more enslaved. The reason for denying to Congress the power to legislate for the territories, is the fear that Congress will prevent slavery in them. The reason for claiming the supreme right of legislation for the territorial inhabitants, is the hope that they will establish slavery within their borders. Must not that democracy be false which begets slavery as its natural offspring?

If it has now been demonstrated that Congress has uniformly legislated, and can legislate, on the subject of slavery in the territories, I proceed to consider the next question. Is it expedient to exclude slavery from them?

Here, on the threshold, we are confronted with the claim that the gates shall be thrown wide open to the admission of slavery into the broad western world; because, otherwise, the southern or slave states would be debarred from enjoying their share of the common property of the Union.

I meet this claim with a counter-claim. If, on the one hand, the consecration of this soil to freedom will exclude the slaveholders of the south, it is just as true, on the other hand, that the desecration of it to slavery will exclude the freemen of the north. We, at the north, know too well the foundations of worldly prosperity and happiness; we know too well the sources of social and moral welfare, ever voluntarily to blend our fortunes with those of a community where slavery is tolerated. If our demand for free territory, then, excludes them, their demand for slave territory excludes us. Not one in five hundred of the freemen of the north could ever be induced to take his family and domicile himself in a territory where slavery exists. They know that the institution would impoverish their estate, demoralize their children, and harrow their own consciences with an ever-present sense of guilt, until those consciences, by force of habit and induration, should pass into that callous and more deplorable state, where continuous crime could be committed without the feeling of remorse.

Sir, let me read a passage from Dr. Channing, written in 1798,—fifty years ago,—when, at the early age of nineteen, he lived for some time in Richmond, Virginia, as a tutor in a private family. While there, he wrote a letter, of which the following is an extract:—

“There is one object here which always depresses me. It is slavery. This alone would prevent me from ever settling in Virginia. Language cannot express my detestation of it. Master and slave! Nature never made such a distinction, or established such a relation. Man, when forced to substitute the will of another for his own, ceases to be a moral agent; his title to the name of man is extinguished; he becomes a mere machine in the hands of his oppressor. No empire is so valuable as the empire of one’s self. No right is so inseparable from humanity, and so necessary to the improvement of our species, as the right of exerting the powers which nature has given us in the pursuit of any and of every good which we can obtain without doing injury to others. Should you desire it, I will give you some idea of the situation and character of the negroes in Virginia. It is a subject so degrading to humanity, that I cannot dwell on it with pleasure. I should be obliged to show you every vice, heightened by every meanness, and added to every misery. The influence of slavery on the whites is almost as fatal as on the blacks themselves.”

This was written fifty years ago, by a young man from New England, only nineteen years old. I know that, on all subjects of philanthropy and ethics, Dr. Channing was half a century in advance of his age. But the sentiments he expressed on this subject, at the close of the last century, are now the prevalent, deep-seated feelings of northern men, excepting, perhaps, a few cases where these feelings have been corrupted by interest.

I repeat, then, that the north cannot shut out the south from the new territories by a law for excluding slavery, more effectually than the south will shut out the north by the fact of introducing slavery. Even admitting, then, that the law is equal for both north and south, I will show that all the equity is on the side of the north.

Sir, from the establishment of our independence by the treaty of 1783 to the time of the adoption of the constitution, and for years afterwards, no trace is to be found of an intention to enlarge the bounds of our republic; and it is well known that the treaty of 1803, for acquiring Louisiana, was acknowledged by Mr. Jefferson, who made it, to be unconstitutional. In 1787, the Magna Charta of perpetual freedom was secured to the North-west Territory. But the article excluding slavery from it had an earlier date than 1787. On the 1st of March, 1784, Congress voted to accept a session from the state of Virginia of her claim to the territory north-west of the Ohio river. The subject of providing a government for this and other territory was referred to a committee consisting of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Chase of Maryland, and Mr. Howell of Rhode Island. On the 19th of April, 1784, their report was considered. That report contained the following ever-memorable clause:—

“That after the year 1800, of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, [they were spoken of as states, because it was always contemplated to erect the territories into states,] otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted to have been personally guilty.”

Sir, we hear much said in our day of the Wilmot proviso against slavery. In former years, great credit has been given to Mr. Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, for originating the sixth article, (against slavery), in the ordinance of 1787. Sir, it is a misnomer to call this restrictive clause the “Wilmot proviso.” It is the Jefferson proviso, and Mr. Jefferson should have the honor of it; and would to Heaven that our southern friends, who kneel so devoutly at his shrine, could be animated by that lofty spirit of freedom, that love for the rights of man, which alone can make their acts of devotion sacred.

But what is most material to be observed here is, that the plan of government reported by Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon by the Congress at that time, embraced all the “western territory.” It embraced all the “territory ceded, or to be ceded, by individual states to the United States.”—See Journals of Congress, April 23, 1784. If, then, we leave out Kentucky and Tennessee, as being parts of Virginia and North Carolina, all the residue of the territory north or south of the Ohio river, within the treaty limits of the United States, was intended, by the “Jefferson proviso,” to be rescued from the doom of slavery. For that proviso there were sixteen votes, and only seven against it. Yet so singularly were these seven votes distributed, and so large a majority of the states did it require to pass an act, that it was lost. The whole of the representation from seven states voted for it unanimously. Only two states voted unanimously against it. Had but one of Mr. Jefferson’s colleagues voted with him, and had Mr. Spaight, of North Carolina, voted for it, the restrictive clause in the report would have stood. But a minority of seven from the slaveholding states controlled a majority of sixteen from the free states,—ominous even at that early day of a fate that has now relentlessly pursued us for sixty years.

That vote was certainly no more than a fair representation of the feeling of the country against slavery at that time. It was with such a feeling that the “compromises of the constitution,” as they are called, were entered into. Nobody dreaded or dreamed of the extension of slavery beyond its then existing limits. Yet, behold its aggressive march! Besides Kentucky and Tennessee, which I omit, for reasons before intimated, seven new slave states have been added to the Union,—Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas,—the last five out of territory not belonging to us at the adoption of the constitution; while only one free state, Iowa, has been added during all this time, out of such newly-acquired territory.[2]

But there is another fact, which shows that the slaveholders have already had their full share of territory, however wide the boundaries of this country may hereafter become.

I have seen the number of actual slaveholders variously estimated; but the highest estimate I have ever seen is three hundred thousand. Allowing six persons to a family, this number would represent a white population of eighteen hundred thousand.

Mr. Gayle, of Alabama, interrupted and said: If the gentleman from Massachusetts has been informed that the number of slaveholders is only 300,000, then I will tell him his information is utterly false.

Mr. Mann. Will the gentleman tell me how many there are?

Mr. Gayle. Ten times as many.

Mr. Mann. Ten times as many! Ten times 300,000 is 3,000,000; and allowing six persons to each family, this would give a population of 18,000,000 directly connected with slaveholding; while the whole free population of the south, in 1840, was considerably less than five millions!

Mr. Meade, of Virginia, here interposed and said, that where the father or mother owned slaves, they were considered the joint property of the family. I think, if you include the grown and the young, there are about three millions interested in slave property.

Mr. Mann resumed. My data lead me to believe that the number does not now exceed two millions; but, at the time of the adoption of the constitution, the number directly connected with slaveholding must have been less than one million. Yet this one million have already managed to acquire the broad States of Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, beyond the limits of the treaty of 1783; when, at the time the “compromises of the constitution” were entered into, not one of the parties supposed that we should ever acquire territory beyond those limits. And this has been done for the benefit, (if it be a benefit,) of that one million of slaveholders, against what is now a free population of fifteen millions. And, in addition to this, it is to be considered that the non-slaveholding population of the slave states have as direct and deep an interest as any part of the country, adverse to the extension of slavery. If all our new territory be doomed to slavery, where can the non-slaveholders of the slaveholding states emigrate to? Are they not to be considered? Has one half the population of the slaveholding states rights, which are paramount, not only to the rights of the other half, but to the rights of all the free states besides? for such is the claim. No, sir. I say that, if slavery were no moral or political evil, yet, according to all principles of justice and equity, the slaveholders have already obtained their full share of territory, though all the residue of this continent were to be annexed to the Union, and we were to become, in the insane language of the day, “an ocean-bound republic.”

I now proceed to consider the nature and effects of slavery, as a reason why new-born communities should be exempted from it. First, let me treat of its economical or financial, and, secondly, of its moral aspects.

Though slaves are said to be property, they are the preventers, the wasters, the antagonists of property. So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both. It blasts worldly prosperity. Other things being equal, a free people will thrive and prosper, in a mere worldly sense, more than a people divided into masters and slaves. Were we so constituted as to care for nothing, to aspire to nothing, beyond mere temporal well being, this well being would counsel us to abolish slavery wherever it exists, and to repel its approach wherever it threatens.

Enslave a man, and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring. The slave does not participate in the value of the wealth he creates. All he earns another seizes. A free man labors, not only to improve his own condition, but to better the condition of his children. The mighty impulse of parental affection repays for diligence, and makes exertion sweet. The slave’s heart never beats with this high emotion. However industrious and frugal he may be, he has nothing to bequeath to his children,—or nothing save the sad bonds he himself has worn. Fear may make him work, but hope—never. When he moves his tardy limbs, it is because of the suffering that goads him from behind, and not from the bright prospects that beckon him forward in the race.

What would a slave owner at the south think, should he come to Massachusetts, and there see a farmer seize upon his hired man, call in a surgeon, and cut off all the flexor muscles of his arms and legs? I do not ask what he would think of his humanity, but what would he think of his sanity? Yet the planter does more than this when he makes a man a slave. He cuts deeper than the muscles; he destroys the spirit that moves the muscles.

In all ages of the world, among all nations, wherever the earnings of the laborer have been stolen from him, his energies have gone with his earnings. Under the villeinage system of England, the villeins were a low, idle, spiritless race; dead to responsibility; grovelling in their desires; resistant of labor; without enterprise; without foresight. This principle is now exemplified in the landlord and tenant system of Ireland. If a tenant is to be no better off for the improvements he makes on an estate, he will not make the improvements. Look at the seigniories of New York,—the anti-rent districts as they are now called;—every man acquainted with the subject knows that both people and husbandry are half a century behind the condition of contiguous fee-simple proprietorships. All history illustrates the principle, that when property is insecure, it will not be earned. If a despot can seize and confiscate the property of his subject at pleasure, the subject will not acquire property, and thereby give to himself the conspicuousness that invites the plunder. And if this be so when property is merely insecure, what must be the effect when a man has no property whatever in his earnings? Who does not know that a slave, who can rationally hope to purchase his freedom, will do all the work he ever did before, and earn his freedom-money besides? Slavery, therefore, though claiming to be a kind of property, is the bane of property; and the more slaves there are found in the inventory of a nation’s wealth, the less in value will the aggregate of that inventory be.

This is one of the reasons why slave labor is so much less efficient than free labor. The former can never compete with the latter; and while the greater service is performed with cheerfulness, the smaller is extorted by fear. Just as certain as that the locomotive can outrun the horse, and the lightning outspeed the locomotive, just so certain is it that he who is animated by the hopes and the rewards of freedom will outstrip the disheartened and fear-driven slave.

The intelligent freeman can afford to live well, dress decently, and occupy a comfortable tenement. A scanty subsistence, a squalid garb, a mean and dilapidated hovel, proclaim the degradation of the slave. The slave states gain millions of dollars every year from the privations, the mean food, clothing, and shelter to which the slaves are subjected; and yet they grow rich less rapidly than states where millions of dollars are annually expended for the comforts and conveniences of the laborer. More is lost in production than is gained by privation.

A universal concomitant of slavery is, that it makes white labor disreputable. Being disreputable, it is shunned. The pecuniary loss resulting from this is incalculable. Dry up the myriad headsprings of the Mississippi, and where would be the mighty volume of waters which now bear navies on their bosom, and lift the ocean itself above its level, by their outpouring flood? Abolish those sources of wealth, which consist in the personal industry of every man, and of each member of every man’s family, and that wide-spread thrift, and competence, and elegance, which are both the reward and the stimulus of labor, will be abolished with them. Forego the means, and you forfeit the end. You must use the instrument if you would have the product. Nothing but the feeling of independence, the conscious security of working for one’s self and one’s family, will, in the present state of the world, make labor profitable.

I know it has been recently said in this capital, and by high authority, that, with the exception of menial services, it is not disreputable at the south for a white man to labor. There are two ways, each independent of the other, to disprove this assertion. One of them consists in the testimony of a host of intelligent witnesses acquainted with the condition of things at the south. I might quote page after page from various sources; but, as the assertion comes from a gentleman belonging to South Carolina, [Mr. Calhoun, of the Senate,] I will meet it with the statement of another gentleman belonging to the same state. I refer to Mr. William Gregg, of Charleston, a gentleman who is extensively acquainted with the social condition of men, both north and south.

In that state, according to the last census, there were about 150,000 free whites over twelve years of age. “Of this class,” says Mr. Gregg, “fifty thousand are non-producers.”[3] I suppose South Carolina to be as thrifty a slave state as there is, perhaps excepting Georgia; yet here is one third part of the population, old enough to work and able to work, who are idle, and of course vicious,—non-producers, but the worst kind of consumers.

Another answer to the above assertion is, that if white labor were reputable at the south, and white men were industrious, the whole country would be a garden,—a terrestrial paradise,—so far as neatness, abundance, and beauty are concerned. Where are the RESULTS of this respected and honored white labor? In a country where few expenses are necessary to ward off the rigors of winter; where the richest staples of the world are produced; where cattle and flocks need but little shelter, and sometimes none; if man superadded his industry to the bounties of nature, want would be wholly unknown, competence would give place to opulence, and the highest decorations of art would mingle with the glowing beauties of nature.

But hear Mr. Gregg:—

“My recent visit to the northern states has fully satisfied me that the true secret of our difficulties lies in the want of energy on the part of our capitalists, and ignorance and laziness on the part of those who ought to labor. We need never look for thrift while we permit our immense timber forests, granite quarries, and mines to lie idle, and supply ourselves with hewn granite, pine boards, laths, shingles, &c., furnished by the lazy dogs of the north. Ah! worse than this; we see our back-country farmers, many of whom are too lazy to mend a broken gate, or repair the fences to protect their crops from the neighboring stock, actually supplied with their axe, hoe, and broom handles, pitchforks, rakes, &c., by the indolent mountaineers of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The time was, when every old woman had her gourd, from which the country gardens were supplied with seed. We now find it more convenient to permit this duty to devolve on our careful friends, the Yankees. Even our boat oars, and handspikes for rolling logs, are furnished, ready-made, to our hand,” &c. “Need I add, to further exemplify our excessive indolence, that the Charleston market is supplied with fish and wild game by northern men, who come out here as regularly as the winter comes, for this purpose, and from our own waters and forests often realize, in the course of one winter, a sufficiency to purchase a small farm in New England.”—Essays, page 8.

Again:—

“It is only necessary to travel over the sterile mountains of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, to learn the true secret of our difficulties,”—“to learn the difference between indolence and industry, extravagance and economy. We there see the scenery which would take the place of our unpainted mansions, dilapidated cabins, with mud chimneys, and no windows, broken-down rail fences, fields overgrown with weeds, and thrown away half exhausted, to be taken up by pine thickets; beef cattle unprotected from the inclemency of winter, and so poor as barely to preserve life.”—Essays, page 7.

And again:—

“Shall we pass unnoticed the thousands of poor, ignorant, degraded white people among us, who, in this land of plenty, live in comparative nakedness and starvation? Many a one is reared in proud South Carolina, from birth to manhood, who has never passed a month in which he has not, some part of the time, been stinted for meat. Many a mother is there who will tell you that her children are but scantily supplied with bread, and much more scantily with meat, and if they be clad with comfortable raiment, it is at the expense of these scanty allowances of food. These may be startling statements, but they are nevertheless true; and if not believed in Charleston, the members of our legislature, who have traversed the state in electioneering campaigns, can attest their truth.”—Essays, page 22.

After such statements as these; after the testimony of hundreds and hundreds of eye-witnesses; after the proofs furnished by the aggregates of products, published in our Patent Office Reports, it is drawing a little too heavily on our credulity to say that the white man at the south is industrious. Industry manifests itself by its results, as the sun manifests itself by shining.

But slavery is hostile to the pecuniary advancement of the community in another way. The slave must be kept in ignorance. He must not be educated, lest with education should come a knowledge of his natural rights, and the means of escape or the power of vengeance. To secure the abolition of his freedom, the growth of his mind must be abolished. His education, therefore, is prohibited by statute under terrible penalties.

Now, a man is weak in his muscles; he is strong only in his faculties. In physical strength how much superior is an ox or a horse to a man; in fleetness, the dromedary or the eagle. It is through mental strength only that man becomes the superior and governor of all animals.

It was not the design of Providence that the work of the world should be performed by muscular strength. God has filled the earth and imbued the elements with energies of greater power than that of all the inhabitants of a thousand planets like ours. Whence come our necessaries and our luxuries?—those comforts and appliances that make the difference between a houseless, wandering tribe of Indians in the far west, and a New England village. They do not come wholly or principally from the original, unassisted strength of the human arm, but from the employment, through intelligence and skill, of those great natural forces with which the bountiful Creator has filled every part of the material universe. Caloric, gravitation, expansibility, compressibility, electricity, chemical affinities and repulsions, spontaneous velocities,—these are the mighty agents which the intellect of man harnesses to the car of improvement. The application of water, and wind, and steam, to the propulsion of machinery, and to the transportation of men and merchandise from place to place, has added ten thousand fold to the actual products of human industry. How small the wheel which the stoutest laborer can turn, and how soon will he be weary! Compare this with a wheel driving a thousand spindles or looms, which a stream of water can turn, and never tire. A locomotive will take five hundred men, and bear them on their journey hundreds of miles in a day. Look at these same five hundred men, starting from the same point, and attempting the same distance, with all the pedestrian’s or the equestrian’s toil and tardiness. The cotton mills of Massachusetts will turn out more cloth, in one day, than could have been manufactured by all the inhabitants of the eastern continent during the tenth century. On an element which, in ancient times, was supposed to be exclusively within the control of the gods, and where it was deemed impious for human power to intrude, even there the gigantic forces of nature, which human science and skill have enlisted in their service, confront and overcome the raging of the elements,—breasting tempests and tides, escaping reefs and lee shores, and careering triumphant around the globe. The velocity of winds, the weight of waters, and the rage of steam, are powers, each one of which is infinitely stronger than all the strength of all the nations and races of mankind, were it all gathered into a single arm. And all these energies are given us on one condition,—the condition of intelligence, that is, of education.

Had God intended that the work of the world should be done by human bones and sinews, he would have given us an arm as solid and strong as the shaft of a steam engine; and enabled us to stand, day and night, and turn the crank of a steamship while sailing to Liverpool or Calcutta. Had God designed the human muscles to do the work of the world, then, instead of the ingredients of gunpowder or gun cotton, and the expansive force of heat, he would have given us hands which could take a granite quarry and break its solid acres into suitable and symmetrical blocks, as easily as we now open an orange. Had he intended us for bearing burdens, he would have given us Atlantean shoulders, by which we could carry the vast freights of rail-car and steamship, as a porter carries his pack. He would have given us lungs by which we could blow fleets before us, and wings to sweep over ocean wastes. But, instead of iron arms, and Atlantean shoulders, and the lungs of Boreas, he has given us a mind, a soul, a capacity of acquiring knowledge, and thus of appropriating all these energies of nature to our own use. Instead of a telescopic and microscopic eye, he has given us power to invent the telescope and the microscope. Instead of ten thousand fingers, he has given us genius inventive of the power loom and the printing press. Without a cultivated intellect, man is among the weakest of all the dynamical forces of nature; with a cultivated intellect, he commands them all.

And now, what does the slave maker do? He abolishes this mighty power of the intellect, and uses only the weak, degraded, and half-animated forces of the human limbs. A thousand slaves may stand by a river, and to them it is only an object of fear or of superstition. An educated man surpasses the ancient idea of a river god; he stands by the Penobscot, the Kennebec, the Merrimack, or the Connecticut; he commands each of them to do more work than could be performed by a hundred thousand men,—to saw timber, to make cloth, to grind corn,—and they obey. Ignorant slaves stand upon a coal mine, and to them it is only a worthless part of the inanimate earth. An educated man uses the same mine to print a million of books. Slaves will seek to obtain the same crop from the same field, year after year, though the pabulum of that crop is exhausted; the educated man, with his chemist’s eye, sees not only the minutest atoms of earth, but the imponderable gases that permeate it, and he is rewarded with an unbroken succession of luxuriant harvests.

Nor are these advantages confined to those departments of nature where her mightiest forces are brought into requisition. In accomplishing whatever requires delicacy and precision, nature is as much more perfect than man as she is more powerful in whatever requires strength. Whether in great or in small operations, all the improvements in the mechanical and the useful arts come as directly from intelligence as a bird comes out of a shell, or the beautiful colors of a flower out of sunshine. The slave worker is forever prying at the short end of Nature’s lever, and using the back instead of the edge of her finest instruments.

Sir, the most abundant proof exists, derived from all departments of human industry, that uneducated labor is comparatively unprofitable labor. I have before me the statements of a number of the most intelligent gentlemen of Massachusetts, affirming this fact as the result of an experience extending over many years. In Massachusetts we have no native-born child wholly without school instruction; but the degrees of attainment, of mental development, are various. Half a dozen years ago, the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education obtained statements from large numbers of our master manufacturers, authenticated from the books of their respective establishments, and covering a series of years, the result of which was, that increased wages were found in connection with increased intelligence, just as certainly as increased heat raises the mercury in the thermometer. Foreigners, and those coming from other states, who made their marks when they receipted their bills, earned the least; those who had a moderate or limited education occupied a middle ground on the pay-roll; while the intelligent young women who worked in the mills in winter, and taught schools in summer, crowned the list. The larger capital, in the form of intelligence, yielded the larger interest in the form of wages. This inquiry was not confined to manufactures, but was extended to other departments of business, where the results of labor could be made the subject of exact measurement.

This is universally so. The mechanic sees it, when he compares the work of a stupid with that of an awakened mind. The traveller sees it, when he passes from an educated into an uneducated nation. Sir, I have seen countries in Europe, lying side by side, where, without compass or chart, without bound or landmark, I could run the line of demarcation between the two, by the broad, legible characters which ignorance has written on roads, fields, houses, and the persons of men, women, and children, on one side, and which knowledge has inscribed on the other.

This difference is most striking in the mechanic arts, but it is clearly visible also in husbandry. Not the most fertile soil, not mines of silver and gold, can make a nation rich, without intelligence. Who ever had a more fertile soil than the Egyptians? Who have handled more silver and gold than the Spaniards? The universal cultivation of the mind and heart is the only true source of opulence;—the cultivation of the mind, by which to lay hold on the treasures of nature; the cultivation of the heart, by which to devote those treasures to beneficent uses. Where this cultivation exists, no matter how barren the soil or ungenial the clime, there comfort and competence will abound; for it is the intellectual and moral condition of the cultivator that impoverishes the soil or makes it teem with abundance. He who disobeys the law of God in regard to the culture of the intellectual and spiritual nature, may live in the valley of the Nile, but he can rear only the “lean kine” of Pharaoh; but he who obeys the highest law may dwell in the cold and inhospitable regions of Scotland or of New England, and “well-formed and fat-fleshed kine” shall feed on all his meadows. If Pharaoh will be a taskmaster, and will not let the bondmen go free, the corn in his field shall be the “seven thin ears blasted by the east wind;” but if he will obey the commandments of the Lord, then behold there shall be “seven ears of corn upon one stalk, all rank and good.” Sir, the sweat of a slave poisons the soil upon which it falls; his breath is mildew to every green thing; his tear withers the verdure it drops upon.

But slavery makes the general education of the whites impossible. You cannot have general education without Common Schools. Common Schools cannot exist where the population is sparse. Where slaves till the soil, or do the principal part of whatever work is done, the free population must be sparse. Slavery, then, by an inexorable law, denies general education to the whites. The providence of God is just and retributive. Create a serf caste, and debar them from education, and you necessarily debar a great portion of the privileged class from education also. It is impossible, in the present state of things, or in any state of things which can be foreseen, to have free and universal education in a slave state. The difficulty is insurmountable. For a well-organized system of Common Schools, there should be two hundred children, at least, living in such proximity to each other that the oldest of them can come together to a central school. It is not enough to gather from within a circle of half a dozen miles’ diameter fifty or sixty children for a single school. This brings all ages and all studies into the same room. A good system requires a separation of school children into four, or at least into three, classes, according to ages and attainments. Without this gradation, a school is bereft of more than half its efficiency. Now, this can never be done in an agricultural community where there are two classes of men—one to do all the work, and the other to seize all the profits. With New England habits of industry, and with that diversified labor which would be sure to spring from intelligence, the State of Virginia, which skirts us here on the south, would support all the population of the New England states, and fill them with abundance.

Mr. Bayly. We have as great a population as New England now.

Mr. Mann. As great a population as New England!!

Mr. Bayly. We send fifteen representatives.

[A voice. And how many of them represent slaves?]

Mr. Mann. Massachusetts alone sends ten representatives.

[A voice. And the rest of New England twenty-one more.]

Mr. Mann. I say, sir, the single State of Virginia could support in abundance the whole population of New England. With such a free population, the school children would be so numerous that public schools might be opened within three or four miles of each other all over its territory,—the light of each of which, blending with its neighboring lights, would illumine the whole land. They would be schools, too, in point of cheapness, within every man’s means. The degrading idea of pauper schools would be discarded forever. But what is the condition of Virginia now? One quarter part of all its adult free white population are unable to read or write, and were proclaimed to be so by a late governor, in his annual message, without producing any reform. Their remedy is to choose a governor who will not proclaim such a fact. When has Virginia, in any state or national election, given a majority equal to the number of its voters unable to read or write? A republican government supported by the two pillars of Slavery and Ignorance!

In South Carolina there is also a fund for the support of pauper schools; but this had become so useless, and was so disdained by its objects, that a late governor of the state, in his annual message, recommended that it should be withdrawn from them altogether.

Yet in many of the slave states there are beautiful paper systems of Common Schools,—dead laws in the statute books,—and the census tells us how profitless they have been. In 1840, in the fifteen slave states and territories, there were only 201,085 scholars at the primary schools. In the same class of schools in the free states, there were 1,626,028,—eight times as many. New York alone had 502,367, or two and a half times as many. The scholars in the primary schools of Ohio alone, outnumbered all those in the fifteen slave states and territories by more than 17,000. In the slave states, almost one tenth part of the free white population over twenty years of age are unable to read and write. In the free states, less than one in one hundred and fifty; and at least four fifths of these are foreigners, who ought not to be included in the computation. Many of the slave states, too, have munificent school funds. Kentucky has one of more than a million of dollars; Tennessee, of two millions; yet, in 1837, Governor Clarke, of Kentucky, declared, in his message to the legislature, that “one third of the adult population were unable to write their names;” and in the State of Tennessee, according to the last census, there were 58,531 of the same description of persons. Surely it would take more than five of these to make three freemen; for the more a state has of them, the less of intelligent freedom will there be in it. And if the schools in the slave states are compared with the schools in the free states, the deficiency in quality will be found as great as the deficiency in number.

Sir, during the last ten years I have had a most extensive correspondence with the intelligent friends of education in the slave states. They yearn for progress, but they cannot obtain it. They procure laws to be passed, but there is no one to execute them. They set forth the benefits and the blessings of education; but they speak in a vacuum, and no one hears the appeal. If a parent wishes to educate his children, he must send them from home, and thus suffer a sort of bereavement, even while they live; or he must employ a tutor or governess in his family, which few are able to do. The rich may do it, but what becomes of the children of the poor? In cities the obstacles are less; but the number of persons resident in cities is relatively small. All this is the inevitable consequence of slavery; and it is as impossible for free, thorough, universal education to coëxist with slavery as for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time. Slavery would abolish education, if it should invade a free state; education would abolish slavery, if it could invade a slave state.

Destroying common education, slavery destroys the fruits of common education,—the inventive mind, practical talent, the power of adapting means to ends in the business of life. Whence have come all those mechanical and scientific improvements and inventions which have enriched the world with so many comforts, and adorned it with so many beauties; which to-day give enjoyments and luxuries to a common family in a New England village, that neither Queen Elizabeth of England nor any of her proud court ever dreamed of, but a little more than two centuries ago? Among whom have these improvements originated? All history and experience affirm that they have come, and must come, from people among whom education is most generous and unconfined. Increase the constituency, if I may so speak, of developed intellect, and you increase in an equal ratio the chances of inventive, creative genius. From what part of our own country has come the application of steam to the propulsion of boats for commercial purposes, or of wheels for manufacturing purposes? Where have the various and almost infinite improvements been made which have resulted in the present perfection of cotton and woollen machinery? Whence came the invention of the cotton-gin, and the great improvements in railroads? Where was born the mighty genius who invented the first lightning rod, which sends the electric fluid harmless into the earth; or that other genius, not less beneficent, who invented the second lightning rod, which sends the same fluid from city to city on messages of business or of affection? Sir, these are results which you can no more have without common education, without imbuing the public mind with the elements of knowledge, than you can have corn without planting, or harvests without sunshine.

Look into the Patent Office reports, and see in what sections of country mechanical improvements and the application of science to the useful arts have originated. Out of five hundred and seventy-two patents issued in 1847, only sixty-six went to the slave states. The patents annually issued, it is true, are a mingled heap of chaff and wheat, but some of it is wheat worthy of Olympus. I think the Patent Office reports show that at least six or eight times as many patents have been taken out for the north as for the south. What improvements will a slave ever make in agricultural implements; in the manufacture of metals; in preparing wool, cotton, silk, fur, or paper; in chemical processes; in the application of steam; in philosophical, nautical, or optical instruments; in civil engineering, architecture, the construction of roads, canals, wharves, bridges, docks, piers, &c.; in hydraulics or pneumatics; in the application of the mechanical powers; in household furniture, or wearing apparel; in printing, binding, engraving, &c., &c.? This question, when put in reference to slaves, appears ridiculous; and yet it is no more absurd, when asked in reference to an ignorant slave, than when asked in reference to an uneducated white man. The fact that the latter is a voter makes no difference, notwithstanding the common opinion, in certain latitudes, that it does. All such improvements come from minds which have had an early awakening, and been put on scientific trains of thought in their childhood and youth,—a thing utterly impossible for the people at large, without Common Schools.

These are causes; now look at effects. In the New England states, the iron manufacture is twenty times as much, according to the population, as it is in Virginia; and yet Virginia has far more of the ore than they. In cotton, we can hardly find a fraction low enough to express the difference. The ship-building in Maine and Massachusetts is thirty-five times as much as in Virginia. The north comes to the south, cuts their timber, carries it home, manufactures it, and then brings it back, wrought into a hundred different forms, to be sold to those who would see it rot before their eyes.

Can any man give a reason why Norfolk should not have grown like New York, other than the difference in the institutions of the people? Jamestown was settled before Plymouth, and had natural advantages superior to it. Plymouth now has a population of between seven and eight thousand, is worth two millions of dollars, and taxed itself last year, for schools and schoolhouses, more than seven thousand dollars. I ought rather to say, that it invested more than seven thousand dollars in a kind of stock that yields a hundred per cent. income. How many bats there may be in the ruins of Jamestown, the last census does not inform us.

The books printed at the south I suppose not to be equal to one fiftieth part of the number printed at the north. In maps, charts, engravings, and so forth, the elements of comparison exist only on one side.

Out of universal education come genius, skill, and enterprise, and the desire of bettering one’s condition. Industry and frugality are their concomitants. Diversified labor secures a home market. Diligence earns much, but the absence of the vices of indolence saves more. Hence comforts abound, while capital accumulates. After the home consumption is supplied, there is a surplus for export. The balance of trade is favorable. All the higher institutions of learning and religion can be liberally supported. These institutions impart an elevated and moral tone to society. Hence efforts for all kinds of social ameliorations. Temperance societies spring up. Societies for preventing crime; for saving from pauperism; for the reform of prisons and the reformation of prisoners; for peace; for sending missionaries to the heathen; for diffusing the gospel,—all these, where a sound education is given, grow up, in the order of Providence, as an oak grows out of an acorn.

In one thing the south has excelled,—in training statesmen. The primary and the ultimate effects of slavery upon this fact are so well set forth in a late sermon by Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford, Connecticut, that I will read a passage from it:—

“And here, since this institution of slavery, entering into the fortunes of our history, complicates in so many ways the disorders we suffer, I must pause a few moments to sketch its characteristics. Slavery, it is not to be denied, is an essentially barbarous institution. It gives us, too, that sign which is the perpetual distinction of barbarism, that it has no law of progress. The highest level it reaches is the level at which it begins. Indeed, we need not scruple to allow that it has yielded us one considerable advantage, in virtue of the fact that it produces its best condition first. For while the northern people were generally delving in labor, for many generations, to create a condition of comfort, slavery set the masters at once on a footing of ease, gave them leisure for elegant intercourse, for unprofessional studies, and seasoned their character thus with that kind of cultivation which distinguishes men of society. A class of statesmen were thus raised up, who were prepared to figure as leaders in scenes of public life, where so much depends on manners and social address. But now the scale is changing. Free labor is rising, at length, into a state of wealth and comfort, to take the lead of American society. Meanwhile, the foster-sons of slavery,—the high families, the statesmen,—gradually receding in character, as they must under this vicious institution, are receding also in power and influence, and have been ever since the revolution. Slavery is a condition against nature; the curse of nature, therefore, is on it, and it bows to its doom by a law as irresistible as gravity. It produces a condition of ease which is not the reward of labor, and a state of degradation which is not the curse of idleness. Therefore, the ease it enjoys cannot but end in a curse, and the degradation it suffers cannot rise into a blessing. It nourishes imperious and violent passions. It makes the masters solitary sheiks on their estates, forbidding thus the possibility of public schools, and preventing also that condensed form of society which is necessary to the vigorous maintenance of churches. Education and religion thus displaced, the dinner table only remains, and on this hangs, in great part, the keeping of the social state. But however highly we may estimate the humanizing power of hospitality, it cannot be regarded as any sufficient spring of character. It is neither a school nor a gospel. And when it comes of self-indulgence, or only seeks relief for the tedium of an idle life, scarcely does it bring with it the blessings of a virtue. The accomplishments it yields are of a mock quality, rather than of a real, having about the same relation to a substantial and finished culture that honor has to character. This kind of currency will pass no longer; for, it is not expense without comfort, or splendor set in disorder, as diamonds in pewter; it is not air in place of elegance, or assurance substituted for ease; neither is it to be master of a fluent speech, or to garnish the same with stale quotations from the classics; much less is it to live in the Don Juan vein, accepting barbarism by poetic inspiration,—the same by which a late noble poet, drawing out of Turks and pirates, became the chosen laureate of slavery,—not any or all of these can make up such a style of man, or of life, as we in this age demand. We have come up now to a point where we look for true intellectual refinement, and a ripe state of personal culture. But how clearly is it seen to be a violation of its own laws, for slavery to produce a genuine scholar, or a man who, in any department of excellence, unless it be in politics, is not a full century behind his time? And if we ask for what is dearer and better still, for a pure Christian morality, the youth of slavery are trained in no such habits as are most congenial to virtue. The point of honor is the only principle many of them know. Violence and dissipation bring down every succeeding generation to a state continually lower; so that now, after a hundred and fifty years are passed, the slaveholding territory may be described as a vast missionary ground, and one so uncomfortable to the faithful ministry of Christ, by reason of its jealous tempers, and the known repugnance it has to many of the first maxims of the gospel, that scarcely a missionary can be found to enter it. Connected with this moral decay, the resources of nature also are exhausted, and her fertile territories changed to a desert, by the uncreating power of a spendthrift institution. And then, having made a waste where God had made a garden, slavery gathers up the relics of bankruptcy, and the baser relics still of virtue and all manly enterprise, and goes forth to renew, on a virgin soil, its dismal and forlorn history. Thus, at length, has been produced what may be called the bowie-knife style of civilization, and the new west of the south is overrun by it,—a spirit of blood which defies all laws of God and man;—honorable, but not honest; prompt to resent an injury, slack to discharge a debt; educated to ease, and readier, of course, when the means of living fail, to find them at the gambling table or the race-ground, than in any work of industry,—probably squandering the means of living there, to relieve the tedium of ease itself.”

The free schools of the north lead to the common diffusion of knowledge, and the equalization of society. The private schools of the south divide men into patricians and plebeians; so that, in the latter, a nuisance grows out of education itself. In the public schools of New York there are libraries now amounting to more than a million of volumes. In the schools of Massachusetts the number of volumes is relatively less; but the quality is greatly superior. In each of these states, within half an hour’s walk of the poorest farm-house or mechanic’s shop, there is a library, free and open to every child, containing works of history, biography, travels, ethics, natural science, &c., &c., which will supply him with the noblest capital of intelligence, wherewith to commence the business of making himself a useful and intelligent citizen. With the exception of New Orleans, (whose free schools were commenced and have been presided over by a Massachusetts man,) and three or four other cities, all the libraries in the public schools of the slave states could be carried in a schoolboy’s satchel. The libraries of all the universities and colleges of the south contain 223,416 volumes; those of the north, 593,897 volumes. The libraries of southern theological schools, 22,800; those of northern, 102,080.

Look into Silliman’s Journal, or the volumes of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and inquire whence the communications came. Where live the historians of the country, Sparks, Prescott, Bancroft; the poets, Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell; the jurists, Story, Kent, Wheaton; the classic models of writing, Charming, Everett, Irving; the female writers, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Sigourney, and Mrs. Child? All this proceeds from no superiority of natural endowment on the one side, or inferiority on the other. The Southern States are all within what may be called “the latitudes of genius;” for there is a small belt around the globe, comprising but a few degrees of latitude, which has produced all the distinguished men who have ever lived. I say this difference results from no difference in natural endowment. The mental endowments at the south are equal to those in any part of the world. But it comes because, in one quarter, the common atmosphere is vivified with knowledge, electric with ideas, while slavery gathers its Bœotian fogs over the other. What West Point has been to our armies in Mexico, that, and more than that, good schools would be to the intelligence and industrial prosperity of our country.

It may seem a little out of place, but I cannot forbear here adverting to one point, which, as a lover of children and as a parent, touches me more deeply than any other. To whom are intrusted, at the south, the early care and nurture of children? It has been thought by many educators and metaphysicians, that children learn as much before the age of seven years as ever afterwards. Who, at the south, administers this early knowledge,—these ideas, these views, that have such sovereign efficacy in the formation of adult character? Who has the custody of children during this ductile, forming, receptive period of life,—a period when the mind absorbs whatever is brought into contact with it? Sir, the children of the south, more or less, and generally more, are tended and nurtured by slaves. Ignorance, superstition, vulgarity, passion, and perhaps impurity, are the breasts at which they nurse. Whatever afflictions God may see fit to bring upon me, whatever other mercies He may withhold, may He give me none but persons of intelligence, of refinement, and of moral excellence, to walk with my children during the imitative years of their existence, and to lead them in the paths of knowledge, and breathe into their hearts the breath of a moral and religious life.

Before considering the moral character of slavery, I wish to advert for a moment to the position which we occupy as one of the nations of the earth, in this advancing period of the world’s civilization. Nations, like individuals, have a character. The date of the latter is counted by years; that of the former, by centuries. No man can have any self-respect, who is not solicitous about his posthumous reputation. No man can be a patriot who feels neither joy nor shame at the idea of the honor or the infamy which his age and his country shall leave behind them. Nations, like individuals, have characteristic objects of ambition. Greece coveted the arts; Rome gloried in war; but liberty has been the goddess of our idolatry. Amid the storms of freedom were we cradled; in the struggles of freedom have our joints been knit; on the rich aliment of freedom have we grown to our present stature. With a somewhat too boastful spirit, perhaps, have we challenged the admiration of the world for our devotion to liberty; but an enthusiasm for the rights of man is so holy a passion, that even its excesses are not devoid of the beautiful. We have not only won freedom for ourselves, but we have taught its sacred lessons to others. The shout of “Death to tyrants, and freedom for man!” which pealed through this country seventy years ago, has at length reached across the Atlantic; and whoever has given an attentive ear to the sounds which have come back to us, within the last few months, from the European world, cannot have failed to perceive that they were only the far-travelled echoes of the American Declaration of Independence. But in the divine face of our liberty there has been one foul, demoniac feature. Whenever her votaries would approach her to worship, they have been fain to draw a veil over one part of her visage, to conceal its hideousness. Whence came this deformity on her otherwise fair and celestial countenance? Sad is the story, but it must be told. Her mother was a vampire. As the daughter lay helpless in her arms, the beldam tore open her living flesh, and feasted upon her lifeblood. Hence this unsightly wound, that affrights whoever beholds it. But, sir, I must leave dallying with these ambiguous metaphors. One wants the plain, sinewy, Saxon tongue to tell of deeds that should have shamed devils. Great Britain was the mother. Her American colonies were the daughter. The mother lusted for gold. To get it, she made partnership with robbery and death. Shackles, chains, and weapons for human butchery, were her outfit in trade. She made Africa her hunting-ground. She made its people her prey, and the unwilling colonies her market-place. She broke into the Ethiop’s home, as a wolf into a sheepfold at midnight. She set the continent a-flame, that she might seize the affrighted inhabitants as they ran shrieking from their blazing hamlets. The aged and the infant she left for the vultures; but the strong men and the strong women she drove, scourged and bleeding, to the shore. Packed and stowed like merchandise between unventilated decks, so close that the tempest without could not ruffle the pestilential air within, the voyage was begun. Once a day the hatches were opened, to receive food and to disgorge the dead. Thousands and thousands of corpses, which she plunged into the ocean from the decks of her slave ships, she counted only as the tare of commerce. The blue monsters of the deep became familiar with her pathway, and, not more remorseless than she, they shared her plunder. At length the accursed vessel reached the foreign shore. And there, monsters of the land, fiercer and feller than any that roam the watery plains, rewarded the robber by purchasing his spoils.

For more than a century did the madness of this traffic rage. During all those years, the clock of eternity never counted out a minute that did not witness the cruel death, by treachery or violence, of some son or daughter, some father or mother, of Africa. The three millions of slaves that now darken our southern horizon are the progeny of these progenitors,—a doomed race, fated and suffering from sire to son. But the enormities of the mother country did not pass without remonstrance. Many of the colonies expostulated against, and rebuked them. The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, presented to the throne the most humble and suppliant petitions, praying for the abolition of the trade. The colonial legislatures passed laws against it. But their petitions were spurned from the throne. Their laws were vetoed by the governors. In informal negotiations attempted with the ministers of the crown, the friends of the slave were made to understand that royalty turned an adder’s ear to their prayers. The profoundest feelings of lamentation and abhorrence were kindled in the bosoms of his western subjects by this flagitious conduct of the king. In that dark catalogue of crimes, which led our fathers to forswear allegiance to the British throne, its refusal to prohibit the slave trade to the colonies is made one of the most prominent of those political offences which are said to “define a tyrant.” In the original draught of the Declaration of Independence, as prepared by Mr. Jefferson, this crime of King George the Third is set forth in the following words:—

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”

Now, if the King of Great Britain prostituted his negative that slavery might not be restricted, what, in after times, shall be said of those who prostitute their affirmative that it may be extended? Yet it is now proposed, in some of the state legislatures, and in this Capitol, to do precisely the same thing, in regard to the Territory of Oregon, which was done by Great Britain to her transatlantic possessions; not merely to legalize slavery there, but to prohibit its inhabitants from prohibiting it. Though three thousand miles west of Great Britain, she had certain constitutional rights over us, and could affect our destiny. Though the inhabitants of Oregon are three thousand miles west of us, yet we have certain constitutional rights over them, and can affect their destiny. Great Britain annulled our laws for prohibiting slavery; we propose to annul an existing law of Oregon prohibiting slavery. If the execrations of mankind are yet too feeble and too few to punish Great Britain for her wickedness, what scope, what fulness, what eternity of execration and anathema will be a sufficient retribution upon us, if we volunteer to copy her example? It was in the eighteenth century when the mother country thus made merchandise of human beings,—a time when liberty was a forbidden word in the languages of Europe. It is in the nineteenth century that we propose to reënact, and on an ampler scale, the same execrable villany,—a time when liberty is the rallying cry of all Christendom. So great has been the progress of liberal ideas within the last century, that what was venial at its beginning is unpardonable at its close. To drive coffles of slaves from here to Oregon, in the middle of the nineteenth century, is more infamous than it was to bring cargoes of slaves from Africa here, in the middle of the eighteenth. Yet such is the period that men would select to perpetuate and increase the horrors of this traffic.

Sir, how often, on this floor, have indignant remonstrances been addressed to the north, for agitating the subject of slavery? How often have we at the north been told that we were inciting insurrection, fomenting a servile war, putting the black man’s knife to the white man’s throat. The air of this hall has been filled, its walls have been, as it were, sculptured, by southern eloquence, with images of devastated towns, of murdered men and ravished women; and, as a defence against the iniquities of the institution, they have universally put in the plea that the calamity was entailed upon them by the mother country, that it made a part of the world they were born into, and therefore they could not help it. I have always been disposed to allow its full weight to this palliation. But if they now insist upon perpetrating against the whole western world, which happens at present to be under our control, the same wrongs which, in darker days, Great Britain perpetrated against them, they will forfeit every claim to sympathy. Sir, here is a test. Let not southern men, who would now force slavery upon new regions, ever deny that their slavery at home is a chosen, voluntary, beloved crime.

But let us look, sir, at the moral character of slavery. It is proposed not merely to continue this institution where it now exists, but to extend it to the Pacific Ocean,—to spread it over the vast slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Sir, the conduct of governments, like the conduct of individuals, is subject to the laws and the retributions of Providence. If, therefore, there is any ingredient of wrong in this institution, we ought not to adopt it, or to permit it, even though it should pour wealth in golden showers over the whole surface of the land. In speaking of the moral character of slavery, sir, I mean to utter no word for the purpose of wounding the feelings of any man. On the other hand, I mean not to wound the cause of truth by abstaining from the utterance of any word which I ought to speak.

The institution of slavery is against natural right. Jurists, from the time of Justinian; orators, from the time of Cicero; poets, from the time of Homer, declare it to be wrong. The writers on moral or ethical science,—the expounders of the law of nations and of God,—denounce slavery as an invasion of the rights of man. They find no warrant for it in the eternal principles of justice and equity; and in that great division which they set forth between right and wrong, they arrange slavery in the catalogue of crime. All the noblest instincts of human nature rebel against it. Whatever has been taught by sage, or sung by poet, in favor of freedom, is a virtual condemnation of slavery. Whenever we applaud the great champions of liberty, who, by the sacrifice of life in the cause of freedom, have won the homage of the world and an immortality of fame, we record the testimony of our hearts against slavery. Wherever patriotism and philanthropy have glowed brightest; wherever piety and a devout religious sentiment have burned most fervently, there has been the most decided recognition of the universal rights of man.

Sir, let us analyze this subject, and see if slavery be not the most compact, and concentrated, and condensed system of wrong which the depravity of man has ever invented. Slavery is said to have had its origin in war. It is claimed that the captor had a right to take the life of his captive; and that if he spared that life he made it his own, and thus acquired a right to control it. I deny the right of the captor to the life of his captive; and even if this right were conceded, I deny his right to the life of the captive’s offspring. But this relation between captor and captive precludes the idea of peace; for no peace can be made where there is no free agency. Peace being precluded, it follows inevitably that the state of war continues. Hence, the state of slavery is a state of war; and though active hostilities may have ceased, they are liable to break out, and may rightfully break out, at any moment. How long must our fellow-citizens, who were enslaved in Algiers, have continued in slavery, before they would have lost the right of escape or of resistance?

The gentleman from Virginia, [Mr. Bocock,] in his speech this morning, put the right of the slaveholder upon a somewhat different ground. He said a man might acquire property in a horse before the existence of civil society, by catching a wild one. And so, he added, one man might acquire property in another man, by subduing him to his will. The superior force gave the right, whether to the horse or to the man. Now, if this be so, and if at any time the superior force should change sides, then it follows inevitably that the relation of the parties might be rightfully changed by a new appeal to force.

The same gentleman claims Bible authority for slavery. He says, “I see slavery there tolerated, I had almost said inculcated. I see such language as this: ‘Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall you buy bondmen and bondmaids; and ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession,’” &c. Does not the gentleman know that, by the same authority, the Israelitish slaves were commanded to despoil their Egyptian masters, and to escape from bondage? Surely the latter is as good an authority as the former. If the gentleman’s argument is sound, he is bound to advocate a repeal of the act of 1793. If the gentleman’s argument is sound, the free states, instead of surrendering fugitive slaves to their masters, are bound to give those masters a Red Sea reception and embrace; and the escape of the children of Israel into Canaan is a direct precedent for the underground railroad to Canada.

Both the gentleman from Kentucky, [Mr. French,] yesterday, and the gentleman from Virginia, to-day, spoke repeatedly, and without the slightest discrimination, of “a slave and a horse,” “a slave and a mule,” &c. What should we think, sir, of a teacher for our children, or even of a tender of our cattle, who did not recognize the difference between men and mules,—between humanity and horse-flesh? What should we think, if, on opening a work, claiming to be a scientific treatise on zoölogy, we should find the author to be ignorant of the difference between biped and quadruped, or between men and birds, or men and fishes? Yet such errors would be trifling compared with those which have been made through all this debate. They would be simple errors in natural history, perhaps harmless; but these are errors,—fatal errors,—in humanity and Christian ethics. No, sir; all the legislation of the slave states proves that they do not treat, and cannot treat, a human being as an animal. I will show that they are ever trying to degrade him into an animal, although they can never succeed.

This conscious idea that the state of slavery is a state of war,—a state in which superior force keeps inferior force down,—develops and manifests itself perpetually. It exhibits itself in the statute books of the slave states, prohibiting the education of slaves, making it highly penal to teach them so much as the alphabet; dispersing and punishing all meetings where they come together in quest of knowledge. Look into the statute books of the free states, and you will find law after law, encouragement after encouragement, to secure the diffusion of knowledge. Look into the statute books of the slave states, and you find law after law, penalty after penalty, to secure the extinction of knowledge. Who has not read with delight those books which have been written, both in England and in this country, entitled “The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties,” giving the biographies of illustrious men, who, by an undaunted and indomitable spirit, had risen from poverty and obscurity to the heights of eminence, and blessed the world with their achievements in literature, in science, and in morals? Yet here, in what we call republican America, are fifteen great states, vying with each other to see which will bring the blackest and most impervious pall of ignorance over three millions of human beings; nay, which can do most to stretch this pall across the continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Is not knowledge a good? Is it not one of the most precious bounties which the all-bountiful Giver has bestowed upon the human race? Sir John Herschel, possessed of ample wealth, his capacious mind stored with the treasures of knowledge, surrounded by the most learned society in the most cultivated metropolis in the world, says, “If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead, under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading.” Yet it is now proposed to colonize the broad regions of the west with millions of our fellow-beings, who shall never be able to read a book, or write a word; to whom knowledge shall bring no delight in childhood, no relief in the weary hours of sickness or convalescence, no solace in the decrepitude of age; who shall perceive nothing of the beauties of art, who shall know nothing of the wonders of science, who shall never reach any lofty, intellectual conception of the attributes of their great Creator;—deaf to all the hosannas of praise which nature sings to her Maker; blind in this magnificent temple which God has builded.

Sir, it is one of the noblest attributes of man that he can derive knowledge from his predecessors. We possess the accumulated learning of ages. From ten thousand confluent streams, the river of truth, widened and deepened, has come down to us; and it is among our choicest delights, that if we can add to its volume, as it rolls on, it will bear a richer freight of blessings to our successors. But it is here proposed to annul this beneficent law of nature; to repel this proffered bounty of Heaven. It is proposed to create a race of men, to whom all the lights of experience shall be extinguished; whose hundredth generation shall be as ignorant and as barbarous as its first.

Sir, I hold all voluntary ignorance to be a crime; I hold all enforced ignorance to be a greater crime. Knowledge is essential to all rational enjoyment; it is essential to the full and adequate performance of every duty. Whoever intercepts knowledge, therefore, on its passage to a human soul; whoever strikes down the hand that is outstretched to grasp it, is guilty of one of the most heinous of offences. Add to your virtue knowledge, says the apostle; but here the command is, Be-cloud and be-little by ignorance whatever virtue you may possess.

Sir, let me justify the earnestness of these expressions by describing the transition of feeling through which I have lately passed. I come from a community where knowledge ranks next to virtue in the classification of blessings. On the tenth day of April last, the day before I left home for this place, I attended the dedication of a schoolhouse in Boston which had cost $70,000. The mayor presided, and much of the intelligence and worth of the city was present on the occasion. I see by a paper which I have this day received, that another schoolhouse, in the same city, was dedicated on Monday of the present week. It was there stated by the mayor that the cost of the city schoolhouses which had been completed within the last three months was $200,000. On Tuesday of this week, a new high schoolhouse in the city of Cambridge was dedicated. Mr. Everett, the president of Harvard College, was present, and addressed the assembly in a long, and, I need not add, a most beautiful speech. That schoolhouse, with two others to be dedicated within a week, will have cost $25,000. Last week, in the neighboring city of Charlestown, a new high schoolhouse, of a most splendid and costly character, was dedicated by the mayor and city government, by clergy and laity. But it is not mayors of cities and presidents of colleges alone that engage in the work of consecrating temples of education to the service of the young. Since I have been here, the governor of the commonwealth, Mr. Briggs, went to Newburyport, a distance of forty miles, to attend the dedication of a schoolhouse which cost $25,000. On a late occasion, when the same excellent chief magistrate travelled forty miles to attend the dedication of a schoolhouse in the country, some speaker congratulated the audience because the governor of the commonwealth had come down from the executive chair to honor the occasion. “No,” said he, “I have come up to the occasion to be honored by it.” Within the last year, $200,000 have been given by individuals to Harvard College. Within a little longer time than this, the other two colleges in the state have received, together, a still larger endowment from individuals or the state.

These measures are part of a great system which we are carrying on for the elevation of the race. Last year, the voters of Massachusetts, in their respective towns, voluntarily taxed themselves about a million of dollars for the support of Common Schools. We have an old law on the statute book, requiring towns to tax themselves for the support of public schools; but the people have long since lost sight of this law in the munificence of their contributions. Massachusetts is now erecting a reform school for vagrant and exposed children,—so many of whom come to us from abroad,—which will cost the state more than a hundred thousand dollars. An unknown individual has given twenty thousand dollars towards it. We educate all our deaf and dumb and blind. An appropriation was made by the last legislature to establish a school for idiots, in imitation of those beautiful institutions in Paris, in Switzerland, and in Berlin, where the most revolting and malicious of this deplorable class are tamed into docility, made lovers of order and neatness, and capable of performing many valuable services. The future teacher of this school is now abroad, preparing himself for his work. A few years ago, Mr. Everett, the present president of Harvard College, then governor of the commonwealth, spoke the deep convictions of Massachusetts people, when, in a public address on education, he exhorted the fathers and mothers of Massachusetts in the following words: “Save,” said he, “save, spare, scrape, stint, starve, do any thing but steal,” to educate your children. And Doctor Howe, the noble-hearted director of the Institution for the Blind, lately uttered the deepest sentiments of our citizens, when, in speaking of our duties to the blind, the deaf and dumb, and the idiotic, he said, “The sight of any human being left to brutish ignorance is always demoralizing to the beholders. There floats not upon the stream of life a wreck of humanity so utterly shattered and crippled, but that its signals of distress should challenge attention and command assistance.”

Sir, it was all glowing and fervid with sentiments like these, that, a few weeks ago, I entered this House,—sentiments transfused into my soul from without, even if I had no vital spark of nobleness to kindle them within. Imagine, then, my strong revulsion of feeling, when the first set, elaborate speech which I heard, was that of the gentleman from Virginia, proposing to extend ignorance to the uttermost bounds of this republic,—to legalize it, to enforce it, to necessitate it, and make it eternal. Since him, many others have advocated the same abhorrent doctrine. Not satisfied with dooming a whole race of our fellow-beings to mental darkness, impervious and everlasting,—not satisfied with drawing this black curtain of ignorance between man and nature, between the human soul and its God, from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande, across half the continent,—they desire to increase this race ten, twenty millions more, and to unfold and spread out this black curtain across the other half of the continent. When, sir, in the halls of legislation, men advocate measures like this, it is no figure of speech to say that their words are the clankings of multitudinous fetters; each gesture of their arms tears human flesh with ten thousand whips; each exhalation of their breath spreads clouds of moral darkness from horizon to horizon.

Twenty years ago, a sharp sensation ran through the nerves of the civilized world, at the story of a young man named Caspar Hauser, found in the city of Nuremberg, in Bavaria. Though sixteen or seventeen years of age, he could not walk nor talk. He heard without understanding; he saw without perceiving; he moved without definite purpose. It was the soul of an infant in the body of an adult. After he had learned to speak, he related that, from his earliest recollection, he had always been kept in a hole so small, that he could not stretch out his limbs, where he saw no light, heard no sound, nor even witnessed the face of the attendant who brought him his scanty food. For many years conjecture was rife concerning his history, and all Germany was searched to discover his origin. After a long period of fruitless inquiry and speculation, public opinion settled down into the belief that he was the victim of some great unnatural crime; that he was the heir to some throne, and had been sequestered by ambition; or the inheritor of vast wealth, and had been hidden away by cupidity; or the offspring of criminal indulgence, and had been buried alive to avoid exposure and shame. A German, Von Feuerbach, published an account of Caspar, entitled “The Example of a Crime on the Life of the Soul.” But why go to Europe to be thrilled with the pathos of a human being shrouded from the light of nature, and cut off from a knowledge of duty and of God? To-day, in this boasted land of light and liberty, there are three million Caspar Hausers; and, as if this were not enough, it is proposed to multiply their number tenfold, and to fill up all the western world with these proofs of human avarice and guilt. It is proposed that we ourselves should create and should publish to the world, not one, but untold millions of “Examples of a Crime on the Life of the Soul.” It is proposed that the self-styled freemen, the self-styled Christians, of fifteen great states in this American Union, shall engage in the work of procreating, rearing, and selling Caspar Hausers, often from their own loins; and if any further development of soul or of body is allowed to the American victims than was permitted to the Bavarian child, it is only because such development will increase their market value at the barracoons. It is not from any difference of motive, but only the better to insure that motive’s indulgence. The slave child must be allowed to use his limbs, or how could he drudge out his life in the service of his master? The slave infant must be taught to walk, or how, under the shadow of this thrice-glorious Capitol, could he join a coffle for New Orleans?

I know, sir, that it has been said, within a short time past, that Caspar Hauser was an impostor, and his story a fiction. Would to God that this could ever be said of his fellow-victims in America!

For another reason slavery is an unspeakable wrong. The slave is debarred from testifying against a white man. The courts will not hear him as a witness. By the principles of the common law, if any man suffers violence at the hands of another, he can prefer his complaint to magistrates, or to the grand juries of the courts, who are bound to give him redress. Hence the law is said to hold up its shield before every man for his protection. It surrounds him in the crowded street and in the solitary place. It guards his treasures with greater vigilance than locks or iron safes; and against meditated aggressions upon himself, his wife, or his children, it fastens his doors every night more securely than triple bolts of brass. But all these sacred protections are denied to the slave. While subjected to the law of force, he is shut out from the law of right. To suffer injury is his, but never to obtain redress. For personal cruelties, for stripes that shiver his flesh, and blows that break his bones, for robbery or for murder, neither he nor his friends can have preventive, remedy, or recompense. The father, who is a slave, may see son or daughter scored, mangled, mutilated, or ravished before his eyes, and he must be dumb as a sheep before its shearers. The wife may be dishonored in the presence of the husband, and, if he remonstrates or rebels, the miscreant who could burn with the lust will burn not less fiercely with a vengeance to be glutted upon his foiler.

Suppose, suddenly, by some disastrous change in the order of nature, an entire kingdom or community were to be enveloped in total darkness,—to have no day, no dawn, but midnight evermore! Into what infinite forms of violence and wrong would the depraved passions of the human heart spring up, when no longer restrained by the light of day, and the dangers of exposure! So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness. A hundred of his fellows may stand around him and witness the wrongs he suffers, but not one of them can appeal to jury, magistrate, or judge, for punishment or redress. The wickedest white man, in a company of slaves, bears a charmed life. There is not one of the fell passions that rages in his bosom which he cannot indulge with wantonness and to satiety, and the court has no ears to hear the complaint of the victim. How dearly does every honorable man prize character! The law denies the slave a character; for, however traduced, legal vindication is impossible.

And yet, infinitely flagrant as the anomaly is, the slave is amenable to the laws of the land for all offences which he may commit against others, though he is powerless to protect himself by the same law from offences which others may commit against him. He may suffer all wrong, and the courts will not hearken to his testimony; but for the first wrong he does, the same courts inflict their severest punishments upon him. This is the reciprocity of slave law.—to be forever liable to be proved guilty, but never able to prove himself innocent; to be subject to all punishments, but, through his own oath, to no protection. Hear what is said by the highest judicial tribunal of South Carolina: “Although slaves are held to be the absolute property of their owners, yet they have the power of committing crimes.”—2d Nott and McCord’s Rep., p. 179. A negro is so far amenable to the common law, that he may be one of three to constitute the number necessary to make a riot.—1st Bay’s Rep., 358. By the laws of the same state, a negro may be himself stolen, and he has no redress; but if he steals a negro from another, he shall be hung.—2d Nott and McCord’s Rep., 179. [An example of this penalty suffered by a slave.] This is the way that slave legislatures and slave judicatories construe the command of Christ, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also the same unto them.” Nay, by the laws of some of the slave states, where master and slave are engaged in a joint act, the slave is indictable, while the master is not.

What rights are more sacred or more dear to us than the conjugal and the parental? No savage nation, however far removed from the frontiers of civilization, has ever yet been discovered, where these rights were unknown or unhonored. The beasts of the forest feel and respect them. It is only in the land of slaves that they are blotted out and annihilated.

Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the conscience. The word “conscience” conveys a complex idea. It includes conscientiousness; that is, the sentiment or instinct of right and wrong; and also intelligence, which is the guide of this sentiment. Conscience, then, implies both the desire or impulse to do right, and also a knowledge of what is right. Nature endows us with the sentiment, but the knowledge we must acquire. Hence we speak of an “enlightened conscience,” meaning thereby not only the moral sense, but that knowledge of circumstances, relations, tendencies and results, which is necessary in order to guide the moral sense to just conclusions. Each of these elements is equally necessary to enable a man to feel rightly and to act rightly. Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault in its conclusions. The two were made to coëxist and operate together by Him who made the human soul. But the impious hand of man divorces these twin capacities, wherever it denies knowledge. If one of these coördinate powers in the mental realm be annulled by the legislature, it may be called law; but it is repugnant to every law and attribute of God.

But, not satisfied with having invaded the human soul, and annihilated one of its most sacred attributes, in the persons of three millions of our fellow-men; not satisfied with having killed the conscience, as far as it can be killed by human device, and human force, in an entire race; we are now invoked to multiply that race, to extend it over regions yet unscathed by its existence, and there to call into being other millions of men, upon whose souls, and upon the souls of whose posterity, the same unholy spoliation shall be committed forever.

Slavery is an unspeakable wrong to the religious nature of man. The dearest and most precious of all human rights is the right of private judgment in matters of religion. I am interested in nothing else so much as in the attributes of my Creator, and in the relations which he has established between me and himself, for time and for eternity. To investigate for myself these relations, and their momentous consequences; to “search the Scriptures;” to explore the works of God in the outward and visible universe; to ask counsel of the sages and divines of the ages gone by,—these are rights which it would be sacrilege in me to surrender; which it is a worse sacrilege in any human being or human government to usurp. Yet, by denying education to the slave, you destroy not merely the right, but the power, of personal examination in regard to all that most nearly concerns the soul’s interests. Who so base as not to reverence the mighty champions of religious freedom, in days when the dungeon, the rack, and the fagot were the arguments of a government theology? Who does not reverence, I say, Wickliffe, Huss, Luther, and the whole army of martyrs whose blood reddened the axe of English intolerance? Yet it was only for this right of private judgment, for this independence of another man’s control in religious concernments, that the godlike champions of religious liberty perilled themselves and perished. Yet it is this very religious despotism over millions of men which it is now proposed, not to destroy, but to create. It is proposed not to break old fetters and cast them away, but to forge new ones and rivet them on. Sir, on the continent of Europe, and in the Tower of London, I have seen the axes, the chains, and other horrid implements of death, by which the great defenders of freedom for the soul were brought to their final doom,—by which political and religious liberty was cloven down; but fairer and lovelier to the view were axe and chain, and all the ghastly implements of death ever invented by religious bigotry or civil despotism to wring and torture freedom out of the soul of man;—fairer and lovelier were they all than the parchment roll of this House on which shall be inscribed a law for profaning one additional foot of American soil with the curse of slavery.

After the above speech was delivered, I was referred to a Tract, written by a Virginian, on the subject of slavery; and, by the politeness of its author, I have since obtained a copy of it. It is entitled, “Address to the People of West Virginia; showing that Slavery is injurious to the public welfare, and that it may be gradually abolished, without detriment to the rights and interests of Slaveholders. By a Slaveholder of West Virginia. Lexington: R. C. Noel. 1847.” This Address was written by the Rev. Henry Ruffner, D. D., president of Lexington College, Lexington, Va. Some of the passages of this Address are so striking; it is throughout so corroborative of one of the arguments contained in the speech; and coming, as it does, from a Virginian, an eye-witness of the effects of slavery, and a holder of slaves, that I have thought it would be useful to append them. The extracts, of course, are not, as here, consecutive.

Nowhere, since time began, have the two systems of slave labor and free labor been subjected to so fair and so decisive a trial of their effects on public prosperity as in these United States. Here the two systems have worked side by side for ages, under such equal circumstances, both political and physical, and with such ample time and opportunity for each to work out its proper effects, that all must admit the experiment to be now complete, and the result decisive. No man of common sense, who has observed this result, can doubt for a moment that the system of free labor promotes the growth and prosperity of states in a much higher degree than the system of slave labor. In the first settlement of a country, when labor is scarce and dear, slavery may give a temporary impulse to improvement; but even this is not the case, except in warm climates, and where free men are scarce and either sickly or lazy; and when we have said this, we have said all that experience in the United States warrants us to say, in favor of the policy of employing slave labor.

It is the common remark of all who have travelled through the United States, that the free states and the slave states exhibit a striking contrast in their appearance. In the older free states are seen all the tokens of prosperity;—a dense and increasing population; thriving villages, towns, and cities; a neat and productive agriculture, growing manufactures, and active commerce.

In the older parts of the slave states,—with a few local exceptions,—are seen, on the contrary, too evident signs of stagnation, or of positive decay;—a sparse population, a slovenly cultivation spread over vast fields that are wearing out, among others already worn out and desolate; villages and towns, “few and far between,” rarely growing, often decaying, sometimes mere remnants of what they were, sometimes deserted ruins, haunted only by owls; generally no manufactures, nor even trades, except the indispensable few; commerce and navigation abandoned, as far as possible, to the people of the free states; and generally, instead of the stir and bustle of industry, a dull and dreamy stillness, broken, if broke at all, only by the wordy brawl of politics.

New England and the middle states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania contained, in 1790, 1,968,000 inhabitants, and in 1840, 6,760,000; having gained, in this period, 243 per cent.

The four old slave states had, in 1790, a population of 1,473,000, and in 1840, of 3,279,000; having gained, in the same period, 122 per cent., just about half as much, in proportion, as the free states. They ought to have gained about twice as much; for they had at first only seven inhabitants to the square mile, when the free states not only had upwards of twelve, but, on the whole, much inferior advantages of soil and climate. Even cold, barren New England, though more than twice as thickly peopled, grew in population at a faster rate than these old slave states.

About half the territory of these old slave states is new country, and has comparatively few slaves. On this part the increase of population has chiefly taken place. On the old slave-labored lowlands, a singular phenomena has appeared; there, within the bounds of these rapidly growing United States,—yes, there, population has been long at a stand; yes, over wide regions,—especially in Virginia,—it has declined, and a new wilderness is gaining upon the cultivated land! What has done this work of desolation? Not war, nor pestilence; not oppression of rulers, civil or ecclesiastical; but slavery, a curse more destructive in its effects than any of them. It were hard to find, in old king-ridden, priest-ridden, overtaxed Europe, so large a country, where, within twenty years past, such a growing poverty and desolation have appeared.

It is in the last period of ten years, from 1830 to 1840, that this consuming plague of slavery has shown its worst effects in the old Southern States. Including the increase in their newly-settled and western counties, they gained in population only 7¹⁄₂ per cent.; while cold, barren, thickly peopled New England gained 15, and the old Middle States 26 per cent. East Virginia actually fell off 26,000 in population; and, with the exception of Richmond and one or two other towns, her population continues to decline. Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction. Her lowland neighbors of Maryland and the Carolinas were not far behind at the seeding; nor are they far behind at the ingathering of desolation.

Let us take the rich and beautiful State of Kentucky, compared with her free neighbor Ohio. The slaves of Kentucky have composed less than a fourth part of her population. But mark their effect upon the comparative growth of the state. In the year 1800, Kentucky contained 221,000 inhabitants, and Ohio, 45,000. In forty years, the population of Kentucky had risen to 780,000; that of Ohio to 1,519,000. This wonderful difference could not be owing to any natural superiority of the Ohio country. Kentucky is nearly as large, nearly as fertile, and quite equal, in other gifts of nature. She had greatly the advantage, too, in the outset of this forty years’ race of population. She started with 5¹⁄₂ inhabitants to the square mile, and came out with 20: Ohio started with one inhabitant to the square mile, and came out with 38. Kentucky had full possession of her territory at the beginning. Much of Ohio was then, and for a long time afterwards, in possession of the Indians. Ohio is by this time considerably more than twice as thickly peopled as Kentucky; yet she still gains, both by natural increase and by the influx of emigrants; while Kentucky has for twenty years been receiving much fewer emigrants than Ohio, and multitudes of her citizens have been yearly moving off to newer and yet newer countries.

Compare this natural increase with the census returns, and it appears that, in the ten years from 1830 to 1840, Virginia lost by emigration no fewer than 375,000 of her people, of whom East Virginia lost 304,000, and West Virginia 71,000. At this rate Virginia supplies the west every ten years with a population equal in number to the population of the State of Mississippi in 1840!

Some Virginia politicians, proudly,—yes, proudly, fellow-citizens,—call our old commonwealth The Mother of States! These enlightened patriots might pay her a still higher compliment, by calling her The Grandmother of States. For our part, we are grieved and mortified to think of the lean and haggard condition of our venerable mother. Her black children have sucked her so dry, that now, for a long time past, she has not milk enough for her offspring, either black or white.

She has sent,—or we should rather say, she has driven,—from her soil at least one third of all the emigrants who have gone from the old states to the new. More than another third have gone from the other old slave states. Many of these multitudes, who have left the slave states, have shunned the regions of slavery, and settled in the free countries of the west. These were generally industrious and enterprising white men, who found, by sad experience, that a country of slaves was not the country for them. It is a truth, a certain truth, that slavery drives free laborers,—farmers, mechanics, and all, and some of the best of them too,—out of the country, and fills their places with negroes.

It is admitted on all hands, that slave labor is better adapted to agriculture than to any other branch of industry; and that, if not good for agriculture, it is really good for nothing.

Therefore, since in agriculture slave labor is proved to be far less productive than free labor, slavery is demonstrated to be not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to the public prosperity.

We do not mean that slave labor can never earn any thing for him that employs it. The question is between free labor and slave labor. He that chooses to employ a sort of labor that yields only half as much to the hand as another sort would yield, makes a choice that is not only unprofitable, but deeply injurious to his interest.

Agriculture in the slave states may be characterized in general by two epithets, extensive, exhaustive,—which in all agricultural countries forebode two things, impoverishment, depopulation. The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,—in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as possible.

This ruinous system of large farms cultivated by slaves showed its effects in Italy, eighteen hundred years ago, when the Roman empire was at the height of its grandeur.

Pliny, a writer of that age, in his Natural History, (Book 18, c. 1-7,) tells us, that while the small farms of former times were cultivated by freemen, and even great commanders did not disdain to labor with their own hands, agriculture flourished, and provisions were abundant; but that afterwards, when the lands were engrossed by a few great proprietors, and cultivated by fettered and branded slaves, the country was ruined, and corn had to be imported. The same system was spreading ruin over the provinces, and thus the prosperity of the empire was undermined. Pliny denounces, as the worst of all, the system of having large estates in the country cultivated by slaves, or indeed, says he, “to have any thing done by men who labor without hope of reward.”

So Livy, the great Roman historian, observed, some years before Pliny, (Book 6, c. 12,) that “innumerable multitudes of men formerly inhabited those parts of Italy, where, in his time, none but slaves redeemed the country from desertion;”—that is, a dense population of free laborers had been succeeded by a sparse population of slaves.

Even the common mechanical trades do not flourish in a slave state. Some mechanical operations must, indeed, be performed in every civilized country; but the general rule in the south is, to import from abroad every fabricated thing that can be carried in ships, such as household furniture, boats, boards, laths, carts, ploughs, axes, and axehelves, besides innumerable other things, which free communities are accustomed to make for themselves. What is most wonderful is, that the forests and iron mines of the south supply, in great part, the materials out of which these things are made. The northern freemen come with their ships, carry home the timber and pig iron, work them up, supply their own wants with a part, and then sell the rest at a good profit in the southern markets. Now, although mechanics, by setting up their shops in the south, could save all these freights and profits, yet so it is, that northern mechanics will not settle in the south, and the southern mechanics are undersold by their northern competitors.

Now connect with these wonderful facts another fact, and the mystery is solved. The number of mechanics, in different parts of the south, is in the inverse ratio of the number of slaves; or in other words, where the slaves form the largest proportion of the inhabitants, there the mechanics and manufacturers form the least. In those parts only where the slaves are comparatively few, are many mechanics and artificers to be found; but even in these parts they do not flourish as the same useful class of men flourish in the free states. Even in our Valley of Virginia, remote from the sea, many of our mechanics can hardly stand against northern competition. This can be attributed only to slavery, which paralyzes our energies, disperses our population, and keeps us few and poor, in spite of the bountiful gifts of nature with which a benign Providence has endowed our country.

Of all the states in this Union, not one has on the whole such various and abundant resources for manufacturing as our own Virginia, both East and West. Only think of her vast forests of timber, her mountains of iron, her regions of stone coal, her valleys of limestone and marble, her fountains of salt, her immense sheep-walks for wool, her vicinity to the cotton fields, her innumerable waterfalls, her bays, harbors, and rivers for circulating products on every side;—in short, every material and every convenience necessary for manufacturing industry.

Above all, think of Richmond, nature’s chosen site for the greatest manufacturing city in America,—her beds of coal and iron, just at hand, her incomparable water power, her tide-water navigation, conducting sea vessels from the foot of her falls, and above them her fine canal to the mountains, through which lie the shortest routes from the eastern tides to the great rivers of the west and the south-west. Think, also, that this Richmond, in old Virginia, “the mother of states,” has enjoyed these unparalleled advantages ever since the United States became a nation;—and then think again, that this same Richmond, the metropolis of all Virginia, has fewer manufactures than a third-rate New England town;—fewer,—not than the new city of Lowell, which is beyond all comparison,—but fewer than the obscure place called Fall River, among the barren hills of Massachusetts;—and then, fellow-citizens, what will you think,—what must you think,—of the cause of this strange phenomenon? Or, to enlarge the scope of the question: What must you think has caused Virginians in general to neglect their superlative advantages for manufacturing industry?—to disregard the evident suggestions of nature, pointing out to them this fruitful source of population, wealth, and comfort?

Say not that this state of things is chargeable to the apathy of Virginians. That is nothing to the purpose, for it does not go to the bottom of the subject. What causes the apathy? That is the question.

The last census gave also the cost of constructing new buildings in each state, exclusive of the value of the materials. The amount of this is a good test of the increase of wealth in a country. To compare different states in this particular, we must divide the total cost of building by the number of inhabitants, and see what the average will be for each inhabitant. We find that it is in Massachusetts, $3·60; in Connecticut, $3·50; in New York, $3·00; in New Jersey, $2·70; in Pennsylvania, $3·10; in Maryland, $2·30; and in Virginia, $1·10.

No state has greater conveniences for ship navigation and ship building than Virginia. Yet on all her fine tide waters she has little shipping; and what she has is composed almost wholly of small bay craft and a few coasting schooners.

We do not blame our southern people for abstaining from all employments of this kind. What could they do? Set their negroes to building ships? Who ever imagined such an absurdity? But could they not hire white men to do such things? No; for, in the first place, southern white men have no skill in such matters; and, in the second place, northern workmen cannot be hired in the south, without receiving a heavy premium for working in a slave state.

The boast of our West Virginia is the good city of Wheeling. Would that she was six times as large, that she might equal Pittsburg, and that she grew five times as fast, that she might keep up with her!

We glory in Wheeling, because she only, in Virginia, deserves to be called a manufacturing town. For this her citizens deserve to be crowned,—not with laurel,—but with the solid gold of prosperity. But how came it that Wheeling, and next to her, Wellsburg,—of all the towns in Virginia,—should become manufacturing towns? Answer: They breathe the atmosphere of free states, almost touching them on both sides. But again; seeing that Wheeling, as a seat for manufactures, is equal to Pittsburg, and inferior to no town in America, except Richmond; and that, moreover, she has almost no slaves; why is Wheeling so far behind Pittsburg, and comparatively so slow in her growth? Answer: She is in a country in which slavery is established by law.

We shall explain, by examples, how a few slaves in a country may do its citizens more immediate injury than a large number.

When a white family own fifty or one hundred slaves, they can, so long as their land produces well, afford to be indolent and expensive in their habits; for though each yields only a small profit, yet each member of the family has ten or fifteen of these black work-animals to toil for his support. It is not until the fields grow old, and the crops grow short, and the negroes and the overseer take nearly all, that the day of ruin can be no longer postponed. If the family be not very indolent and very expensive, this inevitable day may not come before the third generation. But the ruin of small slaveholders is often accomplished in a single lifetime.

When a white family own five or ten slaves, they cannot afford to be indolent and expensive in their habits; for one black drudge cannot support one white gentleman or lady. Yet, because they are slaveholders, this family will feel some aspirations for a life of easy gentility; and because field work and kitchen work are negroes’ work, the young gentlemen will dislike to go with the negroes to dirty field work, and the young ladies will dislike to join the black sluts in any sort of household labor. Such unthrifty sentiments are the natural consequence of introducing slaves among the families of a country, especially negro slaves. They infallibly grow and spread, creating among the white families a distaste for all servile labor, and a desire to procure slaves who may take all drudgery off their hands. Thus general industry gives way by degrees to indolent relaxation, false notions of dignity and refinement, and a taste for fashionable luxuries. Then debts slyly accumulate. The result is, that many families are compelled by their embarrassments to sell off and leave the country. Many who are unable to buy slaves leave it also, because they feel degraded, and cannot prosper, where slavery exists. Citizens of the valley! is it not so? Is not this the chief reason why your beautiful country does not prosper like the northern valleys?

We have examined the census of counties for the last thirty or forty years, in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, with the view to discover the law of population in the northern slave states. The following are among the general results:—

When a county had at first comparatively few slaves, the slave population, except near the free borders, gained upon the whites, and most rapidly in the older parts of the country.

The population, as a whole, increased so long as the slaves were fewer than the whites, but more slowly as the numbers approached to equality. In our valley, a smaller proportion of slaves had the effect of a larger one in East Virginia, to retard the increase of population.

When the slaves became as numerous as the whites in the eastern and older parts of the country, population came to a stand; when they outnumbered the whites, it declined. Consequently, the slave population has tended to diffuse itself equally over the country, rising more rapidly as it was further below the white population, and going down when it had risen above them.

The price of cotton has regulated the price of negroes in Virginia; and so it must continue to do; because slave labor is unprofitable here, and nothing keeps up the price of slaves but their value as a marketable commodity in the south. Eastern negroes and western cattle are alike in this, that, if the market abroad go down or be closed, both sorts of animals, the horned and the woolly-headed, become a worthless drug at home. The fact is, that our eastern brethren must send off, on any terms, the increase of their slaves, because their impoverished country cannot sustain even its present stock of negroes. We join not the English and American abolition cry about “slave-breeding” in East Virginia, as if it were a chosen occupation, and therefore a reproachful one. It is no such thing, but a case of dire necessity, and many a heartache does it cost the good people there. But behold in the east the doleful consequences of letting slavery grow up to an oppressive and heart-sickening burden upon a community! Cast it off, West Virginians, whilst yet you have the power; for if you let it descend unbroken to your children, it will have grown to a mountain of misery upon their heads.

Good policy will require the Southern States, ere long, to close their markets against northern negroes. When the southern slave market is closed, or when, by the reduced profits of slave labor in the south, it becomes glutted,—then the stream of Virginia negroes, heretofore pouring down upon the south, will be thrown back upon the state, and, like a river dammed up, must spread itself over the whole territory of the commonwealth. The head spring in East Virginia cannot contain itself; it must find vent; it will shed its black streams through every gap of the Blue Ridge and pour over the Alleghany, till it is checked by abolitionism on the borders. But even abolitionism cannot finally stop it. Abolitionism itself will tolerate slavery, when slaveholders grow sick and tired of it.

In plain terms, fellow-citizens, eastern slaveholders will come with their multitudes of slaves to settle upon the fresh lands of West Virginia. Eastern slaves will be sent by thousands for a market in West Virginia. Every valley will echo with the cry, “Negroes! Negroes for sale! Dog cheap! Dog cheap!” And because they are dog cheap, many of our people will buy them. We have shown how slavery has prepared the people for this; how a little slavery makes way for more, and how the law of slave increase operates to fill up every part of the country to the same level with slaves.

And then, fellow-citizens, when you have suffered your country to be filled with negro slaves instead of white freemen; when its population shall be as motley as Joseph’s coat of many colors; as ring-streaked and speckled as father Jacob’s flock was in Padan Aram,—what will the white basis of representation avail you, if you obtain it? Whether you obtain it or not, East Virginia will have triumphed; or, rather, slavery will have triumphed, and all Virginia will have become a land of darkness and of the shadow of death.

Then, by a forbearance which has no merit, and a supineness which has no excuse, you will have given to your children, for their inheritance, this lovely land blackened with a negro population,—the offscourings of Eastern Virginia, the fag-end of slavery, the loathsome dregs of that cup of abomination which has already sickened to death the eastern half of our commonwealth.

Delay, not, then, we beseech you, to raise a barrier against this Stygian inundation, to stand at the Blue Ridge, and with sovereign energy say to this Black Sea of misery, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr. Madison thought the original ordinance to be clearly invalid. See Federalist, No. 38. It is just as clear that he thought the constitution gave validity to it. See Federalist, No. 43.

[2] Here Mr. Hilliard, of Alabama, rose to ask if the south, by the Missouri compromise, had not surrendered its right to carry slavery north of the compromise line? His question was not understood. If it had been, it would have been replied, that the existence of slavery at New Orleans, and a few other places in Louisiana, at the time of the treaty with France, by no means established the right to carry it to the Pacific Ocean, if the treaty extended so far. Slavery being against natural right, can only exist by virtue of positive law, backed by force sufficient to protect it. It could not lawfully exist, therefore, in any part of Louisiana, which had not been laid out, organized, and subjected to the civil jurisdiction of the government. Such was not the case with any part of the territory north of the compromise line, and therefore nothing was surrendered. On the other hand, in the formation of the territorial governments of Orleans, Missouri, Arkansas, and Florida, a vast extent of country was surrendered to slavery. And this is independent of the question whether Congress, by the constitution, has any more right to establish slavery any where than it has to establish an inquisition, create an order of nobility, or anoint a king.

[3] Essays on Domestic Industry, or an Inquiry into the Expediency of establishing Cotton Manufactories in South Carolina, 1845.

SKETCH

Of the Opening Argument in the Case of the United States vs. Daniel Drayton, indicted, (in forty-one several Bills of Indictment,) for stealing and carrying away, in the Schooner Pearl, a Cargo of Slaves from Washington, in the District of Columbia, on the Night of the 15th of April, 1848; tried before Thomas H. Crawford, Judge of the Criminal Court of the District of Columbia. P. B. Key, District Attorney; Horace Mann and James M. Carlisle, Counsel for the Prisoner.

Gentlemen of the Jury;

I rise before you under circumstances rarely exceeded in embarrassment. I am an utter stranger to his honor, the judge, and to all of you, gentlemen, who compose the jury. Among all the eager faces in this crowded hall, there is not one with which I am familiar. I suppose there is not one man in this vast assembly who has any sympathy for my client or for me.

The case before us is acknowledged, on all sides, to be one of great moment. It directly affects human interests,—large pecuniary interests,—and these are among the most active and powerful of human impulses. It is a case which has given birth to great excitement. It has been narrated with formidable exaggerations in the public papers; it has been angrily discussed in both houses of Congress, and bruited over the land. From what has transpired in and about this court room, since the trial commenced, I perceive that each individual seems not only to be convinced that the prisoner at the bar has committed a great offence, but, like a light reflected from a multiplying glass, he sees that offence multiplied a thousand fold in the opinions and feelings of those around him. I cannot forbear to add, that it is a case, also, which, in some of its aspects, touches the deepest and tenderest sympathies of the human heart; for this prosecution not only deals with human beings as offenders, but with human beings and human rights, as the subject matters of the offence.

We have been called to trial, too, at an untimely hour. I have not had time for the preparation and investigation which so important a case demands. Added to this, my colleague, [Mr. Carlisle,] was taken ill on the day he was retained, and, until the evening immediately preceding the commencement of the trial, I had no opportunity for a single interview with him, and then but for an hour, in his sick chamber. During all this time, too, as some of you may know, my attention has been called away by official duties elsewhere.

Gentlemen, let me come a little closer to my relations to this case and to yourselves. I stand here, on this side of the table; you sit there, on the other side. Our persons are near to each other; but should I not greatly deceive myself, were I to suppose that our opinions were as near together as our persons? We are within shaking-hands’ distance of each other; still, our convictions and sentiments on certain subjects may be wide asunder as the poles. On a subject of vast importance and gravity,—a subject reflected from every feature of this case,—I was born, and from my birth have been trained up, in one set of ideas; and I mean no discourtesy when I say that you have been born and trained in another set of ideas. Hence it is natural, yes, it is inevitable,—is it not?—that we should approach this subject with widely different views, and, as it were, from opposite points of the moral compass. I am admonished, then, in the outset, that your prepossessions are against me. The frame of your minds must be adverse to the reception of my views. We are in a position where the hearer, consciously or unconsciously, braces himself against the pressure of the speaker’s arguments. And of all difficult positions in which advocate or orator was ever placed, the most difficult is that of encountering the honest antipathies of his hearers. The heart, secure in its own convictions, closes itself against the argument that would overthrow them, as a fond parent bars his doors against the foe that would carry away his children.

But, gentlemen, amid all these adverse circumstances, and amid these conflicts of hostile and perhaps irreconcilable feelings, is there not some common ground on which you and I can stand together, and greet each other as brethren? Is there not one spot where we can stand side by side, as friends, sympathize with each other, and act together in harmony? Yes, gentlemen, there is one such spot. It is the ground of DUTY. In this case, I have certain duties to perform; you, too, have certain duties to perform; and the feeling of a common duty is always creative of the feeling of brotherhood. We are called to these duties as by the voice of God; we are to perform them as under the eye of the Omniscient. Here we are embarked in a common cause. From this moment, then, let all feelings of alienation or repugnance be banished from between us.

Gentlemen, this prisoner has requested me to be his counsel; and I, perhaps unwisely, have acceded to his request. I have taken an oath to be true to him. This has imposed certain responsibilities upon me, which, before Heaven, I may not escape. In this I find my strength. With the fierce excitement, which blazed forth in this District when the prisoners of the “Pearl” were first arrested, still hot around me; with the generally adverse feelings which I suppose you entertain towards the side of the cause which I have espoused, and therefore against its advocate; with these thronged spectators, who show, at every turn and incident of the trial, what their feelings are towards the prisoner and his defenders, I should not be able to stand here one moment, were it not for the supporting, uplifting sentiment, glowing through every fibre of my frame, that I am here in the performance of a high and holy duty. In all else I may be weak; in this I am strong.[4]

So you, gentlemen, sit there to perform a duty. Swearing upon the Holy Evangelists, you have invoked the vengeance of Heaven upon your souls, if, consciously and wittingly, you swerve a hair’s breadth from the line of rectitude; if you allow any partiality in favor of a cherished institution, or any prejudice against the prisoner, to close your eyes or blind your minds to any fact of evidence or rule of law which may be adduced in his behalf.

I might even add a consideration of a lighter nature leading to the same result. Your fortune and mine, for some days to come, I suppose to be settled. I know not how protracted this trial may be, but, gentlemen, we are in it, for longer or shorter, for better or worse; and while we are in it, we shall be obliged to come together from day to day, and live in each other’s presence and company. Now, I trust you have too much philosophy about you to make bad worse. And so of myself. Were we fellow-travellers in the same stage-coach or steamboat, and were doomed to be so for a week or a fortnight, it would be most unwise to add to our inevitable discomforts that of striving to annoy each other; so, when packed together in this room, which seems to have been constructed for creatures that do not breathe, and with the thermometer above ninety degrees, I trust any icy feelings we may have had towards each other will speedily melt away. In a word, I heartily concur, and I trust you will do the same, in the opinion of the old man who declared, according to the anecdote, that after the experience of a long life, he had found it best to submit to what he could not possibly help.

What, then, is the business before us? Daniel Drayton is set here at the bar charged with a grave offence, and you are impanelled to try him. And who is Daniel Drayton? We shall prove to you that he is a man of sober and industrious life, against whose character, as a just, upright, exemplary citizen, no charge was ever before preferred. Whatever may have been his errors in regard to the transaction which has brought him before you, he has, in consequence of it, passed through scenes which must move your sympathy. He has been torn from his family and immured in a loathsome cell. From feeling that sense of security from lawless violence, which every man, whether guilty or innocent, is entitled to feel, he has been in imminent danger of being torn in pieces by an infuriated mob. Yes, gentlemen, on Tuesday, the eighteenth day of April last, this man, this fellow-citizen of ours, in this capital of the nation, within sight of Congress, and of the President’s house, and within hearing of them, too, was pursued by a mob, from near the river’s side on the south of us to the very doors of the jail on the north,—a mob estimated to consist of from four to six thousand people,—many of them armed with deadly weapons; the thrusts of a dirk knife, which was drawn upon him, coming within an inch of his body; amid wrathful cries of “Hang him!” “Lynch him!” accompanied by all the profanities and abominations of speech which usually issue from the foul throat of that hideous monster—A MOB. Arrived at the jail, the mob besieged him there. When afterwards, and while under examination before magistrates of the city, a distinguished gentleman and member of Congress, [the Hon. Joshua R. Giddings, of Ohio,] appeared at his request and in his defence, the mob surrounded the gates of the jail, demanding the immediate expulsion of the counsel; and the jailer, to save bloodshed, insisted upon his departure. The storm swept beyond the prison and the prisoner. It assailed all who were supposed to sympathize with him. The office of a newspaper in this city, (the National Era,) was threatened with demolition. At a mob meeting, votes were passed,—without any great scrutiny, I presume, into the qualifications of the voters,—that the paper should be discontinued. Its editor was waited upon at night, or at midnight, by a mob-elected committee, and a peremptory demand was made upon him to remove his establishment beyond the District, or to abandon it.

But I will not dwell longer upon these details, so disgraceful to the capital of a republic that calls itself free, and so abhorrent to the feelings of every right-minded man. Were I to enumerate all the perils, the indignities, and the privations to which my client has been subjected, the day would be too short for the narration.

After Drayton’s examination, he was held to bail. And what, think you, was the amount of the bail demanded? Seventy-six thousand dollars! and seventy-six thousand dollars also for each of the other prisoners,—$228,000 for the seventy-six alleged slaves, when the common market value of such slaves in this neighborhood would not, I suppose, be more than three or four hundred dollars apiece;—and though all of them, too, had been returned, and were in possession of their claimants at the time. Has the fact never yet come to the knowledge of the magistrates of the District of Columbia, that the constitution of the United States declares that “excessive bail shall not be required”?

But, gentlemen, these are not the only hardships and oppressions to which my client has been subjected. How many, at the most, are the offences against the laws of this District which he has committed? He came here on the 13th of April, in the schooner Pearl. He departed on the 15th. On the 17th, he was arrested near the mouth of the Potomac, with a company of alleged slaves on board his vessel. Was not this all one transaction? Can it be divided and separated into a multitude of distinct offences? Can this one deed be made an offence against different laws? If not, then there is another clause in the constitution set at nought,—that clause which declares that no person shall be “subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.”

And yet, gentlemen, what do we find on the records of this court? One hundred and fifteen indictments against this prisoner for this one act; and one hundred and fifteen indictments also against each of the other prisoners for engaging in the same. Three hundred and forty-five indictments! Reams of indictments for a single deed! Nor is this the only injustice. Each of the prisoners is indicted for having violated, by this one act, separate and distinct laws. There is an old law of Maryland against stealing slaves, and another law against transporting them out of the jurisdiction; and these laws are claimed, by virtue of an act of Congress, to be in force in this District. Now, if the prisoner stole the slaves, he is not guilty of the separate offence of transporting. If he is guilty of transporting, he is not guilty of stealing. That the two offences should have been committed by one and the same act, is a legal impossibility. If the grand jury first found the prisoner guilty of the offence of stealing the slaves, they thereby declared that he was not guilty of the different offence of transporting. Or, if they first found him guilty of the offence of transporting, they thereby declared that he was not guilty of the separate offence of stealing. To proceed, therefore, after a finding for one offence, to charge the prisoner with the other, was not only a legal absurdity, but a grievous injustice.

Besides, if these slaves were stolen, as is alleged, from forty-one different masters, the whole might have been charged in different counts in the same indictment, and the prisoner might be found guilty upon as many of the counts as law and evidence would warrant.

So there was but one act of transportation. Even, therefore, if it were just to charge the prisoner with the breach of two different laws for the same act, still, as the transportation of the whole was but one, it should have been charged only in one indictment.

See how fatal to any man must such a course of proceeding be. If the stealing were charged in one indictment, it would be tried by one jury; and the evidence being to a great degree the same, the whole trial might be brought within a limited period of time. But with forty-one indictments, there must be forty-one trials, before forty-one different juries; for neither government nor prisoner would consent that a jury, who had given an adverse verdict, should try another of the cases. Now, gentlemen, I care not for the enormous expense of such a proceeding,—ten dollars on each indictment, enuring to the benefit of the district attorney,—

Here Mr. Key, the district attorney, interrupted and said: If Mr. Mann thinks I am to have ten dollars on each of these indictments, he is mistaken; and in my argument to the jury I shall deny it.

Mr. Carlisle. Mr. Mann is not mistaken in the general statement, that the district attorney receives ten dollars on each indictment. He receives ten dollars on each, until the income of his office amounts to six thousand dollars a year. It is only when the emoluments of the office reach that sum that he ceases to draw his ten dollars on each indictment.

Mr. Mann. I was saying, gentlemen, that I care comparatively nothing for the amount of expense incurred in consequence of these three hundred and forty-five indictments. Far graver consequences than the mere expenditure of money are involved. Who can maintain or survive a contest against such a host of indictments, sustained by all the power and resources of the government? Were a man rich as Crœsus, it would exhaust his means. Were he brave as a martyr, it would outweary his endurance. Were he innocent as a child unborn, still, on the mere doctrine of chances, he might fail in some one case, out of such a multitude. Were he in the prime of life, its setting sun might go down in darkness and sorrow before the final verdict of acquittal could be pronounced in his favor. Under such a practice with regard to indictments, coupled with such a practice in regard to bail, an accusation would be as fatal as crime itself, however innocent the accused might be. The law provides a statute of limitations as to offences. Could it have foreseen such an abuse as this, it would have provided a statute of limitations against the number of prosecutions for a single offence; for the government might as well try a man, on a separate indictment, for each hair of a horse he had stolen, and hold him, on each of them, to separate bail. The English courts, gentlemen, have provided a remedy for the beginnings of this injustice. They have decided, again and again, that when even two indictments are found against a man for the same offence, they will compel the prosecutor to make his election between them,—to proceed upon one and abandon the other. 2 Leach’s Cr. Cas., 608, Rex vs. Doran. 3 Carr. & P. 412, Rex vs. Smith. Ib. Rex vs. Flower, 413. 3 T. R. Young vs. The King, (in error,) 106. See, also, in support of the same principle, New York Revised Statutes, vol. 2, part 4, ch. 2, § 42, where provision is made that “if there be at any time pending against the same defendant two or more indictments for the same offence, or two indictments for the same matter, although charged as different offences, the indictment first found shall be deemed to be superseded by such second indictment, and shall be quashed.”

But, gentlemen, there is another aspect of this case, which presents, in a manner still more glaring, the enormity of the proceeding to which we are subjected. Under each of the forty-one indictments against this prisoner for stealing, he is liable, if convicted, to be sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, which would make an aggregate imprisonment of more than eight hundred years. Methuselah himself must have been caught young, in order to survive such a sentence. The very shortest time which the court, in its discretion, could imprison, after a conviction on all these indictments, would be two hundred and eighty-seven years! Did the law ever contemplate so cruel and revengeful a proceeding? Did the law ever suppose that the court, after having sentenced a man to eight hundred years’ imprisonment, or even to two hundred and eighty years’ imprisonment, should go on, and sentence him to twenty years, or even to seven years more?—when the court must know that it would be imposing sentences to be executed centuries after the prisoner would be dead, and after he would have left his prison, not to return to this world, but to go to another.

But even this is not all. Behind these forty-one indictments for stealing stand drawn up, in battle array, against this same prisoner, seventy-four other indictments for transporting the very slaves whom he is charged to have stolen. The penalty for each of these offences is a fine of two hundred dollars, with imprisonment till paid. The aggregate of these fines would be $14,800. But a penalty not inflicted by the statute, but superadded by this unwarrantable proceeding of the government, is the defence of seventy-four successive cases, under which the wealthiest, the strongest, and the most innocent man must break down, and be swept to ruin.