James Henry Hammond

“ But sir, the greatest strength of the South arises from the harmony of her political and social institutions. This harmony gives her a frame of society, the best in the world, and an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth. Society precedes government; creates it, and ought to control it; but as far as we can look back in historic times we find the case different: for government is no sooner create d than it becomes too strong for society, and shapes and moulds, as well as controls it. ”

“ The Territorial Legislature is a mere provisional government; a petty corporation, appointed and paid by the Congress of the United States, without a particle of sovereign power. Shall that interfere with a sovereignty—inchoate, but still a sovereignty? Why, Congress cannot interfere; Congress cannot confer on the Territorial Legislature the power to interfere. Congress is no t sovereign. Congress has sovereign powers, but no sovereignty. Congress has no power to act outside of the limitations of the Constitution ”

“ If we take the North, even when the two large States of Kansas and Minnesota shall be admitted, her territory will be one hundred thousand square miles less than ours. I do not speak of California and Oregon; there is no antagonism between the South and those countries, and never will be. The population of the North is fifty per cent. greater than ours. I have nothing to say in disparagement either of the soil of the North, or the people of the North, who are a brave, and energetic race, full of intellect. But they produce no great staple that the South does not produce ”

“ But if there were no other reason why we should never have war, would any sane nation make war on cotton? Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet. The South is perfectly competent to go on, one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton. ”

“ In later centuries the progress of civilization and of intelligence has made the divergence so great as to produce civil wars and revolutions; and it is nothing now but the want of harmony between governments and societies which occasions all the uneasiness and trouble and terror that we see abroad. It was this that brought on the American Revolution. We threw off a Government not adapted to our social system, and made one for ourselves. ”

“ If you were to send back the Lecompton constitution, and another was to be framed, in the slow way in which we do public business in this country, before it would reach Congress and be passed, perhaps the majority would be turned the other way. Whenever you go outside of the regular forms of law and constitutions to seek for the will of the people you are wandering in a wilderness—a wilderness of thorns. ”

“ And when a State knocks at the door for admission, Congress can with propriety do little more than inquire if her constitution is republican. That it embodies the will of her people must necessarily be taken for granted, if it is their lawful act. I am assuming, of course, that her boundaries are settled, and her population sufficient.
If what I have said be correct, then the will of the people of Kansas is to be found in the action of her constitutional convention. It is immaterial whether it is the will of a majority of the people of Kansas now, or not. ”

“ There is a popular sovereignty which is the basis of our Government, and I am unwilling that the Senator should have the advantage of confounding it with "squatter sovereignty." In all countries and in all time, it is well understood that the numerical majority of the people could, if they chose, exercise the sovereignty of the country; but for want of intelligence, and for want of leaders, they have never yet been able successfully to combine and form a stable, popular government. ”

“ It is commerce that breeds war. It is manufactures that require to be hawked about the world, that give rise to navies and commerce. But we have nothing to do but to take off restrictions on foreign merchandise and open our ports, and the whole world will come to us to trade. They will be too glad to brim and carry for us, and we never shall dream of a war. Why the South has never yet had a just cause of war. ”

“ They are ours by all the laws of nature; slave-labor will go over every foot of this great valley where it will b e found profitable to use it, and some of those who may not use it are soon to be united with us by such ties as will make us one and inseparable. The iron horse will soon be clattering over the sunny plains of the South to bear the products of its upper tributaries to our Atlantic ports, as it now does through the ice-bound North. There is the great Mississippi, a bond of union made by Nature herself. She will maintain it forever. ”

“ Under these two powers, Congress may first establish a provisional territorial government merely for municipal purposes; and when a State has grown into rightful sovereignty, when that sovereignty which has been kept in abeyance demands recognition, when a community is formed there, a social compact created, a sovereignty born as it were upon the soil, then Congress is gifted with the power to acknowledge it, and the Legislature, only by mere usage, sometimes neglected, assists at the birth of it by passing a precedent resolution assembling a convention. ”

“ Genuine popular sovereignty never existed on a firm basis except in this country. The first gun of the Revolution announced a new organization of it, which was embodied in the Declaration of Independence, developed, elaborated, and inaugurated forever in the Constitution of the United States. The two pillars of it were Representation and the Ballot-box. In distributing their sovereign powers among the various Departments of the Government, the people retained for themselves the single power of the ballot-box ”

“ They are happy, content, uninspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. ”

“ England with all her accumulated wealth, with her concentrated and educated energy, makes but sixteen-and-a-half dollars of surplus production per head. I have not made a calculation as to the North, with her $95,000,000 surplus; admitting that she exports as much as we do, with her eighteen million s of population it would be but little over twelve dollars a head. But she cannot export to us and abroad exceeding ten dollars a head against our sixteen dollars. I know well enough that the North sends to the South a vast amount of the productions of her industry. ”

“ The great West has been open to your surplus population, and your hordes of semi-barbarian immigrants, who are crowding in year by year. They make a great movement, and you call it progress. Whither? It is progress; but it is progress towards Vigilance Committees. The South have sustained you in a great measure. You are our factors. You bring and carry for us. One hundred and fifty million dollars of our money passes annually through your bands. ”

“ Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slave s either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. ”

“ As to her men, I may be allowed to say, they have never proved themselves to be superior to those of the South, either in the field or in the Senate.
But the strength of a nation depends in a great measure upon its wealth, and the wealth of a nation, like that of a man, is to be estimated by its surplus production. ”

“ All the enterprises of peace and war depend upon the surplus production s of a people. They may be happy, they may be comfortable, they may enjoy themselves in consuming what they make; but they are not rich, they are not strong. It appears, by going to the reports of the Secretary of the Treasury, which are authentic, that last year the United States exported in round numbers $279,000,000 worth of domestic produce, excluding gold and foreign merchandise re-exported. Of this amount $158,000,000 worth is the clear produce of the South; article s that are not and cannot be made at the North. ”

“ If a man possess millions of dollars and consumes his income, is he rich? Is he competent to embark in any new enterprise? Can he build ships or railroads? And could a people in that condition build ships and roads or go to war? ”

“ Is not that territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world? With the finest soil, the most delightful climate, whose staple productions none of those great countries can grow, we have three thousand miles of continental shore line, so indented with bays and crowded with islands, that, when their shore lines are added, we have twelve thousand miles. ”

“ God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, "the poor ye always have with you;" for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. ”

“ I think that the popular sovereignty which the Senator from Illinois would derive from the acts of his Territorial Legislature, and from the information received from partisans and partisan presses, would lead us directly into populace, and not popular sovereignty. ”

“ When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence, when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coining down and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating in thin air, when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? ”

“ Every time she has drawn her sword it has been on the point of honor, and that point of honor has been mainly loyalty to her sister colonies and sister States, who have ever since plundered and calumniated her. ”

“ I will not characterize that class at the North with that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal. ”

“ But, in this territory lies the great valley of the Mississippi, now the real, and soon to be the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world. The sway of that valley will be as great as ever the Nile knew in the earlier ages of mankind. We own the most of it. The most valuable part of it belong s to us now; and although those who have settled above u s are now opposed to us, another generation will tell a different tale. ”

“ They tell us that year after year the majority in Kansas was beaten a t the polls! They have always had a majority, but they always get beaten! How could that be It does seem, from the most reliable sources of information, that they have a majority, and have had a majority for some time. Why has not this majority come forward and taken possession of the government, and made a free-State constitution and brought it here? ”

“ On this fine territory we have a population four times as large as that with which these colonies separated from the mother country, and a hundred, I might say a thousand fold stronger. Our population is now sixty per cent. greater than that of the whole United States when we entered into the second war of independence. ”

“ They have often attempted it, but it has always turned out, instead of a popular sovereignty, a populace sovereignty; and demagogues, placing themselves upon the movement, have invariably led them into military despotism. ”