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reprobation the "Abolition caucus" for violating the sacredness of the Sabbath, that day for which he cherishes, doubtless, a peculiar reverence.1

The Senator exaggerates his own importance in supposing that we had him specially in view. As for myself I tell him he was not in my thoughts. Sir, I know the gigantic stature of the Senator2-the weight and importance he possesses in the country and the powerful party which surrounds him; I know that I am in a minority, but I dare do that which I should like the Senator also to do-to adhere to principle, even though that adherence must carry me into a minority.

Sir, our offense is that we deny the nationality of slavery. We have never sought to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists; all that we have insisted upon is that the Territories shall be preserved from it, and that the legislation of the government wherever its jurisdiction exists shall be on the side of liberty. We did not assail the Senator, but, taking advantage of his powerful position, he has assailed us. Ay, sir, that shows courage, that shows chivalry and lofty manhood, to assail the few and unsupported.

The manifesto spoke only of the Senator's bill. And now and here I reaffirm every word of its appeal. I thank the Senator for bringing it before the country, for it will now reach thousands who otherwise would not have read it.

In despite of the prophecy of the Senator that KansasNebraska will, under the bill, become free soil, I reaffirm that the purpose of his measure is to convert the region into slave territory. Who does not know that upon the western border of Missouri are many slaveholders eager to enter the new Territory with their slaves? Who does not know that the effect of this introduction will be the exclusion of free laborers?

* Douglas had the reputation of being a man of loose habits. •Douglas was called the "Little Giant.”

On February 3, Senator Chase moved to strike out the declaration in the bill that the Missouri Compromise had been superseded by the Compromises of 1850.

It is slavery that renews the strife, slavery with its insatiate lust for more slave territory and future States; and to this end it demands that a time-honored and sacred compact shall be rescinded-a compact which has been regarded, North and South, as inviolable, and the constitutionality of which few have doubted, and by which all have consented to abide.

The Senator from Illinois attempts to show that the original policy of the country was indifferentism between slavery and freedom. Sir, if anything is susceptible of absolute historical demonstration it is that the founders of this Republic never contemplated any extension of slavery.

Here the Senator cited the familiar anti-slavery opinions of Jefferson and his part in the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Territory.

Slavery was already in the Territory under the French colonial law, and also, if the claim of Virginia was well founded, under the laws of that State. The Ordinance of 1787 therefore, as the first application of the original policy of the government, converted slave territory into free.

Chase also showed that the idea of property in man was deliberately excluded from the Constitution by Congress by its changing the proposed Amendment that no freeman shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, to read, no person shall be so deprived.

The Constitution therefore recognizes all men as persons only. Congress under it has no more power to make a slave

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than to make a king; to establish slavery than to set up the Inquisition. It cannot interfere with slavery in the States, except, perhaps, in the case of war or insurrection.1

Here Chase cited, as a few instances of the general former Southern opinion on the subject, John Randolph's scornful rejection of all aid from the Federal government to slavery in Virginia, and the decision of Chancellor Wythe (overruled, however, in the Virginia Court of Appeals) that slavery was so against justice that the presumption of freedom must be allowed to every alleged slave suing for liberty, and the onus of proving the contrary must rest on the claimant of his ownership.

He stated that the Missouri Compromise departed from the original national policy in regard to slavery by recognizing it where it existed and prohibiting it where it did not.

But the idea that slavery could ever be introduced into free territory under the sanction of Congress had not, as yet, entered into any man's head.

He then reviewed the history of the Wilmot Proviso.

The North's position was that territory already free, lying south of the Compromise line, should remain free. Therefore the Northern States defeated Douglas's proposal to extend the line to the Pacific with the effect that slavery would be introduced into all territory south of the line.

The Senator then came to the Clay Compromises.

The acts of 1850 applied only to the Mexican acquisitions. They did not introduce any general principle of Territorial

It was in this case that the Federal government abolished slavery during the Civil War.

VOL. 11-19

organization. No man concerned in their passage, and least of all the Senator from Illinois, imagined that we were planting the germs of a new agitation. Indeed, one act contains an express stipulation which precludes the revival of the agitation in the form in which it is now thrust upon the country.

Senators, will you unite in a statement which you know to be contradicted by the history of the country? If you wish to break up the time-honored compact embodied in the Missouri Compromise, transferred into the annexation of Mexican territory, and preserved and affirmed by the Compromises of 1850, do it openly and boldly.

I cannot believe that the people have so far lost sight of the principles of the Revolution as to acquiesce in the violation of this compact. The Senator from Illinois appeals to them with the specious principle of Popular Sovereignty. What kind of Popular Sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion?

If the Missouri prohibition of slavery shall be repealed, thousands will say: "Away with all compromises; we will return to the old principles of the Constitution. We shall not cease our efforts until slavery shall be abolished wherever it can be reached by the constitutional action of the government."

On February 6, Senator Wade spoke against the bill. He attacked the argument of Douglas that the Compromises of 1850 in organizing Utah and New Mexico, by adding to these Territories strips of land covered by the Missouri Compromise, had inferentially repealed this compact by establishing a "new principle."

This was only a necessary readjustment of boundaries. Suppose your party line with a neighbor has become uncertain, and in running a new one you take in a little land

that belonged to him, or leave out a little land belonging to yourself, does this establish a "new principle" superseding your neighbor's title to the remainder by your own?

Senator Wade denounced the bill as the result of a sudden and base conspiracy to betray the people of the free States.

The North knew nothing about it. Did you let it go before the people? Why, sir, in the presidential contest, triumphant as was the Democracy, had you staked the election of Mr. Pierce on the proposition, he would not have received one electoral vote in the North. The object of this bill is to extend the market for human beings. It is an exceedingly dangerous issue. A cloud, little bigger now than a man's hand, is gathering in the East and North and West, and soon the entire boreal heaven will be ablaze. You are about to bring slavery and freedom to grapple in a contest in which one or the other must die. I do not know that I ought to regret it, for such a conflict has been inevitable; but you are hastening it. I tell you that it will not be liberty which will die in this progressive nineteenth century. If, however, you succeed, and your act of perfidy is consummated, the Union will not survive ten years.

Senator Badger pleaded for the extension of slave territory as an act of justice to the slave-owner, and of humanity to the slave.

Probably only a few Southerners will go to Kansas and Nebraska. Why should they not take a few domestic servants along with them? Why separate a Southern gentleman from his dear old "mammy"?

To this Senator Wade pertinently replied:

We have not the slightest objection to the Senator's migrating to Kansas and taking his "old mammy" along

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