When it became known that Mr. Davis had arrived at the Hall, he was loudly called for. Hon. Joseph Howard, chairman of the meeting, then introduced Mr. Davis, who, on coming forward, was greeted with cheer upon cheer from the vast audience. As soon as the prolonged and enthusiastic applause with which he was welcomed had subsided, Mr. Davis, addressing the audience as fellow citizens and Democratic brethren, said that the invitation with which he had been favored to address them, evinced a purpose to confer together for the common good—for the maintenance of the constitution, the bond of union. He would not be expected to discuss local questions; he would not in this imitate the mischievous agitators who inflame the Northern mind against the Southern States. He came among them, an invalid, advised by his physician to resort to this clime for the restoration of his health; as an American citizen, he had not expected that his right to come here would be questioned; as a stranger, or if not entirely so, known mainly by the detraction which the ardent advocacy of the rights of the South had brought upon him, he had supposed that neither his coming nor his going would attract attention. But his anticipations had proved erroneous. The polite, the manly, elevated men, lifted above the barbarism which makes stranger and enemy convertible terms, had chosen, without political distinction, to welcome his coming, and by constant acts of generous hospitality to make his sojourn as pleasant as his physical condition would permit.
On the other hand, men who make a trade of politics, and whose capital consists in the denunciation of the institutions of other States, had erroneously judged him by themselves, and had regarded his coming as a political mission; wherefore it was, he was led to suppose, that the scavengers of that party had been employed in the publication of falsehoods, both in relation to himself and his political friends at the South.
So far as it affected him personally their attacks were no more than the barking of a cur, which, by its clamor, indicates the inhospitable character of the master who keeps him. If his friends and himself were, as had been falsely charged, Disunionists and Nullifiers, they might naturally have looked for kinder considerations from a party which circulates petitions for a “prompt and peaceful dissolution of the Union” on account of the incompatibility of the sections—from a party, which, having proved faithless to the obligation of the constitution in relation to the fugitive from service or labor, then declares null and void the law which their dereliction made it necessary for Congress to enact. The fealty of himself and friends to the constitution, and their honorable discharge of its obligations was their rebuke to this party, in whose hostility he found the highest commendation in their power to bestow.
By reckless fabrication, by garbling and inserting new words into extracts, they had attempted to deceive the people here as to his opinions, and had crowned the fraud by the absurd announcement that his was the creed on which the people of Maine must vote next Monday.
It was due to the hospitality which he had received at their hands that he should not interfere in their domestic affairs, and he had not failed to remember the obligation; when republicans had introduced the subject of African slavery he had defended it, and answered pharisaical pretensions by citing the Bible, the constitution of the United States and the good of society in justification of the institutions of the State of which he was a citizen; in this he but exercised the right of a freeman and discharged the duty of a Southern citizen. Was it for this cause that he had been signalized as a slavery propagandists? He admitted in all its length and breadth the right of the people of Maine to decide the question for themselves; he held that it would be an indecent interference, on the part of a citizen of another State, if he should arraign the propriety of the judgment they had rendered, and that there was no rightful power in the federal government or in all the States combined, to set aside the decision which the community had made in relation to their domestic institutions. Should any attempt be made thus to disturb their sovereign right, he would pledge himself in advance, as a State-rights man, with his head, his heart and his hand, if need be, to aid them in the defence of this right of community independence, which the Union was formed to protect, and which it was the duty of every American citizen to preserve and to guard as the peculiar and prominent feature of our government.
Why, then, this accusation? Do they fear to allow Southern men to converse with their philosophers, and seek thus to silence or exclude them? He trusted others would contemn them as he did, and that many of our brethren of the South would, like himself, learn by sojourn here, to appreciate the true men of Maine, and to know how little are the political abolitionists and the abolition papers the exponents of the character and the purposes of the Democracy of this State.
And now having brushed away the cob-webs which lay in his path, he would proceed to the consideration of subjects worthy of the audience he had the honor to address.
Democrats, patriots, by whatever political name any of you may be known, you have a sacred duty to perform to your ancestry and to posterity. The time is at hand when for good or for evil, the questions which have agitated the public mind are to be solved. Is it true as asserted by northern agitators that there is such contrariety between the North and the South that they cannot remain united! Or rather, is it not true as our fathers deemed it, that diversity in the character of the population, in the products and in the institutions of the several States formed a reason for their union and tended to secure to their posterity the liberty which was the common object of their love, and by cultivating untrammeled intercourse and free trade between the States, to duplicate the comforts of all?
There was a time when the test of patriotism was the readiness to sever the bond which bound the colonies to the mother country. Recently our people with joyous acclamation have welcomed the connection of the United States with Great Britain, by the Atlantic cable. The one is not inconsistent with the other. When the home government violated the charters of the colonies, and assumed to control the private interests of individuals, the love of political liberty, the determination at whatever hazard to maintain their rights, led our fathers to enter on the trial of revolution. Having achieved the separation, they did what was in their power for the development of commerce. They secured free trade between the States, without surrendering State independence. Their sons, not only free, but beyond the possibility of future interference in their domestic affairs, now seek the closest commercial connection with the country from which their fathers achieved a political separation.
Had the proposition been made to consolidate the States after their independence had been achieved, all must know it would have been rejected—yet there are those who now instigate you to sectional strife for the purpose of sectional dominion and the destruction of the rights of the minority. Do they mean treason to the Constitution and the destruction of the Union? Or do they vilely practice on credulity and passion for personal gain? The latter is suggested by the contradictory course they pursue. At the same time they proclaim war upon the slave property of the South, they ask for protection to the manufactures of the staple which could not be produced if that property did not exist. And while they assert themselves to be the peculiar friends of commerce and navigation, they vaunt their purpose to destroy the labor which gives vitality to both; whilst they proclaim themselves the peculiar friends of laboring men at the North, they insist that the negroes are their equals; and if they are sincere they would, by emancipation of the blacks, bring them together and degrade the white man to the negro level. They seek to influence the northern mind by sectional issues and sectional organization, yet they profess to be the friends of the Union. The Union voluntarily formed by free, equal, independent States.
We of the South, on a sectional division, are in the minority; and if legislation is to be directed by geographical tests—if the constitution is to be trampled in the dust, and the unbridled will of the majority in Congress is to be supreme over the States; we should have the problem which was presented to our Fathers when the Colonies declined to be content with a mere representation in parliament.
If the constitution is to be sacredly observed, why should there be a struggle for sectional ascendency? The instrument is the same in all latitudes, and does not vary with the domestic institutions of the several States. Hence it is that the Democracy, the party of the constitution, have preserved their integrity, and are to-day the only national party and the only hope for the preservation and perpetuation of the Union of the States.
Mr. Jefferson denominated the Democracy of the North, the natural allies of the South. It is in our generation doubly true; they are still the party with whom labor is capital, and they are now the party which stands by the barriers of the constitution, to protect them from the waves of fanatical and sectional aggression. The use of the word aggression reminded him that the people here have been daily harangued about the aggressions of the slave power, and he had been curious to learn what was so described. It is, if he had learned correctly, the assertion of the right to migrate with slaves into the territories of the United States. Is this aggression? If so, upon what? Not upon those who desire close association with the negro; not upon territorial rights, unless these self-styled lovers of the Union have already dissolved it and have taken the territories to themselves. The territory being the common property of States, equals in the Union, and bound by the constitution which recognizes property in slaves, it is an abuse of terms to call aggression the migration into that territory of one of its joint owners, because carrying with him any species of property recognized by the constitution of the United States. The Federal government has no power to declare what is property anywhere. The power of each State cannot extend beyond its own limits. As a consequence, therefore, whatever is property in any of the States must be so considered in any of the territories of the United States until they reach to the dignity of community independence, when the subject matter will be entirely under the control of the people and be determined by their fundamental law. If the inhabitants of any territory should refuse to enact such laws and police regulations as would give security to their property or to his, it would be rendered more or less valueless, in proportion to the difficulty of holding it without such protection. In the case of property in the labor of man, or what is usually called slave property, the insecurity would be so great that the owner could not ordinarily retain it. Therefore, though the right would remain, the remedy being withheld, it would follow that the owner would be practically debarred by the circumstances of the case, from taking slave property into a territory where the sense of the inhabitants was opposed to its introduction. So much for the oft repeated fallacy of forcing slavery upon any community.
If Congress had the power to prohibit the introduction of slave property into the territories, what would be the purpose? Would it be to promote emancipation? That could not be the effect. In the first settlement of a territory the want of population and the consequent difficulty of procuring hired labor, would induce emigrants to take slaves with them; but if the climate and products of the country were unsuited to African labor—as soon as white labor flowed in, the owners of slaves would as a matter of interest, desire to get rid of them and emancipation would result. The number would usually be so small that this would be effected without injury to society or industrial pursuits. Thus it was in Wisconsin, notwithstanding the ordinance of ’87; and other examples might be cited to show that this is not mere theory.
Would it be to promote the civilization and progress of the negro race? The tendency must be otherwise. By the dispersion of the slaves, their labor would be rendered more productive and their comforts increased. The number of owners would be multiplied, and by more immediate contact and personal relation greater care and kindness would be engendered. In every way it would conduce to the advancement and happiness of the servile caste.
No—no—it is not these, but the same answer which comes to every inquiry as to the cause of fanatical agitation. ’Tis for sectional power, and political ascendency; to fan a sectional hostility, which must be, as it has been, injurious to all, and beneficial to none. For what patriotic purpose can the Northern mind be agitated in relation to domestic institutions, for which they have no legal or moral responsibility, and from the interference with which they are restrained by their obligations as American citizens?
Is it in this mode that the spirit of mutual support and common effort for the common good, is to be cultivated? Is it thus that confidence is to be developed and the sense of security to grow with the growing power of each and every State? Is it thus that we are to exemplify the blessings of self-government by the free exercise in each independent community of the power to regulate their domestic institutions as soil, climate, and population may determine?
Among the questions which have been made the basis of recent agitation, and has contributed as much, perhaps, as any other to popular delusion, was the act known as the Missouri Compromise. It will be remembered that the agitation of 1819 on the subject of slavery, was not masked as it has been since, by pretensions of philanthropy—it was an avowed opposition to the admission of a slave-holding State. A long and bitter controversy was terminated by the admission of the State of Missouri, and the prohibition of slavery north of the parallel of 36 deg. 30 minutes. He, and those with whom he most concurred, had always contended that Congress had no constitutional power to make the interdiction. But the people having generally acquiesced, the matter was considered settled; and when Texas, a slave-holding State, was admitted into the Union, Southern men, regarding the Missouri Act as a compact, assented to the extension of the line through the territory of Texas, with a provision that any State formed out of the territory north of 36: 30: should be non-slaveholding. But when, at a subsequent period, we made extensive acquisitions from Mexico, and it was proposed to divide the territory by the same parallel, the North generally opposed it, and after a long discussion, the controversy was settled on the principle of non-intervention by Congress in relation to property in the territories. The line of the Missouri Compromise was repudiated. And a Senator who had been most prominent in denouncing the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a violation of good faith on the part of the South, in 1850, described it as a measure which had been the grave of every Northern man who supported it, and objected to the boundary of 36: 30: for the territory of Utah, because of the political implication which its adoption would contain.
The act having been thus signally repudiated by the denial in every form of the power of Congress to fix geographical limits within which slavery might or might not exist; when it became necessary to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, it was but the corollary of the proposition which had been maintained in 1850 to repeal the act which had fixed the parallel of 36: 30: as the future limit of slavery in the territory of Louisiana.
Consistency demanded so much; fairness and manhood could not have granted less. He was not then a member of Congress; but if he had been, he should have voted for that repeal; for although in 1850 he had favored the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, and believed that it would most conduce to the harmony of the States, he had yielded to the action of the Government, and considered the position then taken as conclusive against the retention of the line in Louisiana and Texas, which its beneficiaries had refused to extend through the territories acquired from Mexico. As a general principle, he thought it was best to leave the territories all open. Equality of right demanded it, and the federal government had no power to withhold it. Whatever validity the Missouri Compromise act had, it derived from the acquiescence of the people. After 1850 then it had none. The South had not asked Congress to extend slavery into the territories, and he in common with most Southern statesmen, denied the existence of any power to do so. He held it to be the creed of the Democracy, both in the North and the South, that the General Government had no constitutional power either to establish or prohibit slavery anywhere; a grant of power to do the one must necessarily have involved the power to do the other. Hence it is their policy not to interfere on the one side or the other, but protecting each individual in his constitutional rights, to leave every independent community to determine and adjust all domestic questions as in their wisdom may seem best.
Politicians of the opposite school seemed to forget the relation of the General Government to the States; even so far as to argue as though the General Government had been the creator instead of the creature of the States. He had learned that attempts had been made to impress upon the people of Maine the belief that they were in danger of having slavery established among them by decree of the Supreme Court of the United States. He scarcely knew how to answer so palpable an absurdity. The court was established, among other purposes, to protect the people from unconstitutional legislation; and if Congress, in the extreme of madness, should attempt thus to invade the sovereignty of a State, it would be within the power, and would be the duty of the court, to check the aggression by declaring such law void. The court have, on more than one occasion, asserted the right of transit as a consequence of the guarantees of the Constitution, but it would require much ingenuity to torture the protection of a traveller or sojourner into an assertion of a right to become resident and introduce property in contravention of the fundamental law of the State, or of a citizen to hold property within a State in violation of its constitution and its policy. The error of the proposition was so palpable that, like the truth of an axiom, it could not be rendered plainer by demonstration.
It is not within the scope of human foresight to see the embarrassments which may arise in the execution of any policy. When it was declared that soil, climate, and unrestrained migration should be left to fix the status of the territories, and institutions of the States to be formed out of them, no one probably anticipated that companies would be incorporated to transport colonists into a territory with a view to decide its political condition. Congress, as he believed, yielding too far to the popular idea, had surrendered its right of revision and thus had recently lost its power to restrain improper legislation in the territories. From these joint causes had arisen the unhappy strife in Kansas, which at one time threatened to terminate in civil war. The Government had been denounced for the employment of United States troops. Very briefly he would state the case.
The movement of the Emigrant Aid Societies of the North was met by counteracting movements in Missouri and other Southern States. Thus opposing tides of emigration met on the plains of Kansas. The land was a scene of confusion and violence. Fortunately the murders which for a time filled the newspapers, existed nowhere else; and the men who were reported slain, usually turned up after a short period to enjoy the eulogies which their martyrdom had elicited. But arson, theft and disgraceful scenes of disorder did really exist, and bands of armed men indicated the approach of actual hostilities. What was the Government to do? Perhaps you will say, call out the militia. But that would have been to feed and arm one of the parties for the destruction of the other. To call out the militia of neighboring States would have been but little better. The sectional excitement then ran so high, that they would probably have met upon the fields of Kansas as combatants, the government in the meantime furnishing the supplies for both armies. It was necessary to have a force—one which would be free from sectional excitement or partisan zeal and under executive control. The army fulfiled these conditions. It was therefore employed. It dispersed marauding parties, disarmed organized invaders, arrested disturbers of the peace, gave comparative quiet and repose to the territory, without taking a single life, aye, or shedding one drop of blood. The end justified the means, and the result equaled all that could have been anticipated.
The anomalous condition of a territory possessing full legislative power, but not invested with the sovereignty of a State, justified the anxiety exhibited by Congress to be relieved from the embarrassment which the case of Kansas presented. The Senate passed a bill to authorize a convention for the preparation of a constitution for the admission of Kansas as a State. It however failed in the House of Representatives, and the legislature of Kansas, availing themselves of the plenary power conferred upon them by the organic act, proceeded to provide for the assembling of a convention, and the formation of a constitution. The law was minute and fair in its provisions, so nearly resembling the bill of the Senate that the one was probably copied from the other. It seemed to secure to every legal voter every desirable opportunity to exercise his right. One of the parties of the territory, however, denying the legal existence of the legislature, chose to abstain from voting. The other elected the delegates who formed the constitution. The validity of the instrument he has been denied, because it was not submitted for popular ratification. He held this position to be wholly untenable, and could but regard it as a gross departure from the principle of popular sovereignty. A people—he used the word in its strict political sense—having the right to make for themselves their fundamental law, may either assemble in mass convention for that purpose, or may select delegates and limit their power to the preparation of an instrument to be submitted to a popular decision; or they may appoint delegates with full powers to frame the fundamental law of the land. Whether they adopt one mode or the other is a question with which others have no right to interfere, and he who claims for Congress the power to sit in judgment on the manner in which a people may form a constitution, is outside of the barrier which would restrain him from claiming for Congress the right to dictate the instrument itself. If the right existed to form a constitution at all, the power of Congress in relation to the instrument was limited to the simple inquiry: is it republican? In this view of the case it would not matter to him the ninety-ninth part of a hair whether a people should chose to admit or exclude slave property. Their right to enter the Union would be a thing apart from that consideration.
He had felt great doubt as to the propriety of admitting Kansas, and had only yielded those doubts to the peculiar necessities which seemed to make the case exceptional. The inhabitants of the territory had however decided not to enter the Union upon the terms proposed, and he thought their decision was fortunate. They had not the requisite population; their resources were too limited to give assurance that they would be able to bear the expenses of their government and properly to perform the duties of a State. But more than this, their legislative history shows that they are wanting in the essential characteristics of a community; whichever party has had the control of the legislature, has manifested by its acts not a desire to promote the public good, and protect individual rights, but a purpose to war upon their political opponents as a hostile power. The political party with which he most sympathized had marked its legislation by requiring test oaths, offensive to all our notions of political freedom; and the other party had assumed to take from the territorial executive the control of the militia and to place it in irresponsible hands, where, it reports speak truly, it has been employed in the most wanton outrages and disgraceful persecution of citizens of the opposite political party. He held, therefore, that the decision of the inhabitants was fortunate and wise. It was well, that before they assume the responsibilities of a State, they should gather population, develop the natural resources of the country, and above all acquire the homogeneous character which would give security to person and property, and fit them to be justly denominated a community.
A stranger, and but a passing observer of events in Maine, he had nevertheless seen indications of a reaction in popular opinion, which promised hopefully for the future of Democracy, hopefully, it might be permitted for one to say who believed that the success of the Democracy was the only hope for the maintenance of the constitution and the perpetuation of the Union which sprung from and cannot outlive it. If the language of his friend who preceded him should prove prophetic, the waving of the banner he described would be the dawning of a day which would bring gladness and confidence to many a heart now clouded with distrust, and loud would be the cheers which, on distant plain and mountain, would welcome Maine again to her position on the top of the Democratic pyramid. He saw a brighter sky above him; he felt a firmer foundation beneath his feet, and hoped ere long through a triumph achieved by the declaration of principles, suited to every latitude and longitude of the United Slates, to receive the assurance that we have passed the breakers —that our ship may henceforth float freely on—that our flag, no longer threatened with mutilation or destruction, shall throw its broad stripes to the breeze and gather stars until its constellation shines a galaxy, and records a family of States embracing the new world and its adjacent islands.
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