He begged, therefore, that the gentlemen who put the petition on the table, might be desired to take it back again. He was truly sorry to see such a dangerous paper supported by such a worthy member of the House, and good Federalist, as Mr. Thatcher."

This incident is curious, since it shows that the "Black Patriots" of 1799, a "combination of Jacobins," who "never would cease troubling Congress," are the Black Republicans of the present day, still troubling it. While Mr. Thatcher, "a good Federalist," was the only one advocating the

66

troubling," Mr. Harrison Gray Otis referred the "property" to its "proprietors." The "Federalist " party, of which Mr. Thatcher was a "good one," also passed, in the Massachusetts Legislature, the resolution to "dissolve the Union," if Louisiana should be annexed. That party has "dissolved" on the occasion of every new slave State added to the Union since the annexation, no matter what "the party may have assumed for the moment. The free territory question has ever been revived when it was thought useful to defeat "the Democrats," which seems to have been its leading principle on all occasions, and at the present moment its "sole" principle.

" name

John Adams was a shoemaker in Braintree, Massa

chusetts. When out of his time he studied law, on the advice of his uncle, a schoolmaster. He became, after the revolution, the leader of the Monarchical party, and his leading idea was "hereditary rulers;" and through his influence the alien and seditious laws were enacted. The former gave the executive absolute power over foreigners who arrived, and they were imprisoned and expelled for no reason but the will of the executive. The law of Congress in relation to the importation of such persons as any other States chose to admit, until 1808, was held to apply only to negroes; hence the alien law, originated by that founder of the party, now known as the Black Republican party, was allowed to operate against whites.

In a moral and religious view, slavery is indefensible; but I defy any one, whether European or American, to deny that it is not only allowed by the law of the United States, but guaranteed and protected by the most solemn forms of the Legislature. While the constitution was forming, and indeed long after, slavery was the rule in almost the whole of the nation. By degrees the Northern States found that their climate and land would pay better by other labour than negroes; the abolished the importation from Africa, and made a good bargain with the South

for the sale of their slaves. By and by they proposed to the Southern States that they should do the same, but with this difference, that they should not be paid for getting rid of their slaves, and alleged that their land would be worth more by the change. The South replied that they were the best judges both of their convenience and their pockets, and that the law of the land protected their property. To this the Northerners answered that their productions of rice, tobacco, and cotton, were a commercial mistake, if not much overrated; and as to the law, their consciences would not allow them to be bound by such a law; and as an argument for the first proposition, instanced the amazing progress of wealth and prosperity in the non-slaveholding section of the Republic. The Southerners replied that such prosperity was the natural result of the trading and carrying monopoly, export and import from and to a country of such immense natural resources as the South, which had been secured to the North by a long series of prohibitory laws and tariffs; and moreover, that the well-known and avowed inclinations of the Southerners to establish free trade with the world, to break through these fetters and open their ports and commerce to foreign nations, are not an unlikely solution of the qualms of conscience in the second proposition.

The original pact of the United States of America provided for each separate State a quasi sovereignty, which included all the absolute rights of internal selfgovernment, legislative and executive; the general body of the separate States agreeing to a Union, with a President governing by Senate and Congress, both nominated by the State Legislatures, and the supreme law administered by a Court of Judicature, appointed by the President for life. The only act which gives power to the Government to repress by armed force resistance against its action was passed in 1795, by Congress, upon the occasion of insurrection in Pennsylvania, on account of riots consequent on the enforcing of some laws relating to whisky, &c., and applies solely to insurrection. There is no statute existing which gives the Government a right to act by arms, except as against insurrection. The action of the Supreme Court of Judicature has been frequently interrupted. Although it is, by the constitution, the supreme law of the land, its decisions have been frequently disregarded with impunity; such as occurred when fourteen of the Northern State Legislatures passed acts in direct contravention of the judgment of the Supreme Court in the Dred-Scott case, besides individual instances in Pennsylvania and other places, in 1852, where the warrant of the Federal

marshals, acting under the Supreme Court, was successfully resisted. It follows, therefore, that there does not exist such a polity in the United States as to give the Government an absolute legislative and executive control over the whole people, except by their express consent in the State Legislature enacted, but that its action in each State depends on the legal consent of the constituted authority in each separately. Now, right or wrong, the right of slave-holding has been the law of the United States of America, and its necessary consequences have been upheld by the successive Governments and the Supreme Court until 1860. The election of Abraham Lincoln entirely by the Northern States, without one single electoral vote in any Southern State, changed this order of things. The balance of might was by this thrown into the scale opposing the rights of the slave-owners, and immediately, as a necessary consequence, arose the secession. Now, it would be useless to argue the morality, as it would the question of force; we have only the plain constitutional bearing to look at. It is plainly competent for any individual State to retire from the Union by an act contemplated in the original compact which constituted such Union, and by no such act can resistance against the action of the Federal Government be construed into insurrection so as