FUTILITY OF THE 'PEACE' CLAMOR. was a sore trial to human patience. A government which cannot uphold and vindicate its authority in the country which it professes to rule is to be pitied; but one which does not even attempt to enforce respect and obedience is a confessed imposture and sham, and deserves to be hooted off the face of the earth. Nay, more: it was impossible for ours to exist on the conditions prescribed by its domestic foes. No government can endure without revenue; and the Federal Constitution (Art. I. § 9) expressly prescribes that 441 Mr. Lincoln intended peace or war, | sealed against the commerce and navigation of the other half, save on payment of duties utterly unknown to our laws; while goods could be entered at those ports at quite other (and generally lower) rates of impost than those established by Congress. Hence, importers, with good reason, refused to pay the established duties at Northern ports until the same should be exacted at Southern as well; so that three months' acquiescence by the President in what was untruly commended as the "Peace policy," would have sunk the country into anarchy and whelmed the Government in hopeless ruin. "No preference shall be given, by any regulation of commerce or revenue, to the ports of one State over those of another; nor shall vessels bound to or from one State be obliged to enter, clear, or pay duties, in another." But here were the ports of nearly half our Atlantic and Gulf coasts ate's called Session, which followed-yet, when war actually grew out of the conflicting pretensions of the Union and the Confederacy, took nobly and heartily the side of his whole country. But, even before the close of the called Session, a decided change in his attitude, if not in his conceptions, was manifest. On the 25th of March, replying to a plea for 'Peace,' on the basis of 'No Coercion,' by Senator J. C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, he thus thoroughly exposed the futility of the main pretext for Disunion: "From the beginning of this Government down to 1859, Slavery was prohibited by Congress in some portion of the territories of the United States. But now, for the first time in the history of this Government, there is no foot of ground in America where Slavery is prohibited by act of Congress. You, of the other side of this chamber, by the unanimous vote of every Republican in this body, and of every Republican in the House of Representatives, have organized all the territories of the United States on the principle of non-intervention, by Congress, with the question of Slavery-leaving the people to do as they please, subject only to the limitations of the Constitution. Hence, I think the Senator from Kentucky fell into a gross error of fact as well as of law when he said, the other day, that you had not abated one jot of your creed-that you had not abandoned your aggressive policy in Still, no one is required to achieve the impossible, though to attempt what to others will seem such may sometimes be accepted by the unselfish and intrepid as a duty; and this practical question confronted the the territories, and that you were now pursuing the policy of excluding the Southern people from all the territories of the United States. *** There never has been a time since the Govern ment was founded when the right of the slaveholders to emigrate to the territories, to carry with them their slaves, and to hold them on an equal footing with all other property, was as fully and distinctly recognized in all the territories as at this time, and that, too, by the unanimous vote of the Republican party in both Houses of Congress. "The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Breckinridge] has told you that the Southern States, still in the Union, will never be satisfied to remain in it unless they get terms that will give them either a right, in common with all the other States, to emigrate into the territories, or that will secure to them their rights in the territories on the principle of an equitable division. These are the only terms on which, as he says, those Southern States now in the Union will consent to remain. I wish to call the attention of that distinguished Senator to the fact that, under the law as it now stands, the South has all the rights which he claims. First, Southern men have the right to emigrate into all the territories, and to carry their Slave property with them, on an equality with the citizens of the other States. Secondly, they have an equitable partition of the territories assigned by law, viz.: all is Slave Territory up to the thirty-seventh degree, instead of up to the parallel of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes-a half degree more than they claim." |