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THE POLICY OF THE FATHERS OF THE REPUBLIC.

SENECA FALLS, OCTOBER 31, 1860.

A CRISIS in individual life is when a man passes through some perilous accident, or surmounts some apprehended mortal disease; or else when he falls before the danger, or succumbs to the disease and dies. A political crisis, such as we so often hear of, is the period in which a nation-for a nation is but a person, a human person consisting of many persons--surmounts some national disease or avoids some national peril, and takes new assurance and long life, or failing to surmount it, suddenly or slowly languishes and dies. And politicians, availing themselves through the influence of interest or passion, tell us very often that the town in which we live, or the state in which we belong, or the country of which we are members, is in a crisis, misjudging, because a crisis occurs but seldom even in the course of individual life, and at very distant periods in the life of a nation. But on all hands there is an agreement now that this republic of ours is in a crisis, and I, for one confess, as I believe it to be true, if this republic passes safely through this crisis, it takes assurance of long endurance-practically of immortality; and if it fails to pass safely through this crisis, it will languish and die. To know how to pass safely through a crisis, it is necessary to understand its nature, and to understand the nature of the present national crisis it will be necessary for us to go back to the beginning.

I said we must go back to the beginning, and the moment that we go back to the beginning of our national existence we perceive the fact, clear, unmistakable and uncontested, that this nation was to be, not a monarchy, not an aristocracy, but a republican nation. That can be a republican nation only which is a free nation; and if freedom or liberty is a vital principle of every republican government, or every republican state, that principle is that the people must be free and must be equal. When we say that the people of a country

are free and equal, we say precisely that that nation enjoys civil and religious liberty, and that all, practically all, of its citizens enjoy the rights and safety of their persons, of freedom in the pursuit of happiness, which involves freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of suffrage, and above all freedom of religious conscience.

This you will all recognize, at once, as the nature of the republic which our fathers intended to establish, and which we all confess, and the world confesses, that they did establish. It did not mean that every human being within the jurisdiction of the government when it was first established was, or must immediately be, entirely free. That was impossible, because slaves and slavery existed in the land at that time, and there was no process by which every human being in the United States, on the first organization of the government, could be emancipated, if in bondage, and raised up to freedom; but it did mean this: that the great mass of the people were, and should remain forever free; that slavery should be subordinate, inferior in its position to freedom, and that freedom should be the general and normal condition of the country; that thereafter all the changes shall be, not from freedom toward slavery, but from existing and tolerated slavery, upward toward freedom. This was all that could have been done in the country, at that time, and this country was in a better condition to establish a free government, than any other people that had then existed on the face of the globe.

I call your attention, then to this fact, that there were thirteen of those states-that this was not to be a consolidated nation, consisting of only one people, and one jurisdiction alone, like France, or like Russia, but that it did consist of thirteen equal states, and that these states were to remain thereafter, and until the end of time; and each of them should be, in a large degree, sovereign statesand all of them, of course, should be equal. That this was to be in the beginning a republic of thirteen states, and that, as time should advance, the number should increase to twenty, up to thirty-at which standard we have already arrived--and in distant years forty, fifty, or sixty states—a thing not impossible, scarcely improbable, for in: ny to see who are not older than the lad who sits upon the stage before me.

Now none of these states, practically none, with the exception of Massachusetts, scarcely worth noticing-no one of these states had

an entire population of freemen. There were slaves in every state, and slavery was commingled with freemen in each one, and through the whole country. But, nevertheless, freedom was recognized, and not slavery, in founding the federal government, as the element which prevailed in every one of these thirteen states; and what was to be done was to take care that freedom, and not slavery, should predominate in all the other states, which, under any circumstances and at any period, however remote, might be adopted into the Union.

There was, as you see, slavery existing then in every state in the newly formed Union-and there was freedom existing in it, and these two were in conflict. Let the silly person who denies that. there is a conflict between freedom and slavery wherever they exist in the country, and that that conflict is irrepressible, answer me. Let him answer me whether, taking the Declaration of Independence, which was the first utterance of the American nation, he does not read there in the very first sentence of that utterance the existence of a conflict between freedom and slavery?

He certainly will read there the declaration that "all men are created equal, and have inalienable rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Did they assert a mere truism which all the world accepted, and upon which all the world have based all their institutions, or did they assert a truth that other people beside the American nation denied and rejected? They asserted a truth which only this nation, and none before this had ever asserted, and which was disputed in this country at the time, and was in dispute, and is in dispute still over the whole face of the globe.

Let me ask the silly person who denies that there is an irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery, whether every page of the history of the United States does not bear testimony to the conflict between freedom and slavery for the period of eighty years that this Union has endured? What else have we had from the beginning but attempts to compromise-compromises and breaches of compromises of the dispute between freedom and slavery-and if it was so in the beginning and has been so through the middle, how is it now? Upon what issue is the American people divided in this political crisis, except a conflict between freedom and slavery? So, unless this conflict shall end in the manner appointed by Him who created and called into existence all nations, as he did all men, and that is in favor of the right, so it will be an irrepressible conflict

until this nation shall cease to exist, and shall give place to some other in which the same conflict shall be renewed.

There was then a conflict between freedom and slavery in the beginning, and our fathers had to choose between freedom and slavery as the elemental and vital principle of the republic. Our fathers, dif fering from their descendants, widely differing from you, strange that it should be so, were unanimous in accepting and adopting freedom and rejecting slavery as the elemental and vital principle of the republic. And not one statesman of them all proposed at any time that all the American states, all of which practically were then slaveholding states, should continue and remain forever slaveholding states, and that every new state which should come into the Union through the course of ages, should also be a slave state. If there was one such statesman in any one of those thirteen slave states, pray name him to me, because his name and action have escaped my reading of history. Not one statesman of the republic proposed an equilibrium or a balance in which freedom should be one principle and slavery another in the United States. That is to say, that onehalf of the states should be free states and that the other half of the states should be slave states, and that each should remain free or slave through all time as they were at the beginning, and that the future states one-half to be admitted to be free and the other half to be slave, and they should remain so forever. If I am mistaken in this, if there was any statesman of that day who proposed an equal balance between freedom and slavery, I pray you to name him to me, because his name has escaped my reading of history. Not one statesman in any part of this republic proposed to leave the matter to accident or choice, to let freedom and slavery balance each other, or the one to prevail over the other, as it might, careless whether freedom was voted up or voted down, whether slavery was voted up or voted down. If there is one of these political philosophers proposing the theory of indifference or practising it, I pray you to name him to me, because I have been unable to find it inscribed upon the history of the fathers of the republic.

Now there was a way in which this Union could have been established upon either of these three principles. There was a way in which this could have been made a republic, not of freedom, but of slavery. And if there had been statesmen who desired such a government, the process would have suggested itself to them, it is very

simple, and they would have propounded it to the convention which formed and to the people who accepted our state and federal constitution; and it was this: Prohibit emancipation in all the thirteen states; prohibit emigration of foreigners from all countries into the United States, or any of them, because foreigners were free men, deny naturalization to the foreigner who is found here, and leave him practically disfranchised, and therefore in the class of slaves; perpetuate the African slave trade, so that for all time to come the future inhabitants of the United States, upon whom they must depend for labor and for the great business of society, should be African slaves; declare slavery to be not only existing and the law of the land in each state, but declare that it shall be perpetual. Declare this and take one step more. Let the federal government, the congress of the United States, shut up the common domain upon which the future states were to be created, that domain stretching between the river Ohio and the great lakes to the Mississippi: declare that that domain shall be open hereafter, not to freemen at all, but only to slaveholders and slavery. Now you see how easy it would have been at that day, by adopting this simple programme, to have made not the free republic which our fathers bequeathed to us, but a slave republic, from the Atlantic ocean to the Mississippi river, and from the St. Lawrence to the St. Mary's, which were the original boundaries of the republic.

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There was a way also for the statesmen of that day, if that had been what they desired and what they meant, to make a republic in which freedom and slavery should be held in equilibrium and remain so forever. How was this to be done? Divide the thirteen orginal states so that in just one-half of the territory freedom should exist and slavery be unknown, and in the other half slavery should exist and freedom be unknown. Admit, of all the future. states, just one-half free, and the other half slave; open your ports to the emigrant from Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Germany, Holland and Switzerland; admit just one-half of white labor of the country free, keep open the African slave trade, and admit and receive the other half of the labor of African slaves-here you would have had that perfect equilibrium between freedom and slavery which those who oppose the republican party say is exactly the condition in which the country can live and flourish, and to which they propose to bring it by the policy upon which they insist.

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