Stephen Arnold Douglas

“ Would you, the people of the South, have submitted to such tyranny? Would you have suffered an Abolition Constitution to be forced down the throats of the people of any territory in opposition to their wishes, more especially had such a Constitution contained a provision that it should not be changed for seven years, and not then except by a two-thirds vote; so that the minority having once fastened it on the people, that same minority could perpetuate it forever in opposition to the wishes of the majority. ”

“ While I will never invade them — while I will never fail to defend and protect their rights to the full extent that a fair and liberal construction of the Constitution can give them — they must distinctly understand that I will never acquiesce in their invasion of our constitutional rights.
It is a crime against the inalienable and indefeasible right of every American citizen to attempt to destroy the government under which we were born. ”

“ How can your slave property be protected without local law? The Constitution gives you a right to go into a Territory and carry your slave property with you; but it does not punish any man for stealing your slave, when you get there. It does not punish a man for stealing any other property, when you get there. Congress never yet passed a law to punish crime or protect property in any organized Territory. ”

“ It is a crime against constitutional freedom and the hopes of the friends of freedom throughout the wide world to attempt to blot out the United States from the map of Christendom. Yet this attempt is now being made. The government of our fathers is to be overthrown and destroyed. The capital that bears the name of the Father of his Country is to be bombarded, and leveled to the earth among the rubbish and the dust of things that are past. The records of your government are to be scattered to the four winds of heaven. ”

“ You have all the elements of the French Revolution surrounding the capital now, and threatening it with its terrors. Not only is our constitutional government to be stricken down; not only is our flag to be blotted out; but the very foundations of social order are to be undermined and destroyed; the demon of destruction is to be let loose over the face of the land, a reign of terror and mob law is to prevail in each section of the Union, and the man who dares to plead for the cause of justice and moderation in either section is to be marked down as a traitor to his section. ”

“ Let the asperities growing out of the controversy die with the controversy. All I ask is, that in future we recognize the right of the people of a Territory to form a Free State, or a Slave State, as they may choose, and come into the Union on an equality with the other States. ”

“ Are we to be called upon to fold our arms, allow the national capital to be seized by a military force under a foreign revolutionary flag; to see the archives of the government in the hands of a people who affect to despise the flag and government of the United States? I am not willing to be expelled by military force, nor to fly from the Federal Capital. ”

“ But for your indomitable firmness and the enlightened patriotism of the Democracy of Illinois, which struck these with impotency, you and that Democracy had been surrendered over to the tender mercies of a foe, who, if victorious, would have strewed this glorious country of ours with such seeds of trouble and discord as would have imperiled the very existence of the Republic, and perhaps blasted the last hope on which hung with our own liberty the liberties of the world. ”

“ I repeat that this Government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, to be administered by white men, and none others. It is true that then, as well as now, we had among us other races - inferior races - incapable of self-government, and necessarily dependent on others for protection.
But it is a law of humanity, a law of civilization, that whenever a man, or race of men, show themselves incapable of managing their own affairs, they must consent to be governed by those who are capable of performing the duty. ”

“ Nothing short of Providence can reveal to us the issue of this great struggle. Bloody — calamitous — I fear it will be. May we so conduct it if a collision must come, that we will stand justified in the eyes of Him who knows our hearts, and who will judge our every act. We must not yield to resentments, nor to the spirit of vengeance, much less to the desire for conquest or ambition. ”

“ If the people want Slavery they will have it, if they don't want it they won't have it, and you can't force it upon them. If these principles be recognized and adhered to we can live in peace and harmony together; but just as surely as you attempt to force the people to have Slavery, against their will, in regions to which it is not adapted, fanaticism will take control of the Federal Government and attempt to force it out of other countries adapted to it. It was on these principles that, last Winter, I resisted the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. ”

“ I had supposed that it was a cardinal and fundamental principle of our system of government that the decision of the people at the ballot box, without fraud, according to the forms of the Constitution, was to command the implicit obedience of every good citizen. If defeat at a presidential election is to justify the minority, or any portion of the minority, in raising the traitorous hand of rebellion against the constituted authorities, you will find the future history of the United States written in the history of Mexico. ”

“ My votes in Congress have always been in harmony with that line of policy. It matters not how far you acquire more territory, or how much or how little you wish to acquire. Expansion is the law of our existence; when we cease to grow, we commence to decline. Hence our course is onward, on the principle established by our fathers, under divine inspiration, as I believe, in the formation of the Government. ”

“ Hence, I repeat that while I am not prepared to take up arms or to sanction war upon the rights of the Southern States; upon their domestic institutions; upon their rights of person or property, but, on the contrary, would rush to their defense and protect them from assault, I will never cease to urge my countrymen to take up arms and to fight to the death in defense of our indefeasible rights. Hence, if a war does come, it will be a war of self-defense on our part. It will be a war in defense of our own just rights ”

“ Simply because the sages who formed our Government had more at heart the great principles of civil liberty than the desire of sectional power or sectional advantage - because they wished to establish the principle that each State should possess the sovereign power of legislation over its own domestic institutions - to form them and modify them to suit themselves, retaining Slavery so long as they might desire to retain it, and abolishing it whenever they chose. ”

“ Whenever our government is assailed — when hostile armies are marching, under new and odious banners against the government of our country, the shortest way to peace is the most stupendous and unanimous preparation for war.The greater the unanimity the less blood will be shed. The more prompt and energetic the movement and the more imposing in numbers, the shorter will be the struggle. ”

“ If experience shall continue to prove, what the past may be considered to have demonstrated, that those little Central American powers cannot maintain self-government, the interests of Christendom require that some power should preserve order for them. Hence, I maintain that we should adopt and observe a line of policy in unison with our own interests and our destiny. I do not wish to force things. We live in a rapid age. Events crowd upon each other with marvelous speed. I do not want territory any faster than we can occupy, Americanize and civilize it. ”

“ If you do not like our laws on the subject of negro Slavery, or any other domestic concern, stay at home and live under such laws as you choose to make. We have a law in our State that a negro shall not be a citizen, nor either shall he be a slave. But during our territorial existence, when the settlers were from Slaveholding States, bringing their slave-property with them, the Territorial Legislature, in defiance of the celebrated ordinance of 1787, established Slavery in Illinois, and maintained it for years. ”

“ Can we permit nations foreign to tis to collect revenues off our products — the fruits of our industry? I ask the citizens of Illinois — I ask every citizen in the great basin between the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghenies, in the valleys of the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri toted me whether he is willing to sanction a line of policy that may isolate us from the markets of the world and make us dependent provinces upon powers that thus choose to surround and hem us in? ”

“ Come, then, you, the intrepid and invincible tribune, the independent and uncompromising Senator; come, and speak forth with that boldness which you have so successfully displayed in the councils of the nation and before your own people at home, and say where were and where still are the designs of your enemies and ours. Be fearless. You are in the midst of men who love truth and who value above all other things moral courage and political honesty. ”

“ The first duty of an American citizen, or of a citizen of any constitutional government, is obedience to the constitution and laws of his country. I have no apprehension that any man in Illinois, or beyond the limits of our own beloved State, will misconstrue or misunderstand my motive. ”

“ For the first time since the adoption of the Federal Constitution, a wide-spread conspiracy exists to destroy the best government the sun of heaven ever shed its rays upon. Hostile armies are now marching upon the Federal Capitol, with a view of planting a revolutionary flag upon its dome ”

“ This Government was formed on the principle of State Rights and State Sovereignty. It is a confederacy of sovereign and independent States, having a certain common purpose, each retaining the right to manage its own affairs, and maintaining its own liberties inside of its own jurisdiction.
It is a fatal heresy to proclaim the doctrine that there out to be or can be uniformity among the different States of the Union, as to their local and domestic institutions. Uniformity is neither possible nor desirable. ”

“ I desire to know whether the principles, which are admitted to be sound and orthodox in the Free States, can pass current in the Slave States. So long as we live under a common Constitution, binding on the people of all the States, any political creed which cannot be proclaimed in Louisiana as boldly as in Illinois, must be unsound and unsafe. ”

“ I warn you, my countrymen, whenever you permit this to be done in the Southern States, New York will very soon follow their example. New York — that great port, where two-thirds of all our revenue is collected, and whence two-thirds of our products are exported, will not long be able to resist the temptation of taxing fifteen millions of people in the great West when she can monopolize the resources and release her own people thereby from any taxation whatsoever. ”

“ The effort had previously been made, principally in the North, to array the North against the South, and the South against the North, and thus embittering them against each other, until no Southern man would vote for a Northern candidate, and no Northern man would trust a Southern candidate. I can well understand how unscrupulous politicians in the North, who prefer their own aggrandizement to the peace of their country, and prohibit the perpetuity of this Union, may advocate this doctrine, as they belong to the stronger section. ”

“ Then they stop and say, "Doesn't that Declaration tell us that all men are created equal? Is not a negro a man, and is he not, therefore the equal of the white man? Was he not made equal by his Creator, and is his equality not, therefore inalienable by Divine law? ”

“ When calling upon Democrats to rally to the tented field, leaving wife, child, father and mother behind them to rush to the rescue of the President that you elected, do not make war upon them and try to manufacture partisan capital at their expense out of a struggle in which they are engaged from the holiest and purest of motives. ”

“ Thus, Slavery will exist wherever soil, climate, and productions demand it, and it will exist nowhere else. Now if climate and soil, and self-interest will regulate this question, why should we quarrel about it? When you arrive at a certain distance to the north of the line there cannot be any doubt of the result; and so, when you got a certain distance south the result will be equally certain the other way. ”

“ It is to enable the tier of States bordering on the Atlantic and the Pacific, and on the Gulf, surrounding us on all sides, to withdraw from our Union — form alliances among themselves and then levy taxes on us without our consent and collect revenue without giving us any just proportion or any portion of the amount collected. Can we submit to taxation without representation? ”

“ There is and should be nothing disagreeable or humiliating to men who have differed, in times of peace, on every question that could divide fellow-men, to rally in concert in defense of the country and against all assailants. ”

“ It is on this principle that you establish those institutions of charity, for the support of the blind, or the deaf and the dumb, or the insane, that those incapable of governing themselves must be governed by others. In accordance with this principle I assert that the negro race, under all circumstances, at all times and in all countries, has shown itself incapable of self-government. ”

“ So long as the Free States were the minority section, the North adhered to the doctrine that each State should manage its own domestic affairs without interference from the other States or the Federal Government. But when, in the progress of events the Free States increased till they obtained the majority in the House of Representatives, and then a tie in the Senate, ambitious men found that by organizing sectional parties, and belonging to the strongest section, they could ride into power. ”

“ It is a historical fact, well known to every man who has read the debates of the Convention which framed the constitution, that the Southern States refused to become parties to the constitution unless there was an express provision in the constitution prohibiting Congress to levy an export duty on any product of the country. ”

“ I presume that all men, North and South, of whatever politics, religion, or prejudices, will assent to the principle that humanity compels us all to extend to the negro, and all other dependent races, all the privileges, immunities and facilities, consistent with the good of the society in which they reside. ”

“ Hence I say to you, my countrymen, from the best consideration I have been able to give to this subject, after the most mature reflection and thorough investigation, I have arrived at the conclusion that, come what may, war, if it must be, although I deplore it as a great calamity, yet, come what may, the people of the Mississippi Valley can never consent to be excluded from free access to the ports of the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. ”