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and admitted power to alter or amend the Constitution, peaceably and quietly, whenever experience shall point out defects or imperfections. And finally, the people of the United States have at no time, in no way, directly or indirectly, authorized any State legislature to construe or interpret their high instrument of government; much less to interfere, by their own power, to arrest its course and operation.

If, sir, the people, in these respects, had done otherwise than they have done, their Constitution could neither have been preserved, nor would it have been worth preserving. And if its plain provisions shall now be disregarded, and these new doctrines interpolated in it, it will become as feeble and helpless a being as its enemies, whether early or more recent, could possibly desire. It will exist in every State, but as a poor dependent on State permission. It must borrow leave to be; and will be no longer than State pleasure, or State discretion, sees fit to grant the indulgence and to prolong its poor existence.

But, sir, although there are fears, there are hopes also. The people have preserved this, their own chosen Constitution, for forty years, and have seen their happiness, prosperity, and renown, grow with its growth, and strengthen with its strength. They are now, generally, strongly attached to it. Overthrown by direct assault, it can not be; evaded, undermined, nullified, it will not be, if we, and those who shall succeed us here as agents and representatives of the people, shall conscientiously and vigilantly discharge the two great branches of our public trust-faithfully to preserve and wisely to administer it.

Mr. President, I have thus stated the reasons of my dissent to the doctrines which have been advanced and maintained. I am conscious of having detained you and the Senate much too long. I was drawn into the debate, with no previous deliberation such as is suited to the discussion of so grave and important a subject. But it is a subject of which my heart is full, and I have not been willing to sup

press the utterance of its spontaneous sentiments. I can not, even now, persuade myself to relinquish it without expressing once more my deep conviction that, since it respects nothing less than the union of the States, it is of most vital and essential importance to the public happiness. I profess, sir, in my career hitherto to have kept steadily in view the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home, and our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union that we are chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That Union we reached only by the discipline of our virtues in the severe school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign influences, these great interests immediately awoke, as from the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings; and although our territory has stretched out wider and wider, and our population spread farther and farther, they have not outrun its protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain of national, social, and personal happiness. I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it shall be broken up and destroyed.

While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant

that, in my day at least, that curtain may not rise. God grant, that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind. When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured-bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards-but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart-Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

IV

The Contest Over Slavery

FOR MORE than twenty years following the settlement of the Missouri question, the portentous subject of Slavery slept an uneasy sleep in the halls of Congress. Then followed a period of gradually increasing intensity of conflict, which culminated in the secession of the South and the Civil War.

The invention of the cotton gin (1793) made cotton raising very profitable, and cotton exports rose from 19,000 pounds in 1791 to 142,000,000 pounds in 1824. A new and urgent demand for slave labor thus arose; and all serious thought of emancipation, such as had been cherished by Jefferson, Mason, Wythe, Laurens, and others of the best spirits of the South in the first quarter of our national existence, died out in the slaveholding sections. In its stead came the attitude expressed by Governor McDuffie, of South Carolina, in his message to the legislature of that State in 1834: "Domestic slavery, instead of being a political evil, is the corner-stone of our republican edifice. No patriot who justly estimates our privileges will tolerate the idea of emancipation, at any period however remote, or on any condition of pecuniary advantage however favorable." (Von Holst, Constitutional History of the United States, II, p. 118.) This is the position which John C. Calhoun makes his own in the first speech here given, that of February 6, 1837.

In the North, on the other hand, the ten years preceding 1840 saw the formation of nearly 1,000 abolition societies, local, State, and national,-with about 40,000 members; it saw also the founding of Garrison's newspaper, the Liberator, with its narrow uncompromising demand for immediate universal emancipation, its denunciation of the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and the deadly earnestness of its editor, who wrote: "I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard." Wendell Phillips's eulogy of Garrison, which is here given, is included as affording one of the best expositions of the moral earnestness of uncompromising abolitionism. More practical opponents of slavery also arose, demanding the abolition of the inter-State slave trade and of slavery itself in the District of Columbia; while theoretical abolitionists and practical anti-slavery men alike combined to nullify to a large extent the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.

The occasion for the reviving of the slavery discussion in Congress in its full intensity was the acquisition of territory from Mexico as a result of the Mexican War. The idea entertained by a considerable section of the North as to the motives underlying these territorial acquisitions was (as expressed by Lowell in his Biglow Papers),—

"They jest want this Californy

So's to lug new slave States in."

It was to meet this effort at slavery expansion that the famous Wilmot Proviso was first introduced (1846), declaring that "As an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory . . . neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of the said territory."

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