Joseph K. Edgerton

“ On the contrary, I believe that while the question of slavery might be safely agitated, with a view to political action, in a consolidated or imperial government, or even in an American Federal State, it cannot under our Federal system of government be safely or rightly agitated as a national question. Its agitation as such has done more to alienate and embitter the two sections of our Union—more to rouse the spirit of slavery aggression and extension, and to tighten the bonds and increase the burdens of the slave, than it has done to effect emancipation. ”

“ Why do they now support a party whose real motto is "No more slave territory—no more Slave States," and whose candidates are northern sectional men only? Is that the motto, or are these the candidates for a Union in which there are North States and South States, Free States and Slave States, all equal in the house of the nation, and in the nation's fundamental law?
A fearful responsibility rests on every citizen who, by his vote or his acts, aids in the first triumph of a party whose creed and whose men are sectional. ”

“ Again I say, there is nothing in this cry of the extension of the barbarism of slavery; it is as senseless as it is dangerous to the nation's peace. All that is is done by the legislation of 1850 and 1854, is to establish a governing principle in regard to slavery in the territories, which is exactly the same as the principle which governs slavery in the States under the Constitution. The laws of 1850 and 1854 plant slavery no where, nor do they extend it any where into the national domain. They leave the national territory free. ”

“ Was it not the almost sure result of that line to prevent men who favor Free States from going south of it to demonstrate by experience that Free States could grow and prosper even in a southern clime? Had free labor a fair chance to raise its standard in the south, and try its strength beneath a burning sun, so long as Congress had virtually doomed the land of the south to slave labor, by declaring that the region of free land and free labor was north of the Missouri line? Is it not slavery rather than freedom that needs the protection of positive law? ”

“ Such are the fruits of over seventy years trial and experience of the Federal Union and Constitution, and the heart of every true American patriot swells with a just and noble pride as he contemplates them, and more than this, it swells with an earnest longing—an ardent desire—that prompts him as he looks into the future, to breathe to the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, the prayer—"God save the Union and the Constitution!" ”

“ Are not the laws that now stand upon the statute book of the nation, as the compromise measures of 1850, the same as they were in 1852, when they were endorsed by nearly 3,000,000 of votes—almost the unanimous vote of the nation? Is the law of the Kansas and Nebraska act, annulling the Missouri compromise line, a different law from what it was in 1856, when it was triumphantly sustained against Fremont and the Philadelphia platform? No man can say the laws are not the same. ”

“ If what I have written shall induce but even a few candid men to think better of the departed Douglas, as a statesman and patriot, than they were wont to think, I will be more than rewarded for my own labor in his vindication. But I have other motives than this.
The time is not far distant, and I would gladly accelerate its advance, when the conservative sentiment of the nation will revive and have utterance, and demand the re-enthronement of the spirit of compromise and peace—the guardian genius of the unity of the nation. ”

“ Virginia has not alone given to the nation Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Clay, Henry, Marshall, heroes, statesmen and Presidents, whose valor aided to win our independence, and whose wisdom laid deep and broad the foundations of our Union, but by her magnanimity she added to the Union six of its noblest States, and from their citizens at least she should never hear the cry that taunts her with slavery. ”

“ Seward, will not trust as the conservators of the American principle of freedom and the American system of free government, the sons of the men who fought the battles of American Independence, but I and they will trust the exiles from foreign lands—from Europe, from Asia and from Africa, to establish here upon the battle fields, rich with the blood of our fathers, the principles of universal suffrage and universal equality. ”

“ The sovereignty of the people or true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves over its depths. ”

“ We will not extend slavery over it, nor will we exclude slavery from it; but we open the territory to citizens of all the States alike. It is their common property. The land is all before them where to choose; let them go in with their wives and their children, their men servants and their maid servants, their goods and their cattle, and the stranger that is within their gates, and form such domestic institutions as may suit their wants and desires, consistent with republican government and the Federal Constitution, which is for them, as for us, the supreme law. ”

“ If, however, the war on the part of professedly loyal men shall be guided by any other feeling than love for the Union and a sacred regard for all the obligations of its Constitution, the preservation of the Union will be impossible. The non-slaveholding States may, perhaps, bind the seceded States to them by the stern power of military subjugation, as Poland is bound to Russia, or Hungary to Austria, but the subjugation of one section of the Republic by another will never unite their people in the fraternal bonds of a true Federal Union. ”

“ Rather let that cry go forth from puritan and abolition Massachusetts, as her sons read over her ancient Quaker laws, or count up the nefarious gains their slave-trading fathers made, while enjoying the twenty years lease of the African slave trade, granted by the Federal Constitution. Ridicule as we may the family pride or State pride of Virginia, or the sometimes Quixotic chivalry of her sons, they have reason to be proud of their noble mother, for her great names belong to American fame, and her history is our nation's glory. ”

“ Slavery is an evil permitted by Providence for ends that time will reveal. From this form of social evil, he is still educing good, far more good to the slaves, as a class, than to the masters as a class. It must not be suddenly nor rashly dealt with. Like a disease that pervades the blood or the whole constitution of a man, it needs not, for it cannot be reached by, the exterminating knife or cautery of the surgeon ”

“ All power not granted to Congress is reserved to the States or the people; and if the territories are not under the Constitution, there is no right in Congress to govern them at all, and that right rests in the States or the people who settle the territories. On the contrary, if the territories be under the Constitution, then must they be governed according to its principles and bill of rights, and not arbitrarily, and all powers of government over them not granted to Congress are in the people of the territories themselves. ”

“ No American heart that honors God, and truly loves America and the human race, has ever yet dared to think, much less to say, of the Constitution of the United States, as William Lloyd Garrison has said, "It is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." ”

“ Buchanan and his compeers should have known before they passed the Kansas bill, that when the people of an American State or territory once laid their hands upon the power to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, they held the power upon which free institutions and slave institutions alike rested in the American States, and that that power and its free exercise could never be taken from the people by any Supreme Court or the dogma of any political party, and any systematized attempt to take it away would be met by resistance that would shiver the Union to fragments. ”

“ Slavery, according to Lincoln and Seward, is a national evil, gigantic and portentous, to be combatted and slain by the same strong arm.
That the South will permit slavery to be abolished in all the States by violence or starvation; or that the North will permit slavery to be established in all the States by judicial decision or otherwise, no man in his senses believes—hence looking to the legitimate results of their doctrines, both the Breckinridge and Lincoln parties are essentially disunion parties. Constant conflict and ultimate disunion are the natural sequents of their antagonism. ”

“ With the immense domain of fair and fertile lands, thus freely given to the Federal government by individual States, it was able to discharge the debts of the war of the revolution, and in various ways to provide for the common defence and promote the general welfare of the United States. No man in whose bosom glows a generous sentiment, can read the record of that period of our national history without feeling his heart swell with admiration and affection for the fathers of the Republic. ”

“ If the people of a territory are competent to make a Constitution without the assent of Congress, for a stronger reason they are competent to make a law below the dignity of a Constitution. It will not do for any man to contend that mere change of residence from a State to a territory, so changes the moral and intellectual character of the man, as to unfit him for the exercise of self-government, or the high duties of founder of a State. ”

“ Does not any sensible man know that prohibition of domestic slavery in a territory, is essentially prohibition of it in a State to be formed of that territory? As the twig is bent by Congress in the territory, so will the tree be inclined in the State. If slavery does not exist in a State at its organization, it will never exist there, unless forced there by the Federal government under the Breckinridge construction of the constitution. ”

“ A geographical line is arbitrary and not adapted to varying circumstances or events; the principle of local sovereignty involved in that of national non-intervention, is self-adjusting and of universal application; it applies to all cases and all times, and is in itself, the only principle consistent with the theory of the government, which is that the people of each State and community have the right and capacity to regulate their own internal affairs, subject only to their respective fundamental laws or Constitutions of government and to the nation's organic law. ”

“ For the first time in the history of the government, we have the spectacle of purely sectional parties struggling for the control of the Federal government, each determined to warp and bend to its own sectional end, the Constitution and power of the Federal Union. Never before could patriotic citizens so earnestly lay to heart the counsel of Washington to avoid the formation of sectional parties. ”

“ The traditions and historic glory that surround the Federal Government as our fathers formed it, are yet dear to the hearts of the whole American people. That government still belongs to them—it is their heritage, and they, I trust, will yet restore and preserve it. ”

“ No man dare say that. Why is it then that the Democratic party, which triumphed in 1852 and in 1856 on these very measures, is now a divided and broken army and almost panic-stricken, and its opponents, the advocates of Congressional prohibition of slavery, with a man at their head without a record as a statesman and almost unknown to the nation, carrying in their train all the fiercest elements of anti-slavery agitation, are already boasting of sure success? ”

“ Congress has never rightfully taken sides on this question; for while on the one hand slavery has been forbidden in some territories, it has been permitted in others. Slave territory and free territory have alike been acquired by treaty, and Slave States and Free States alike admitted to the Union. The action of Congress is therefore no precedent for absolute slavery prohibition or indefinite slavery extension. ”

“ If the normal condition of all the territories of the United States is that of freedom, and if Congress cannot legalize slavery in any territory, can the Federal government bring slaves under the power of Congress by acquiring territory governed by foreign slave laws, as were the territories of Florida and Louisiana? ”

“ The times demand of every true lover of his country to read and think. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Let not the people be deceived! When the Federal government assumes the power by military or other force to blot out the sovereignty of Federal States, (a proposition already before the Federal Congress) , it strikes a blow at the life of American democracy, which exists in the constitutional sovereignty of the States. ”

“ No such theory will ever find a perfect realization in any system of human government.
In his speech at Chicago, before referred to, Mr. Seward vauntingly asserts, as the idea or creed of the Republican party, as if to that party alone were committed the oracles of freedom—"That civilization is to be maintained and carried on upon this continent by Federal States, based upon the principles of free soil, free labor, free speech, [Pg 10] equal rights and universal suffrage." ”

“ The pretense then of conceding sovereignty to the people of the States "to order and control" the domestic institution of slavery, when that sovereignty is denied to the same people while in a territory, is a piece of transparent hypocrisy. ”