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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.
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 in 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.
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 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?
"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 in- terfere
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 today,
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 tranquillity. . . .
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