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WASHINGTON, January 28, 1854. "The invitation to a meeting to be held in the city of New York, to protest against any repeal or violation of the Missouri compromise, with which you have honored me, has been received. My constant attendance here is required by the interest which the city of New York and the state of New York have in the great projects of a railroad to San Francisco, and the extension of our commerce to the islands and continents divided from us by the Pacific ocean, which are now being matured in committees to which I belong. Moreover the day designated for the meeting is one upon which the senate may be brought to a vote upon the bold and dangerous measure which has so justly excited the patriotic apprehensions of the citizens of the metropolis. I could not be safely absent from the capital under these circumstances, even if my attendance in New York would otherwise be proper.

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You have kindly asked me, in view of this inability, to give you such an expression of my 'sentiments as may help to arouse the north to the defense of its rights, and the south to maintenance of its plighted honor.' Permit me to say, in response to the appeal, that when the slavery laws of 1850 were under discussion in the senate, I regarded the ground then demanded to be conceded by the north as a vantage ground, which, when once yielded, would be retrieved with infinite difficulty afterward, if, indeed, it should not be absolutely irretrievable; and that, I, therefore, in my place as a representative here, said and did all that it was in my power to do and say, and all that I could now do and say, to 'help to rouse the north to the defense of its rights, and south to the maintenance of its honor.' When, afterward, eminent members of congress, who had been engaged in passing those laws, carried an appeal against those who had opposed them before the people in their primary assemblies, I declined to follow them then, and I have ever since refrained from all unnecessary discussions of the slave laws of 1850, and of matters pertaining to slavery, even here, as well as elsewhere, because I was unwilling to injure so just a cause by discussions which might seem to betray undue solicitude, if not a spirit of faction. We have only now arrived at a new stage in the trial of that appeal. For it is quite clear that if the slavery laws had not been passed in 1850, for the territories acquired from Mexico, there would have been no pretense for extending such slavery laws now, over the territories before acquired from Louisiana, and that if we had maintained our ground on the laws of freedom, which then protected New Mexico and Utah, we should not now have been attacked in our stronghold in Nebraska. It is equally evident, also, that Nebraska is not all that is to be saved or lost. If we are driven from this field, there will yet remain Oregon and Minnesota, and we who thought only so lately as 1849 of securing some portion at least of the shore of the gulf of Mexico and all of the Pacific coast to the institutions of freedom, will be, before 1859, brought to a doubtful struggle to prevent the extension of slavery to the shores of the great lakes, and thence westward to Puget's sound. I hope, gentlemen, that for one, I may be allowed to continue to the end that abstinence from popular agitation which I have heretofore practised, less from considerations of self-respect than from my confidence in the sagacity and virtue of the people I represent. Nevertheless, I beg you to be assured that, while declining to go into popular assemblies, as an agitator, I shall endeavor to do my duty here with as many true men as shall be found in a delegation, which, if all were firm and united in the maintenance of public right and justice, would be able to control the decision of this great question. But the measure of success and effect which shall crown our exertions must depend now as heretofore, on the fidelity with which the people whom we represent shall adhere to the policy and principles which are the foundation of their own unrivaled prosperity and greatness.

"I am, gentlemen, with great respect and esteem, your obedient servant, "WILLIAM H. SEWARD."

1 See ante page 27.

SPEECHES

IN

THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES.

NEBRASKA AND KANSAS.

FREEDOM AND PUBLIC FAITH."

The United States of America, at the close of the revolution, rested southward on the St. Mary's, and westward on the Mississippi, and possessed a broad, unoccupied domain, circumscribed by those rivers, the Alleghany mountains, and the great northern lakes. The constitution anticipated a division of this domain into states, to be admitted as members of the Union, but it neither provided for nor foresaw any enlargement of the national boundaries. The people, engaged in reörganizing their governments, improving their social systems, and establishing relations of commerce and friendship with other nations, remained many years content within their apparently ample limits. But it was already known that the free navigation of the Mississippi would soon become an urgent public want.

France, although she had lost Canada, in chivalrous battle, on the Heights of Abraham, in 1763, nevertheless, still retained her ancient territories on the western bank of the Mississippi. She had also, just before the breaking out of her own fearful revolution, reäcquired, by a secret treaty, the possessions on the gulf of Mexico, which, in a recent war, had been wrested from her by Spain. Her

VOL. IV.

1 Speech in the United States Senate, February 17, 1854.

55

first consul, among those brilliant achievements which proved him the first statesman, as well as the first captain of Europe, sagaciously sold the whole of these possessions to the United States, for a liberal sum, and thus replenished his treasury, while he saved from his enemies, and transferred to a friendly power, distant and vast regions which, for want of adequate naval force, he was unable to defend.

This purchase of Louisiana from France by the United States, involved a grave dispute concerning the western limits of that province; and that controversy, having remained open until 1819, was then adjusted by a treaty, in which they relinquished Texas to Spain, and accepted a cession of the early discovered and long inhabited provinces of East Florida and West Florida. The United States stipulated, in each of these cases, to admit the countries thus annexed into the Federal Union.

The acquisitions of Oregon, by discovery and occupation, of Texas, by voluntary annexation, and of New Mexico and California, including what is now called Utah, by war, completed the rapid course of enlargement, at the close of which our frontier has been fixed near the center of what was New Spain, on the Atlantic side of the continent, while on the west, as on the east, only an ocean separates us from the nations of the old world. It is not in my way now to speculate on the question, how long we are to rest on these advanced positions.

Slavery, before the revolution, existed in all the thirteen colonies, as it did also in nearly all the other European plantations in America. But it had been forced by British authority, for political and commercial ends, on the American people, against their own sagacious instincts of policy, and their strongest feelings of justice and humanity.

They had protested and remonstrated against the system earnestly, for forty years, and they ceased to protest and remonstrate against it only when they finally committed their entire cause of complaint to the arbitrament of arms. An earnest spirit of emanci pation was abroad in the colonies at the close of the revolution, and all of them, except perhaps South Carolina and Georgia, anticipated, desired and designed an early removal of the system from the coun try. The suppression of the African slave trade, which was univer sally regarded as ancillary to that great measure, was, with much reluctance, postponed until 1808.

While there was no national power, and no claim or desire for national power, anywhere, to compel involuntary emancipation in the state where slavery existed, there was at the same time a very general desire and a strong purpose to prevent its introduction into new communities, yet to be formed, and into new states yet to be established. Mr. Jefferson proposed, as early as 1784, to exclude it from the national domain-which should be constituted by cessions from the states to the United States. He recommended and urged the measure as ancillary, also, to the ultimate policy of emancipation. There seems to have been at first no very deep jealousy between the emancipating and the non-emancipating states; and the policy of admitting new states was not disturbed by questions concerning slavery. Vermont, a non-slaveholding state, was admitted in 1793. Kentucky, a tramontane slaveholding community, having been detached from Virginia, was admitted, without being questioned, about the same time. So, also, Tennessee, which was a similar community separated from North Carolina, was admitted in 1796, with a stipulation that the ordinance which Mr. Jefferson had first proposed, and which had in the meantime been adopted for the territory northwest of the Ohio, should not be held to apply within her limits. The same course was adopted in organizing territorial governments for Mississippi and Alabama, slaveholding communities which had been detached from South Carolina and Georgia. All these states and territories were situated southwest of the Ohio river, all were more or less already peopled by slaveholders with their slaves; and to have excluded slavery within their limits would have been a national act, not of preventing the introduction of slavery, but of abolishing slavery. In short, the region southwest of the Ohio river presented a field in which the policy of preventing the introduction of slavery was impracticable. Our forefathers never attempted what was impracticable.

But the case was otherwise in that fair and broad region which stretched away from the banks of the Ohio, northward to the lakes, and westward to the Mississippi. It was yet free, or practically free, from the presence of slaves, and was nearly uninhabited, and quite unoccupied. There was then no Baltimore and Ohio railroad, no Erie railroad, no New York Central railroad, no Boston and Ogdensburgh railroad; there was no railroad through Canada; nor, indeed, any road around or across the mountains; no imperial Erie canal,

no Welland canal, no lockage around the rapids and the falls of the St. Lawrence, the Mohawk and the Niagara rivers, and no stean navigation on the lakes, or on the Hudson, or on the Mississippi. There, in that remote and secluded region, the prevention of the introduction of slavery was possible; and there our forefathers, who left no possible national good unattempted, did prevent it. It makes one's heart bound with joy and gratitude, and lift itself up with mingled pride and veneration, to read the history of that great transaction. Discarding the trite and common formis of expressing the national will, they did not merely "vote," or "resolve," or "enact," as on other occasions, but they "ORDAINED," in language marked at once with precision, amplification, solemnity and emphasis, that there "shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." And they further ORDAINED and declared that this law should be considered a COMPACT between the original states and the people and states of said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent. The ordinance was agreed to unanimously. Virginia, in reäffirming her cession of the territory, ratified it, and the first congress held under the constitution solemnly renewed and confirmed it.

In pursuance of this ordinance, the several territorial governments successively established in the northwest territory, were organized with a prohibition of the introduction of slavery, and in due time, though at successive periods, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, states erected within that territory, have come into the Union with constitutions in their hands forever prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, except for the punishment of crime. They are yet young; but, nevertheless, who has ever seen elsewhere such states as they are? There are gathered the young, the vigorous, the active, the enlightened sons of every state, the flower and choice of every state in this broad Union; and there the emigrant, for conscience sake, and for freedom's sake, from every land in Europe, from proud and all-conquering Britain, from heart-broken Ireland, from sunny Italy, from mercurial France, from spiritual Germany, from chivalrous Hungary, and from honest and brave old Sweden and Norway. Thence are already coming ample supplies of corn and wheat and wine for the manufacturers of the east, for the planters of the tropics, and even for the artisans and the armies

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