Mr. Toombs.  Mr. President and Senators, I obtained the floor last Thursday with a view of addressing this body upon the various propositions which were submitted to the committee of thirteen, of which I was a member.  I am indifferent as to this substitution; but not having seen the proposition of the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Crittenden], my remarks will be confined mainly to the action of the committee of thirteen.  This, I understand, is somewhat like one of the propositions, though not identically that one, to which I may have occasion to advert in the course of my argument on the propositions submitted by the honorable Senator from Kentucky in the committee of thirteen.

The success of the Abolitionists and their allies, under the name of the Republican party, has produced its logical results already.  They have for long years been sowing dragons’ teeth, and have finally got a crop of armed men.  The Union, sir, is dissolved.  That is an accomplished fact in the path of this discussion that men may as well heed.  One of your confederates has already, wisely, bravely, boldly, confronted public danger, and she is only ahead of many of her sisters because of her greater facility for speedy action.  The greater majority of those sister States, under like circumstances, consider her cause as their cause; and I charge you in their name to-day, “Touch not Seguntum.” It is not only their cause; but it is a cause which receives the sympathy and will receive the support of tens and hundreds of thousands of honest patriotic men in the non-slaveholding States, who have hitherto maintained constitutional rights, who respect their oaths, abide by compacts, and love justice.  And while this Congress, this Senate and this House of Representatives, are debating the constitutionality and the expediency of seceding from the Union, and while the perfidious authors of this mischief are showering down denunciations upon a large portion of the patriotic men of this country, those brave men are coolly and calmly voting what you call revolution—ay, sir, doing better than that: arming to defend it.  They appealed to the Constitution, they appealed to justice, they appealed to fraternity, until the Constitution, justice, and fraternity were no longer listened to in the legislative halls of their country, and then, sir, they prepared for the arbitrament of the sword; and now you see the glittering bayonet, and you hear the tramp of armed men from your capital to the Rio Grande.  It is a sight that gladdens the eyes and cheers the heart of other millions ready to second them.  Inasmuch, sir, as I have labored earnestly, honestly, sincerely, with these men to avert this necessity so long as I deemed it possible, and inasmuch as I heartily approve their present conduct of resistance, I deem it my duty to state their case to the Senate, to the country, and to the civilized world.

Senators, my countrymen have demanded no new Government; they have demanded no new Constitution.  Look to their records at home and here from the beginning of this national strife until its consummation in the disruption of the Empire, and they have not demanded a single thing except that you shall abide by the Constitution of the United States; that constitutional rights shall be respected, and that justice shall be done.  Sirs, they have stood by your Constitution; they have stood by all its requirements; they have performed all of its duties unselfishly, uncalculatingly, disinterestedly, until a party sprang up in this country which endangered their social system—a party which they arraign, and which they charge before the American people and all mankind, with having made proclamation of outlawry against four thousand millions of their property in the Territories of the United States; with having put them under the ban of the Empire in all the States in which their institutions exist, outside of the protection of Federal laws; with having aided and abetted insurrection from within and invasion from without, with the view of subverting those institutions, and desolating their homes and their firesides.  For these causes they have taken up arms.  I shall proceed to vindicate the justice of their demands, the patriotism of their conduct.  I will show the injustice which they suffer and the rightfulness of their resistance.

I shall not spend much time on the question that seems to give my honorable friend [Mr. Crittenden] so much concern—the constitutional right of a State to secede from this Union.  Perhaps he will find out after a while that it is a fact accomplished.  You have got it in the South pretty much in both ways.  South Carolina has given it to you regularly, according to the approved plan.  You are getting it just below there [in Georgia] I believe, irregularly, outside of law, without regular action.  You can take it either way.  You will find armed men to defend both.

I have stated that the discontented States of this Union have demanded nothing but clear, distinct, unequivocal, well-acknowledged constitutional rights; rights affirmed by the highest judicial tribunals of their country; rights older than the Constitution; rights which are planted upon the immutable principles of natural justice; rights which have been affirmed by the good and the wise of all countries, and of all centuries.  We demand no power to injure any man.  We demand no right to injure our Confederate States.  We demand no right to interfere with their institutions, either by word or deed.  We have no right to disturb their peace, their tranquillity, their security.  We have demanded of them simply, solely—nothing else—to give us equality, security and tranquillity.  Give us these, and peace restores itself.  Refuse them, and take what you can get.

I will now read my own demands, acting under my own convictions, and the universal judgment of my countrymen.  They are considered the demands of an extremist.  To hold to a constitutional right now makes one considered an extremist—I believe that is the appellation these traitors and villains, North and South, employ.  I accept their reproach rather than their principles.  Accepting their designation of treason and rebellion, there stands before them as good a traitor, and as good a rebel, as ever descended from revolutionary loins.

What do these rebels demand?  First, “that the people of the United States shall have an equal right to emigrate and settle in the present, or any future acquired Territories, with whatever property they may possess (including slaves) and be securely protected in its peaceable enjoyment until such Territory may be admitted as a State into the Union, with or without slavery, as she may determine, on an equality with all existing States.”  That is our territorial demand.  We have fought for this Territory when blood was its price.  We have paid for it when gold was its price.  We have not proposed to exclude you, though you have contributed very little of either blood or money.  I refer especially to New England.  We demand only to go into those Territories upon terms of equality with you, as equals in this great Confederacy, to enjoy the common property of the whole Union, and receive the protection of the common Government, until the Territory is capable of coming into the Union as a sovereign State, when it may fix its own institutions to suit itself.

The second proposition is: “that property in slaves shall be entitled to the same protection from the Government of the United States, in all of its departments, everywhere, which the Constitution confers the power upon it to extend to any other property, provided nothing herein contained shall be construed to limit or restrain the right now belonging to every State to prohibit, abolish, or establish and protect slavery within its limits.”  We demand of the common Government to use its granted powers to protect our property as well as yours.  For this protection we pay as much as you do.  This very property is subject to taxation.  It has been taxed by you, and sold by you for taxes.  The title to thousands and tens of thousands of slaves is derived from the United States.  We claim that the Government, while the Constitution recognizes our property for purposes of taxation, shall give it the same protection that it gives yours.  Ought it not to do so?  You say no.  Every one of you upon the committee said no.  Your Senators say no.  Your House of Representatives says no.  Throughout the length and breadth of your conspiracy against the Constitution, there is but one shout of no!  This recognition of this right is the price of my allegiance.  Withhold it, and you do not get my obedience.  This is the philosophy of the armed men who have sprung up in this country.  Do you ask me to support a Government that will tax my property; that will plunder me; that will demand my blood, and will not protect me?  I would rather see the population of my own native State laid six feet beneath her sod than that they should support for one hour such a Government.  Protection is the price of obedience everywhere, in all countries.  It is the only thing that makes Government respectable.  Deny it, and you cannot have free subjects or citizens; you may have slaves.

We demand, in the next place, “that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, shall be delivered up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee shall be the test of criminality.” That is another one of the demands of an extremist and rebel.  The Constitution of the United States, article four, section two, says:

“A person charged in any State with treason, felony, or other crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another State, shall, on demand of the executive authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the crime.”

But the non-slaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts, have steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro, and that negro was a slave, to deliver him up.  It was refused twice on the requisition of my own State as long as twenty-two years ago.  It was refused by Kent and by Fairfield, Governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each of the then Federal parties.  We appealed then to fraternity, but we submitted; and this constitutional right has been, practically, a dead letter from that day to this.

The next case came up between us and the State of New York, when the present senior Senator [Mr. Seward] was the Governor of that State; and he refused it.  Why?  He said it was not against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he would not comply with the demand.  He made a similar refusal to Virginia.  Yet these are our confederates; these are our sister States!  There is the bargain; there is the compact.  You have sworn to it.  Both these Governors swore to it.  The Senator from New York swore to it.  The Governor of Ohio swore to it when he was inaugurated.  You cannot bind them by oaths.  Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect to whip freemen into loving such brethren!  They will have a good time in doing it!  It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried out.  The Constitution says slaves are property; the Supreme Court says so; the Constitution says so.  The theft of slaves is a crime; they are a subject-matter of felonious asportation.  By the text and letter of the Constitution you agreed to give them up.  You have sworn to do it, and you have broken your oaths.  Of course, those who have done so look out for pretexts.  Nobody expected them to do otherwise.  I do not think I ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some pretexts to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings, hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him.  Yet this requirement of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an extremist and a rebel.

The next stipulation is that a fugitive slave shall be surrendered under the provisions of the fugitive slave act of 1850, without being entitled either to a writ of habeas corpus or trial by jury, or other similar obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee.  Here is the Constitution: 

“No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

This language is plain, and everybody understood it the same way for the first forty years of your Government.  In 1793, in Washington’s time, an act was passed to carry out this provision.  It was adopted unanimously in the Senate of the United States, and nearly so in the House of Representatives.  Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the Constitution did not mean a negro slave.  It was clear; it was plain.  Not only the Federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States, decided that this was a constitutional obligation.  How is it now?  The North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their national character, they commenced with the fraudulent fiction that fugitives were entitled to habeas corpus, entitled to trial by jury in the State to which they fled.  They pretended to believe that fugitive slaves were entitled to more rights than their white citizens; perhaps they were right, they know one another better than I do.  You may charge a white man with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is nothing to determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he fled, and then he is to be delivered up upon demand.  White people are delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves.  Slaves, black people, you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes have been invented to defeat your plain constitutional obligations.  In January, last year, I argued this question, and presented at the close of my speech a compilation made by a friend of mine, of the laws of the non-slaveholding States on this point.  The honorable gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Collamer] commented upon the reference to his State, and the greater portion of his speech was taken up with a discussion of the particular act which was quoted in my appendix.  I have no doubt the Senator did not know of the act of 1858, because certainly his argument would not have been made if he did; he certainly was not informed as to the act of 1858.  I will read him one or two of the sections of that act.  I referred to and commented on it then in my speech; but in the appendix containing the compilation there was an accidental misreference.  That act provides---

“That every person who may have been held as a slave, who shall come or be brought or be in this State, with or without the consent of his or her alleged master—”

Mr. Collamer.  What date is that?

Mr. Toombs.  Eighteen hundred and fifty-eight.  It is entitled “An act to secure freedom to all persons in this State.”

Mr. Collamer.  That was not the one mentioned in the Senator’s speech. 

Mr. Toombs.  I have explained why it was not in the appendix; but I had read it, and I supposed the Senator had.  The Senator made his speech on this reference, because, I suppose, it was more easily answered.

Mr. Collamer.  I made the speech upon the one to which reference was made. 

Mr. Toombs.  That was very adroitly done, or very ignorantly done, I do not know which; but I want to set that portion of our record right.  This was the act to which I referred, and upon which I commented in the body of the speech, though not in the appendix, which was prepared by another person:

“Every person who may have been held as a slave, who shall come, or be brought, or be in this State with or without the consent of his or her alleged master or mistress, or Who shall come or be brought, or be in this State, shall be free.”

 The Constitution of the United States says they shall not be free; Vermont says they shall; and yet all her legislators are sworn to obey the Constitution.  Vermont says if slaves come, voluntarily or involuntarily, with or without consent; if they flee from service, or come into Vermont in any way, they shall be free.  The Constitution says they shall not be discharged from service if they flee; Vermont says they shall be.  That is another one of our sisters, for whom it is said we ought to have a deep attachment. 

Again:

“Sec.  7.  Every person who shall hold, or attempt to hold, in this State, in slavery, or as a slave, any free person, in any form or for any time, however short, under the pretense that such person is or has been a slave, shall, on conviction thereof, be imprisoned in the State prison for a term not less than five years nor more than twenty years, and be fined not less than $1,000 nor more than $10,000.”

 This is decidedly fraternal!  If a man passes voluntarily through the State of Vermont with his slave, that State, in her fraternal affection, will keep him fifteen years in the State prison and fine him $2,000.  Fraternal, affectionate Vermont!  I have made these references for the benefit of the Senator.  Will he say that this was done only to carry out the decision in Prigg vs.  Pennsylvania?

I have heretofore shown that a plain constitutional provision has been violated by specific acts in thirteen of these States; but in the Pilgrim’s Progress they finally do it, I believe, without acts of legislation.  Mr. Lincoln and his party have taken an easier position; and now such has been the rapid descent into error as Virgil describes that into hell, “smooth is the descent and easy the way,” that now they even refuse to admit that legislative acts are necessary to enable them to defeat the Constitution; they profess to defeat it by circumvention; they think it better to be cunning than strong.  Personal liberty bills are the bungling contrivances of a less advanced accomplishment in crime.  I should not be surprised if they should repeal all of them, for they do not need them now.  Lincoln says they are unnecessary; that by the Constitution it is settled that all men are created free and equal, and that all men are entitled to an equal participation in the Government, and that the Declaration of Independence refers to slaves; that no man shall be deprived of his life and liberty and property without the judgment of his peers or the law of the land.  Apply these principles as the Black RepubHcans intend to apply them, and they have no need for personal liberty bills.  They are far in advance of such contrivances.  The progressive spirit of the age will not wait upon such devices.  They may now dispense with these superseded devices; but I undertake to say here that no Black Republican Legislature that repeals them will ever say that it is their purpose or duty to surrender the fugitive.  No, sir, they do not intend to do that.  They may delude you in order to get power; they may deceive you to get possession of this Government; but there is neither faith, nor truth, nor manhood in this conspiracy. 

The next demand made on behalf of the South is, “that Congress shall pass efficient laws for the punishment of all persons in any of the States who shall in any manner aid and abet invasion or insurrection in any other State, or commit any other act against the laws of nations, tending to disturb the tranquillity of the people or government of any other State.”  That is a very plain principle.  The Constitution of the United States now requires, and gives Congress express power, to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the laws of nations.  When the honorable and distinguished Senator from Illinois [Mr. Douglas] last year introduced a bill for the purpose of punishing people thus offending under that clause of the Constitution, Mr. Lincoln, in his speech at New York, which I have before me, declared that it was a “sedition bill;” his press and party hooted at it.  So far from recognizing the bill as intended to carry out the Constitution of the United States, it received their jeers and gibes.  The Black Republicans of Massachusetts elected the admirer and eulogist of John Brown’s courage as their Governor, and we may suppose he will throw no impediments in the way of John Brown’s successors.  The epithet applied to the bill of the Senator from Illinois is quoted from a deliberate speech delivered by Lincoln in New York, for which, it was stated in the journals, according to some resolutions passed by an association of his own party, he was paid a couple of hundred dollars.  The speech should therefore have been deliberate.  Lincoln denounced that bill.  He places the stamp of his condemnation upon a measure intended to promote the peace and security of Confederate States.  He is, therefore, an enemy of the human race, and deserves the execration of all mankind.

We demand these five propositions.  Are they not right?  Are they not just?  Take them in detail, and show that they are not warranted by the Constitution, by the safety of our people, by the principles of eternal justice.  We will pause and consider them; but mark me, we will not let you decide the question for us. 

But we are told by well-meaning but simple-minded people that admit your wrongs, your remedies are not justifiable.  Senators, I have little care to dispute remedies with you, unless you propose to redress my wrongs.  If you propose that in good faith, I will listen with respectful deference; but when the objectors to my remedies propose no adequate ones of their own, I know what they mean by the objection.  They mean submission.  I tell them, if I have good sight, perhaps the musket will improve my defective remedy.  But still, I will as yet argue it with them.

These thirteen Colonies originally had no bond of union whatever; no more than Jamaica and Australia have to-day.  They were wholly separate communities, independent of each other, and dependent on the Crown of Great Britain.  All the union between them that was ever made is in writing.  They made two written compacts.  One was known as the Articles of Confederation, which declared that the Union thereby formed should be perpetual—an argument very much relied upon by “the friends of the Union” now.  Those Articles of Confederation in terms declared that they should be perpetual.  I believe that expression is used in our last treaty with Billy Bowlegs, the chief of the Seminoles.  I know it is a phrase used in treaties with all nations, civilized and savage.  Those that are not declared eternal are the exceptions; but usually treaties profess to be for “perpetual friendship and amity,” according to their terms.  So was that treaty between the States.  After a while, though, the politicians said it did not work well.  It carried us through the Revolution.  The difficulty was, that after the war there were troubles about the regulation of commerce, about navigation, but above all, about financial matters.  The Government had no means of getting at the pockets of the people; and but for that one difficulty, this present Government would never have been made.  The country is deluded with the nonsense that this bond of union was cemented by the blood of brave men in the Revolution.  Sir, it is false.  It never cost a drop of blood.  A large portion of the best men of the Revolution voted against it.  It was carried in the convention of Virginia by but ten majority, and among its opponents were Monroe and Henry, and other men who had fought the war, who recorded their judgment that it was not a good bond; and I am satisfied to-day that they were the wiser men.  This talk about the blood of patriots is intended to humbug the country, to scare the old women.  Why, sir, it never cost a drop of blood.  It was carried in some of the States by treachery, by men betraying their constituents.  That is the history of the times.  Five votes would have tied it in Virginia.  It passed New York by but three majority.  Out of nearly four hundred in the convention of Massachusetts, it passed by nineteen.  That is the history of the action of the three greatest States of the Union at that time.  Some of the bravest and the boldest and the best men of the Revolution, who fought from its beginning to its end, were opposed to the plan of union; and among them was the illustrious author of the Declaration of Independence himself.  Are we to be deterred by the cry, that we are laying our unhallowed hands on this holy altar?  Sir, I have no hesitation in saying that a very large portion of the people of Georgia, whom I represent, prefer to remain in this Union with their constitutional rights—I would say ninety per cent, of them—believing it to be a good Government.  They have lived and prospered in it.  Shallow-pated fools have told them this Government was the cause of their prosperity, and they have never troubled themselves to inquire whether or not this were true.  I think it had but little to do with their prosperity beyond securing their peace with other nations, and that boon has been paid for at a price that no freeman ought to submit to.  These are my own opinions; they have been announced to my constituents, and I announce them here.  Had I lived in that day, I should have voted with the majority in Virginia, with Monroe, Henry, and the illustrious patriots who composed the seventy-nine votes against the adoption of the present plan of Government.  In my, opinion, if they had prevailed, to-day the men of the South would have the greatest and most powerful nation of the earth.  Let this judgment stand for future ages.

Senators, the Constitution is a compact.  It contains all our obligations and duties of the Federal Government.  I am content, and have ever been content, to sustain it.  While I doubt its perfection; while I do not believe it was a good compact; and while I never saw the day that I would have voted for it as a proposition de novo, yet I am bound to it by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by established forms, rather than to rush into unknown dangers.  I have given to it, and intend to give to it, unfaltering support and allegiance; but I choose to put that allegiance on the true ground, not on the false idea that anybody’s blood was shed for it.  I say that the Constitution is the whole compact.  All the obligations, all the chains that fetter the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that the powers not granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people.  Now I will try it by that standard; I will subject it to that test.  The law of nature, the law of justice, would say—and it is so expounded by the publicists—that equal rights in the common property shall be enjoyed.  Even in a monarchy the king cannot prevent the subjects from enjoying equality in the disposition of the public property.  Even in a despotic Government this principle is recognized.  It was the blood and the money of the whole people (says the learned Grotius, and say all the publicists) which acquired the public property, and therefore it is not the property of the sovereign.  This right of equality being, then, according to justice and natural equity, a right belonging to all States, when did we give it up?  You say Congress has a right to pass rules and regulations concerning the Territory and other property of the United States.  Very well.  Does that exclude those whose blood and money paid for it?  Does “dispose of” mean to rob the rightful owners?  You must show a better title than that, or a better sword than we have.

But, you say, try the right.  I agree to it.  But how?  By our judgment?  No, not until the last resort.  What then; by yours?  No, not until the same time.  How then try it?  The South has always said, by the Supreme Court.  But that is in our favor, and Lincoln says he will not stand that judgment.  Then each must judge for himself of the mode and manner of redress.  But you deny us that privilege, and finally reduce us to accepting your judgment.  We decline it.  You say you will enforce it by executing laws; that means your judgment of what the laws ought to be.  Perhaps you will have a good time of executing your judgment.  The Senator from Kentucky comes to your aid, and says he can find no constitutional right of secession.  Perhaps not; but the Constitution is not the place to look for State rights.  If that right belongs to independent States, and they did not cede it to the Federal Government, it is reserved to the States, or to the people.  Ask your new commentator where he gets your right to judge for us.  Is it in the bond ?

The Northern doctrine was, many years ago, that the Supreme Court was the judge.  That was their doctrine in 1800.  They denounced Madison for the report of 1799, on the Virginia resolutions; they denounced Jefferson for framing the Kentucky resolutions, because they were presumed to impugn the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States; and they declared that that court was made, by the Constitution, the ultimate and supreme arbiter.  That was the universal judgment—the declaration of every free State in this Union, in answer to the Virginia resolutions of 1798, or of all who did answer, even including the State of Delaware, then under Federal control.

The Supreme Court have decided that, by the Constitution, we have a right to go to the Territories and be protected there with our property.  You say, we cannot decide the compact for ourselves.  Well, can the Supreme Court decide it for us?  Mr. Lincoln says he does not care what the Supreme Court decides, he will turn us out anyhow.  He says this in his debate with the honorable Senator from Illinois [Mr. Douglas].  I have it before me.  He said he would vote against the decision of the Supreme Court.  Then you do not accept that arbiter.  You will not take my construction; you will not take the Supreme Court as an arbiter; you will not take the practice of the Government; you will not take the treaties under Jefferson and Madison; you will not take the opinion of Madison upon the very question of prohibition in 1820.  What, then, will you take?  You will take nothing but your own judgment: that is, you will not only judge for yourselves, not only discard the court, discard our construction, discard the practice of the Government, but you will drive us out, simply because you will it.  Come and do it!  You have sapped the foundations of society; you have destroyed almost all hope of peace.  In a compact where there is no common arbiter, where the parties finally decide for themselves, the sword alone at last becomes the real, if not the constitutional, arbiter.  Your party says that you will not take the decision of the Supreme Court.  You said so at Chicago; you said so in committee; every man of you in both Houses says so.  What are you going to do?  You say we shall submit to your construction.  We shall do it, if you can make us; but not otherwise, or in any other manner.  That is settled.  You may call it secession, or you may call it revolution; but there is a big fact standing before you, ready to oppose you—that fact is, freemen with arms in their hands.  The cry of the Union will not disperse them; we have passed that point; they demand equal rights; you had better heed the demand.

You have no warrant in the Constitution for this declaration of outlawry.  The court says you have no right to make it.  The treaty says you shall not do it.  The treaty of 1803 declares that the property of the people shall be protected by the Government until they are admitted into the Union as a State.  That treaty covers Kansas and Nebraska.  The law passed in 1804 or 1805, under Mr. Jefferson, protects property in slaves in the very territory.  In 1820, when the question of prohibition came up, Mr. Madison declared it was not warranted by the Constitution, and Jefferson denounced its abettors as enemies of the human race.  Here is the court; here are our fathers; here is cotemporaneous exposition for fifty years, all asserting our right.  The Black Republican party say, “We care not for your precedents or practices; we have progressive politics as well as a progressive religion.  Behold Spooner!  We care not for the fathers; we care not for the judges.”  They have said more: their leaders on this floor have said they will get rid of the court as James II got rid of the honest judges when they decided against the dispensing power of the Crown.  One set refused; he turned them out and put in another; they refused; he turned them out and got another.  They mocked the Constitution and the laws, and decided for the Crown.  What was the result?  He became, and justly, a wanderer and an outcast, and his posterity were wanderers and outcasts, houseless and homeless.  The heir of his race—the son of Mary of Modena, the last scion of a perfidious race—died a pensioner of Rome.  Read, then, the record of this reckless king, and profit by his example.  When you appoint judges to make decisions, you make a mockery of all justice, and of all decisions with freemen everywhere.  Our ancestors told us how to treat such oppression in 1688.  We have not forgotten the lesson.

To come back from this digression, I will now read your proclamation of outlawry from the Chicago platform, to wit: 

“That the normal condition of the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in our national territory, ordained that no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty, by congressional legislation, whenever such legislation becomes necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.”

There you declare that the treaties made by Mr. Jefferson in 1803 are null, void, and no law; there you declare that the acts by which property in slaves was protected and allowed, both by territorial and congressional acts, in Florida, in Louisiana, in Arkansas, in Missouri, in Mississippi, and in Alabama, were all null, void, and no law.  You declare that the decision of the Supreme Court is null, void, and no law; that there is no Constitution but the Chicago platform; yet you propose to come here and take possession of this Government, and swear to maintain the Constitution with this reading, and you are quite astonished at our having any objections to the peaceable proceeding—at least the Senator from Oregon [Mr. Baker] was, the other day.  I suppose that orator has just come out of the woods.  I do not know where he has kept himself, if he has never heard any more of this question than he told us.  But no matter what may be our grievances, the honorable Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Crittenden] says we cannot secede.  Well, what can we do?  We cannot revolutionize; he will say that is treason.  What can we do?  Submit?  They say they are the strongest, and they will hang us.  Very well, I suppose we are to be thankful for that boon.  We will take that risk.  We will stand by the right; we will take the Constitution; we will defend it by the sword with the halter around our necks.  Will that satisfy the honorable Senator from Kentucky?  You cannot intimidate my constituents by talking to them about treason.  They are ready to fight for the right with the rope around their necks, and meet the Black Republicans and their allies upon whatever ground they may select.  Treason; bah!

The Black Republicans denounce Mr. Buchanan because he has construed the relation of master and slave, “to involve an unqualified property in persons.”  Mr. Lincoln approves their censure.  So far as this denounces the language employed by the President, it is a simple denial of all property in slaves; but, with characteristic knavery, this party put enough of falsehood to misrepresent his real meaning.  Upon the point referred to, the President has gone no farther than the Supreme Court; and his declaration may be safely left to judicial vindication.

But I have promised to show that Lincoln has refused obedience to judicial interpretations of a constitutional question.  Iti his speech of loth July, 1856, he said:

“If I were in Congress, and a vote should come up on the question whether slavery should be prohibited in a new Territory, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, I would vote that it should.”

I omitted to remark in its proper place that not only Mr. Lincoln repudiates the propositions which I submitted to the committee of thirteen of the Senate, but they were all voted against by the five members representing the Black Republican party in the Senate of the United States upon the committee of thirteen, and I presumed they were not extreme men.  Some of them, I had been led to believe, were the moderate men who were among, and not of, the organization.  But every principle which was proposed received the condemnation of every one of them.  A resolution involving the same principles, introduced by a distinguished colleague of mine in the House of Representatives, was voted down, I believe, by a unanimous vote of all the members of that House belonging to the Republican party.  The same lesson is taught by every declaration they make, even by the treacherous silence which has been maintained by their most extreme men on this floor and elsewhere, on these subjects, since the beginning of this session.  Probably some of them thought it was best to be calm, supposing that perhaps the foot which was upon the neck of slavery was insecure.  Possibly “the jubilant Senator from the Northwest” [Mr. Doolittle] thought the domination might not be perpetual, and that it was well to bring the coils of power, of place, of armies, of navies, and of legality around us, in order to tighten our chains before we were alarmed.  We understand this danger, and we will anticipate it.  You will have to use your strength, not ours, to rivet our chains; spend your own money and your own blood, not ours, to consolidate your power.

I have, then, established the proposition—it is admitted—that you seek to outlaw $4,000,000,000 of property of our people in the Territories of the United States.  Is not that a cause of war?  Is it a grievance that $4,000,000,000 of the property of the people should be outlawed in the Territories of the United States by the common Government?  What, then, is our reliance?  Your treachery to yourselves?  I will not accept that guarantee.  I know you are treacherous to us, but I see no reason but justice why you should betray each other; and that will not avail you.  I think, therefore, you will do what you say on that question; at least there can be no harm in my accepting your declarations as true.  I believe that however hostile nations may be, they take the warlike declarations of the enemy as true and sufficient for their action.  Then you have declared, Lincoln declares, your platform declares, your people declare, your Legislatures declare—there is one voice running through your entire phalanx—that we shall be outlawed in the Territories of the United States.  I say we will not be; and we are willing to meet the issue; and rather than submit to such an outlawry, we will defend our territorial rights as we would our household gods.

But, although I insist upon this perfect equality in the Territories, yet, when it was proposed, as I understand the Senator from Kentucky now proposes, that the line of 36° 30’ shall be extended, acknowledging and protecting our property on the south side of that line, for the sake of peace—permanent peace—I said to the committee of thirteen and I say here, that, with other satisfactory provisions, I would accept it.  If that or some other satisfactory arrangement is not made, I am for immediate action.  We are as ready to fight now as we ever shall be.  I am willing, however, to take the proposition of the Senator as it was understood in committee, putting the North and the South on the same ground, prohibiting slavery on one side, acknowledging slavery and protecting it on the other, and applying that to all future acquisition, so that the whole continent to the north pole shall be settled upon the one rule, and to the south pole under the other.  I will not buy a shameful peace.  I will have equality or war.  Georgia is on the war-path, and demands a full and final settlement this time.

Yet, not only did your committee refuse that, but my distinguished friend from Mississippi [Mr. Davis], another moderate gentleman like myself—proposed simply to get a recognition that we had the right to our own; that man could have property in man; and it met with the unanimous refusal even of the most moderate,  Union-saving, compromising portion of the Republican party.  They do not intend to acknowledge it.  How could they?  Mr. Lincoln says that, according to the Declaration of Independence, all men are born free and equal.  You do not want any fugitive slave law; all you want is a habeas corpus; with this you can set them free in Georgia.  According to this notion Spooner is right in contending that the Federal Constitution authorizes the abolition of slavery.  Mr. Lincoln thus accepts every cardinal principle of the Abolitionists; yet he ignorantly puts his authority for abolition upon the Declaration of Independence, which was never made any part of the public law of the United States.  It is well known that these “glittering generalities” were never adopted into the Constitution of the United States.

And what a spectacle does Mr. Lincoln present of the fathers of the Republic by his absurd theory?  There sat the representatives of thirteen slaveholding Colonies, declaring that all men were free and equal, and endowed by the Creator with the same rights.  You say they meant their slaves.  Every State then held slaves, and most of the gentlemen who were around that board themselves held them.  Did those fathers, who pledged to God and to mankind their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors, mean to cheat the human race?  Did they falsely and fraudulently utter that sentiment, and still hold on to their slaves as long as they lived?  That is the way you construe it.  Washington, during all his lifetime, held hundreds of slaves.  He kept them as long as he lived, and left them to his wife, with the provision, that after her death, they should be free—a very common custom with gentlemen in our country who have no immediate descendants, and from attachment to their slaves are reluctant to let them pass even into the hands of collateral relatives.  So strong was that sentiment, that my State was compelled to pass a law to prohibit emancipation, or by this time a large portion of the slaves might have been free under the operation of that sentiment.  Jefferson held slaves all his lifetime, and left them to his heirs.  Madison held them, and they went to his heirs.  And these men are now quoted as meaning to include their own slaves in the Declaration of Independence; and seem, in Republican argument, base enough to hold on to “the sum of all villainies,” to rob freemen of their wages, and plunder them to the day of their death.  With your doctrines, you have the audacity to pretend to think well of such men.  Shall we give you credit for sincerity?

Yes, Mr. Lincoln says it is a fundamental principle that all men are entitled to equality in Government everywhere.  That idea seems to be a hobby of his.  Very well; you not only want to break down our constitutional rights; you not only want to upturn our social system; your people not only steal our slaves and make them freemen to vote against us; but you seek to bring an inferior race in a condition of equality, socially and politically, with our own people.  Well, sir, the question of slavery moves not the people of Georgia one half as much as the fact that you insult their rights as a community.  You Abolitionists are right when you say that there are thousands and tens of thousands of men in Georgia, and all over the South, who do not own slaves.  A very large portion of the people of Georgia own none of them.  In the mountains, there are comparatively but few of them; but no part of our people are more loyal to their race and country than our bold and brave mountain population: and every flash of the electric wires brings me cheering news from our mountain tops and our valleys, that these sons of Georgia are excelled by none of their countrymen in loyalty to the rights, the honor, and the glory of the Commonwealth.  They say, and well say: This is our question; we want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no mongrel race to degrade our own; and as one man they would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.  They would drive you from our borders, and make you walk over the blighted ruins of their fair land.  We will tell you when we choose to abolish this thing; it must be done under our direction and according to our will; our own, our native land shall determine this question and not the Abolitionists of the North.  That is the spirit of our freemen; beware of them.

It was in this spirit of intermeddling and mischief that sixty-eight members of your party in the other House, and at least one member of the Senate, signed a recommendation to circulate as a campaign document an infamous publication to excite these very non-slaveholders of the South to insurrection against their fellow-citizens.  I allude to the Helper book.  This Republican party sometimes say “We are not an abolition party.”  Take away their Abolitionists, and they are nobody.  They would be beaten in New England.  All Abolitionists are Republicans, whether all Republicans are Abolitionists or not.  We understand that.  There may be perhaps an exception to abolition unanimity, and that is in regard to one class, an honest class—composed of the New England or Boston anti-slavery society, headed by Garrison.  Garrison looks at it squarely and honestly.  He says to these very Abolitionists of the other sort, the political Abolitionists, “Your Government is a pro-slavery Government; you take oaths and you violate them; we will not take these oaths, because we will not break them.”  That is the difference between you and them.  One of the most able, and eloquent, and well written exposés of the position of the Garrison Abolitionists that I have seen anywhere is to be found in a late annual report of the Massachusetts anti-slavery society; and they say that “the Constitution is a pro-slavery instrument which does recognize slavery, and you perjure yourselves when you take oaths to support it, and break them.  We cannot vote, we cannot take office, because we will not take oaths to break them; we cannot vote for you, because we will not vote for men who will take oaths and break them.” That is an authoritative exposition from this class of Abolitionists.  So it seems that the Abolitionists with whom we have to deal are so base that the honest Abolitionists themselves will not trust them.

I have already adverted to the proposition in regard to giving up criminals who are charged with stealing negroes, and I have referred to the cases of Maine, New York, and Ohio.  I come now to the last specification—the requirement that laws should be passed punishing all who aid and abet insurrection.  These are offenses recognized by the laws of nations as inimical to all society; and I will read the opinions of an eminent publicist when I get to that point.  I said that you had aided and abetted insurrection.  John Brown certainly invaded Virginia.  John Brown’s sympathizers, I presume, are not Democrats.  Two of the accomplices of John Brown fled—one to Ohio, one to Iowa.  The Governors of both States refused to give up the fugitives from justice.  The party maintained them.  I am aware that, in both cases, pretexts were gotten up, to cover the shame of the transaction.  I am going to show you that their pretexts were hollow, unsubstantial, not only against constitutional law, but against the law of nations.  I will show you that it was their duty to seize them under the law of nations, and bring them to their Confederate States, or even to a friendly State.  The first authority I will read is Vattel on the law of nations.  If there had been any well-founded ground, if the papers had been defective, if the case had been defectively stated, what was the general duty of a friendly State without any constitutional obligation?  This general principle is, that one State is bound to restrain its citizens from doing anything tending to create disturbance in another State, to foment disorder, to corrupt its citizens, or to alienate its allies.  Vattel says, page 162:

“And since the latter [the sovereign] ought not to suffer his subjects to molest the subjects of other States, or to do them an injury, much less to give open, audacious offense to foreign Powers, he ought to compel the transgressor to make reparation for the damage or injury, if possible, or to inflict on him an exemplary punishment; or, finally, according to the nature and circumstances of the case, to deliver him up to the offended State, to be there brought to justice.  This is pretty generally observed with respect to great crimes, which are equally contrary to the laws and safety of all nations.  Assassins, incendiaries, and robbers, are seized everywhere, at the desire of the sovereign in whose territories the crime was committed, and are delivered up to his justice.  The matter is carried still farther in States that are more closely connected by friendship and good neighborhood.  Even in cases of ordinary transgressions, which are only subjects of civil prosecution, either with a view to the recovery of damages, or the infliction of a slight civil punishment, the subjects of two neighboring States are reciprocally obliged to appear before the magistrate of the place where they are accused of having failed in their duty.  Upon a requisition of that magistrate, called letters rogatory, they are summoned in due form by their own magistrates, and obliged to appear.  An admirable institution, by means of which many neighboring States live together in peace, and seem to form only one republic!  This is in force through all Switzerland.  As soon as the letters rogatory are issued in form, the superior of the accused is bound to enforce them.  It belongs not to him to examine whether the accusation be true or false; he is to presume on the justice of his neighbors, and not to suffer any doubts on his own part to impair an institution so well calculated to preserve harmony and good understanding between the States.”

That is the law of nations, as declared by one of its ablest expounders; but, besides, we have this principle embodied in the Constitution; we have there the obligation to deliver up fugitives from justice; and, though it is in the Constitution, though it is sanctioned, as I said, by all ages and all centuries, by the wise and the good, everywhere, our Confederate States are seeking false pretexts to evade a plain social duty, in which are involved the peace and security of all civil society.  If we had no Constitution, this obligation would devolve upon friendly States.  If there were no Constitution, we ought to demand it.  But instead of giving us this protection, we are met with reproaches, reviling, tricks, and treachery, to conceal and protect incendiaries and murderers.

This man Brown and his accomplices had sympathizers.  Who were they?  One of them, as I have before said, who was, according to his public speeches, a defender and a laudator of John Brown—is Governor of Massachusetts.  Other officials of that State applauded Brown’s heroism, magnified his courage, and, no doubt, lamented his ill success.  Throughout the whole North, public meetings, immense gatherings, triumphal processions, the honors of the hero and the conqueror, were awarded to this incendiary and assassin.  They did not condemn the traitor; think you they abhorred the treason?

Yet, I repeat, when a distinguished Senator from a non-slaveholding State [Mr. Douglas] proposed to punish such attempts at invasion and insurrection, Lincoln and his party come before the world and say, ‘Here is a sedition law.’  To carry out the Constitution, to protect States from invasion and suppress insurrection, to comply with the laws of the United States, is a ‘sedition law,’ and the chief of this party treats it with contempt; yet, under the very same clause of the Constitution which warranted this important bill, you derive your power to punish offenses against the laws of nations.  Under this warrant you have tried and punished our citizens for meditating the invasion of foreign States.  You have stopped illegal expeditions.  You have denounced our citizens as pirates, and commended them to the bloody vengeance of a merciless enemy.

Under this principle alone you protect our weaker neighbors of Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua.  By this alone are we empowered and bound to prevent our people from conspiring together, giving aid, giving money, or arms, to fit out expeditions against any foreign nation.  Foreign nations get the benefit of this protection; but we are worse off in the Union than if we were out of it.  Out of it, we should have the protection of the neutrality laws.  Now you can come among us; raids may be made; you may put the incendiary’s torch to our dwellings, as you did last summer for hundreds of miles on the frontiers of Texas; you may do what John Brown did, and when the miscreants escape to your States, you will not punish them; you will not deliver them up.  Therefore we stand defenseless.  We must cut loose from the accursed ‘body of this death,’ even to get the benefit of the law of nations.  Hence we are armed, and hence we will stay so, until our rights are respected, and justice is done.  We must take up arms to get the rights that the laws of nations give us.

Mr. Lincoln’s speech, to which I referred as some indication of the jeers and the gibes of this “conservative gentleman,” charges us with a multitude of imaginary offenses:

“This is a natural and apparently adequate means; but what will convince them?”—

That he does not intend to hurt us.

“This, and this only: Cease to call slaveholding wrong, and join them in calling it right; and this must be done thoroughly; done in acts as well as words.  Silence will not be tolerated.  We must place ourselves avowedly with them.  Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced.”

I say so too.  I say I will not stay in the Union that gives me less rights than it gives to a foreign nation.  I will meet you on this issue.  I will have these rights in the Union, or I will not stay in it.

“Douglas’s new sedition laws must be enacted and enforced”—

It must be before I will make peace.—

“suppressing all declarations of hostility to slavery, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private.”

That is a very adroit way to state the case.  We have never sought to interfere with your discussion of any questions in your own country.  The standing laws of my own State only punish the words and acts that are intended to incite insurrection among any class of people.  But you write, and speak, and form societies, and claim the right to become a nest of incendiaries, in order to assail your neighbors; and you say you have the right to do it under the liberty of speech guaranteed by the Constitution.  I will not interfere with your rights, but you must so use them as not to injure us.

You will not regard Confederate obligations; you will not regard constitutional obligations; you will not regard your oaths.  What, then, am I to do?  Am I a freeman?  Is my State, a free State, to lie down and submit because political fossils raise the cry of the glorious Union?  Too long already have we listened to this delusive song.  We are freemen.  We have rights; I have stated them.  We have wrongs; I have recounted them.  I have demonstrated that the party now coming into power has declared us outlaws, and is determined to exclude four thousand million of our property from the common Territories; that it has declared us under the  ban of the Empire, and out of the protection of the laws of the United States everywhere.  They have refused to protect us from invasion and insurrection by the Federal Power, and the Constitution denies to us in the Union the right either to raise fleets or armies for our own defense.  All these charges I have proven by the record; and I put them before the civilized world, and demand the judgment of to-day, of to-morrow, of distant ages, and of Heaven itself, upon the justice of these causes.  I am content, whatever it be, to peril all in so noble, so holy a cause.  We have appealed, time and time again, for these constitutional rights.  You have refused them.  We appeal again.  Restore us these rights as we had them, as your court adjudges them to be, just as all our people have said they are; redress these flagrant wrongs, seen of all men, and it will restore fraternity, and peace, and unity, to all of us.  Refuse them, and what then?  We shall then ask you, “let us depart in peace.” Refuse that, and you present us war.  We accept it; and inscribing upon our banners the glorious words, “liberty and equality,” we will trust to the blood of the brave and the God of battles for security and tranquility.