over these millions of free acres, thus dooming both the white and black race who may people them, perhaps for ages to come, to the innumerable woes which follow in its train. Mr. Chairman, not for all the land which this nation has acquired from Mexico by the sword of conquest, with all its glittering gold included; not for all the offices and honors with which this government has the power to reward a traitor to freedom, would I steep my conscience in the guilt, the infamy, of planting on free soil this hell-born traffic in the bodies and souls of men, or call down upon me the blistering curses of my constituents, by so base and ignominious a betrayal of the trust which they have committed to my hands. No threat of civil war, no dread of consequences, no cowardly alarm aroused by the studied bluster of Texan slaveholders, could induce me thus to join hands with the oppressor, and wage war upon humanity

itself.

But the bill has passed. Had there been votes enough to defeat it, it is possible that civil war would have followed, though I think it in the highest degree improbable. It is likewise possible that such a war might have produced consequences fatal to the perpetuity of this Union. For aught I know, the passage of the bill may be attended with the same ultimate results. I cannot pretend to decide such questions with certainty, because Providence has not vouchsafed to me the gift of foreknowledge. The question of duty, and the consequences resulting from its performance, are often entirely distinct; the former may be perfectly clear, whilst the latter may be impalpable or unknown. But the moral sense of every man, if not perverted, will tell him plainly that slavery is an outrage upon humanity, and a crime against God; and that he cannot justify himself in fastening it upon his fellow-men, in the hope of thereby averting a greater evil. It is true that in obscure or doubtful cases we may sometimes consider the supposed consequences of an act in determining upon its performance; but we are never justified in perpetrating a deed that is palpably wicked, on the pretense that the end we design to accomplish will sanctify the means we employ. I have sufficient faith in the moral government of the world to believe that no right act is ever unattended, sooner or later, with an appropriate result; whilst every wrong deed carries with it its own unfailing retribution. To act upon any other principle is practical atheism.

Mr. Chairman, I deprecate war as much as any gentleman on this floor. I claim to be an humble advocate of the great peace movement of the age. I stand opposed to the war spirit and the

war mania in all their popular manifestations, and quite as decidedly, I trust, as any friend of the Texas Boundary Bill. And yet I will not deny that I think war sometimes necessary. I must say, too, that I believe there are things more to be dreaded. The betrayal of sacred trusts is worse than war; shrinking from a just responsibility, when necessary to encounter it, is worse than war; the extension of slavery by the Federal Government, and with the approval of the nation, I would pronounce worse than war; and, to be more specific, war is less to be deplored than the dastardly and craven spirit which would prompt the representatives of twenty millions of people to cower and turn pale at the bandit threats of Texan slaveholders, and give them millions of acres and millions of gold as a peace-offering to the vandal spirit of slaveholding aggres sion. Sir, I can conceive of nothing more pitiably abject and humiliating than this. Why, who are these Texans who lately told this government that the time for argument had passed, and dictated to the United States the terms upon which their disputed boundary should be settled, under a menace of war? Have Northern gentlemen forgotten their history? Texas was torn from the Mexican confederacy by citizens of the United States, who, in violation of their allegiance to their own country, raised the standard of revolt against Mexican authority to which they had voluntarily become subject. They found it a free province, but subjected it to the curse of American slavery; and this was one of the main purposes of its settlement and conquest by our citizens. The Government of the United States, moved and instigated by the same unholy lust for slavery, finally sought to sanctify this "robbery of a realm" by incorporating it into the Union. Annexation was the primary cause of the war with Mexico, whilst its immediate cause related to the very question of boundary which Congress has been laboring to adjust. Texas, by means of this war, has cost this government more than one hundred millions of money.

These are the prominent facts of her history; and yet we are now called on to give her ten millions of dollars besides, and an immense territory to which she had not even the shadow of a title at the beginning of the contest with Mexico, because she threatens us with her military power if we refuse to yield to her insolent demands. Yes, Texas threatens! With a voting population of only about thirty thousand, bankrupt in the means of raising a military force, or even paying her just debts, unable to protect herself against the savage tribes that infest her borders, and begging the United States to send a force to her rescue, she yet threatens to

raise an army and maintain it against the National Government! Can anything be more preposterous? And yet I am charged with voting for civil war, because, under such circumstances, I am not willing to surrender to Texas the unquestionable rights of this government, for the purpose of buying her friendship.

Sir, the time will come, and I believe it draws nigh already, when the country will pronounce a just verdict upon those men who deny to Texas the right to a single dollar of the money, or a single foot of the land we have given her, and yet supported this bill, with all its provisions, to the fullest extent," on the cowardly pretext of averting the calamities of war. I have no censure to cast upon those, if there be any such, who voted for the bill in the honest belief that Texas owned the whole of the disputed territory up to the Rio Grande, and that the money we have given her is a fair compensation for the surrender she has made. They acted in accordance with their judgment. But I despise the driveling, servile, mean-spirited policy which proclaims in one breath that Texas is without the semblance of a right to the territory for which she threatens us with war, thereby putting her in the attitude of the robber seeking to despoil us by force of property which does not belong to her, and in the next breath declares, that sooner than encounter her freebooting governor and his gang, the United States will cram their pockets with gold, and surrender to slaveholding rapacity fully one half of our possessions lying on the east side of the Rio Grande.

It is not alone to the cowardice of such a policy that I object. Courage, considered apart from other qualities, stands the lowest on the list of virtues, if indeed it be a virtue. It is often found in alliance with the worst passions. In most men it pertains rather to the organization of the body than to the character. The highwayman and the pirate often possess it in the highest degree. No evidence of character is more equivocal than that of mere physical courage; and therefore I will not pronounce any harsh judgment upon those who have quailed before the military power of Texas. Their alarm is doubtless the result of a constitutional infirmity over which they have no control; but I cannot justify this dread of Texan powder when I see it conjoined to what seems to me moral cowardice, in the support of a measure which curses with the blight of slavery soil enough for two States larger than that of Indiana. Sir, I asperse no man's motives, and I impeach no man's patriotism; but when gentlemen charge me with voting for civil war, I point them, and I point the country, to the vile panacea by

which they have sought to avert it; and I ask the people to judge whether the danger of a war with Texas was so imminent, or the mischiefs to be apprehended from it so incalculable, as to justify the monstrous remedy which has been resorted to by Congress? I am ready to meet the responsibility involved in the votes I have given, and to abide by the judgment which the country may pronounce upon the miserable and flimsy plea, that the peace of the country demanded of Northern representatives the sacrifices they have made. Sir, had we passed a law giving to Texas only one half the land and money she has received, she would have accepted it with gladness. It is folly, it is madness, to suppose that that State, feeble, bankrupt, powerless, as she is, would have undertaken to force the National Government into submission. Had she done so, the Constitution defines the punishment of treason; and it would be equal folly to suppose that the federal arm would not have been strong enough to maintain the supremacy of the laws of the Union against the arrant project of Texan nullification. The peace of the country is scarcely worth maintaining, if civil war, clothed in all the horrors with which it has been contemplated, could arise from any such cause, and spread itself over these States. I will only add, that these views are corroborated by the recent action of Texas herself, her Legislature having indefinitely postponed the warlike gasconade of Governor Bell.

Mr. Chairman, the territorial bills for the government of New Mexico and Utah contain no prohibition against the introduction of slavery; on the contrary, they seem to imply its legality in those territories, by the clause providing for the admission of additional slaveholding States. I beg the indulgence of the committee in a few observations which I desire to offer upon this subject.

On another occasion I have shown that the founders of the government had no expectation that the boundaries of the United States, as established by the Treaty of 1783, would ever be enlarged; that they interdicted the establishment of slavery in all the territory belonging to the government at the time of its formation; that slavery, even in the States in which it then existed, was rapidly dwindling under the weight of its acknowledged evils; that both the statesmen and the people of that day, instead of looking forward to its diffusion over new regions, confidently expected it to be swept from the country at no very distant period; and finally, that the compromises on the subject of slavery to which the Northern States assented, were formed in reference to these facts, and must be interpreted in the light which they reflect upon our path from

that early period. These facts entered into, and formed a part of, the understanding and agreement between the Northern and Southern States, as embodied in the Federal Constitution. I do not mean to enlarge upon them now, vindicated as they are by the truth of history; but I reiterate them here, as worthy of the consideration of those who seem bent on a total disregard of the principles and policy of the government at its beginning. Sir, the doctrine of "No more slave States, and no slave territory," was the doctrine of the founders of the Republic. The clause on the subject of slave representation, was only applicable to slavery in the then slaveholding States; and even there it was not understood as a perpetual, but a temporary covenant. Yet now, after the government for the last fifty years has been drifting from its early landmarks, and violating the faith upon which the federal compact was formed, we not only repudiate the Jeffersonian policy of excluding slavery from our Territories, but, in framing governments for them, we expressly stipulate that slaveholding States may be formed out of them and admitted into the Union if they shall demand it. We not only abandon the faith of our fathers, but we seem anxious to make our apostasy manifest, that all the world may behold it. So long has the slave power guided the ship of State, that we are determined that freedom shall either silently submit to its pilotage or be cast into the sea. What was politically orthodox in 1787, according to the authority of" the Fathers," is the rankest heresy in 1850.

My honorable colleague [Mr. GORMAN] argued the other day that to insist on the prohibition of slavery in New Mexico and Utah by act of Congress, is to deny the capacity of the people for self-government. He says his motto is, to "trust the people with political power;" that he wants the "free-soil abolition agitators' either to "affirm or deny the capacity of the people for self-government ;" and he declares that "there is no other issue in the whole principle of the Wilmot Proviso but this one." Sir, I am willing to go before the country on the issue which he tenders. I am for trusting the people" of those territories with the general right to establish their own municipal regulations; but I am not willing that one portion of them shall strip another portion of their humanity by converting them into beasts of burden and articles of merchandise. That is not the sort of Democracy I believe in. I have no faith in any such "self-government." I am not willing to "trust the people" of our Territories "with political power" for any such purpose, and neither do they demand it at the hands of

66