the country whose streams flow into the Mississippi the free navigation of the river, and the free interchange of all of the agricultural products of the valley of the Mississippi. Such a course is dictated not only by every consideration of justice, but by the recognized and well-understood interests of the southwestern States. On this point, I can speak with entire confidence of the sentiment of Louisiana."

The right has been claimed by the United States to occupy foreign territory on the ground of its importance to the safety of the institutions of the country. On this principle the Government acted in the case of Florida. This was the principle announced at Ostend, where the American ministers to the three principal. courts of Europe met and considered the grounds upon which the Government would be justified in acquiring Cuba. How would this doctrine bear upon Louisiana when out of the Union and holding the key to the Gulf-the outlet of the commerce of the West?

Mr. Lane, of Oregon, replied that the attempt to enforce the laws in South Carolina, when she was not a member of this Confederacy, would bring about civil war. No authority to conquer States and hold them as provinces is found in the Constitution. No such power is conferred on the Government. He exclaimed: "I am a man of peace. I dislike war. I would never make it or encourage it, except in defence of right, in defence of honor, in defence of truth and justice. I would go into battle and fight for the right; but I will never force war upon a people, or inaugurate it, unless it is authorized, and unless it is my duty to do so in defence of right; but certainly I would not make war to conquer a people contending simply for a right that has been refused, for a right that they cannot have in the Union, and for a right that they can have out of the Union, even if tyrants, or rulers that would be tyrants, should undertake to coerce them. The man that would do it, the man that would inaugurate it, would drench this country in blood."

In his opinion, reorganization was the only means to restore the country. "If we would bring about that reorganization, if we would rebuild the fabric that has been stricken down, we must maintain peace. Inaugurate force, inaugurate war in this country, and all hope of reconstruction has vanished forever."

He argued that if the party that succeeded in the late triumph had indicated to the country that they were now ready to see justice done; that they were ready to extend to every Southern State the rights they claim for themselves; if they had, at the beginning of this Congress, said "Amendments of the Constitution will be acceptable to us, and ratified by our people, extending justice to all," to-day the Union would have been safe, and secession would not have been possible.

Declaring this to be the greatest Govern

ment ever created by the wit of man, he thus stated his view of the cause of its destruction: "I look upon our Constitution as the best system of government ever formed by man. I would to God it could be maintained as it is. I wish that equality could prevail. I would to Heaven that justice could be dealt out fairly to every man of every State of this Union, as provided by that great system of government. But it cannot be so. Public opinion is in its way. The Northern sectional party is opposed to it; and you cannot have rights equal with them under the Constitution as it is. They break it up, not we. They destroy it by refusing to comply with its provisions. They trample it under foot, because they will not do justice to their friends. They claim the territory, though won by the blood of the gallant Southern men as well as the Northern men. They refuse to the Southern man one inch of territory for his property, though it cost him his money and his blood."

Mr. Benjamin, of Louisiana, declared that the present state of things had been foreseen for years. South Carolina had dissolved the Union which connected her with the other States of the Confederacy, and proclaimed herself independent. He said: "We, the representatives of those remaining States, stand here to-day, bound either to recognize that independence or to overthrow it; either to permit her peaceful secession from the Confederacy, or to put her down by force of arms. That is the issue. That is the sole issue. No artifice can conceal it. No attempts by men to disguise it from their own consciences, and from an excited or alarmed public, can suffice to conceal it. Those attempts are equally futile and disingenuous."

His anticipations of the extent to which secession would reach embraced all the slaveholding States. "Next week, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida will have declared themselves independent; the week after, Georgia; and a little later, Louisiana; soon, very soon, to be followed by Texas and Arkansas. I confine myself purposely to these eight States, because I wish to speak only of those whose action we know with positive certainty, and which no man can for a moment pretend to controvert. I designedly exclude others, about whose action I feel equally confident, although others may raise a cavil."

That South Carolina had a right to take the course she pursued, the Senator attempted to prove from the admitted right of all men to self-government, and having this right she formed a compact with the other States, which had been broken on the part of some of them, and was therefore broken on the part of all. Between the right to secede and the right of revolution, he thus discriminated: "I say, therefore, that I distinguish the rights of the States under the Constitution into two classes: one resulting from the nature of their bargain; if the bargain is broken by the sister States, to

consider themselves freed from it on the ground of breach of compact; if the bargain be not broken, but the powers be perverted to their wrong and their oppression, then, whenever that wrong and oppression shall become sufficiently aggravated, the revolutionary rightthe last inherent right of man to preserve freedom, property, and safety-arises, and must be exercised, for none other will meet the case." The act of a State absolves all its subjects, says the Senator, addressing the Republican side, and when you deny that you will coerce a.State, but assert that you mean to execute the laws against individuals, it is an absurdity. "This whole scheme, this whole fancy, that you can treat the act of a sovereign State, issued in an authoritative form, and in her collective capacity as a State, as being utterly out of existence; that you can treat the State as still belonging collectively to the Confederacy, and that you can proceed, without a solitary Federal officer in the State, to enforce your laws against private individuals, is as vain, as idle, and delusive, as any dream that ever entered into the head of man. The thing cannot be done. It is only asserted for the purpose of covering up the true question, than which there is no other; you must acknowledge the independence of the seceding State, or reduce her to subjection by war."

Mr. Baker, of Oregon, rising for the final time to speak on the floor of the Senate, after a few preliminary words, thus proceeded: "It is my purpose to reply, as I may, to the speech of the honorable and distinguished Senator from the State of Louisiana. I do so, because it is, in my judgment at least, the ablest speech which I have heard, perhaps the ablest I shall hear, upon that side of the question, and in that view of the subject; because it is respectful in tone and elevated in manner; and because, while it will be my fortune to differ from him upon many, nay, most of the points to which he has addressed himself, it is not, I trust, inappropriate for me to say that much of what he has said, and the manner in which he has said it, has tended to increase the personal respect-nay, I may say the admiration-which I have learned to feel for him. And yet, sir, while I say this, I am reminded of the saying of a great man-Dr. Johnson, I believe-who, when he was asked for his critical opinion upon a book just then published, and which was making a great sensation in London, said: 'Sir, the fellow who has written that, has done very well what nobody ought ever to do at all.'

"The entire object of the speech is, as I understand it, to offer a philosophical and constitutional disquisition to prove that the Government of these United States is, in point of fact, no Government at all; that it has no principle of vitality; that it is to be overturned by a touch; dwindled into insignificance by a doubt; dissolved by a breath; not by maladministration merely, but in consequence of organic defects, interwoven with its very existence.

"But, sir, this purpose-strange and mournful in anybody, still more so in him-this purpose has a terrible significance now and here. In the judgment of the honorable Senator, the Union is this day dissolved; it is broken and disintegrated; civil war is a consequence at once necessary and inevitable. Standing in the Senate chamber, he speaks like a prophet of woe. The burden of the prediction is the echo of what the distinguished gentleman now presiding in that chair has said before-(Mr. Iverson in the chair)-Too late! too late!' The gleaming and lurid lights of war flash around his brow, even while he speaks. And, sir, if it were not for the exquisite amenity of his tone and manner we could easily persuade ourselves that we saw the flashing of the armor of the soldier beneath the robe of the Senator.

"My purpose is far different; sir, I think it is far higher. I desire to contribute my poor argument to maintain the dignity, the honor of the Government under which I live, and beneath whose august shadow I hope to die. I propose, in opposition to all that has been said, to show that the Government of the United States is in very deed a real, substantial power, ordained by the people, not dependent upon States; sovereign in its sphere; a Union, and not a compact between sovereign States; that, according to its true theory, it has the inherent capacity of self-protection; that its Constitution is a perpetuity, beneficent, unfailing, grand; and that its powers are equally capable of exercise against domestic treason and against foreign foes. Such, sir, is the main purpose of my speech; and what I may say additional to this, will be drawn from me in reply to the speech to which I propose now to address myself."

He then proceeded to deny that this Government was a compact, that there was such a right as that of secession, or that the grievances complained of by the South, were sufficient to justify their proposed course of action.

These propositions went to the Committee of Thirteen, and the subsequent debate embraced all the measures before that committee. No separate and favorable action was taken upon them in the Senate.

The following resolution, presented in the Senate by Mr. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, previous to his retirement, contains in a few words the entire claim made by Southern members of what was necessary to secure their rights. It was ordered to be printed.

Resolved, That it shall be declared, by amendment of the Constitution, that property in slaves, recognized as such by the local law of any of the States of the tutional and Federal relations as any other species of Union, shall stand on the same footing in all constiproperty so recognized; and, like other property, shall not be subject to be divested or impaired by the local law of any other State, either in escape thereto, or of transit or sojourn of the owner therein; and in no case or impaired by any legislative act of the United States, whatever shall such property be subject to be divested or of any of the territories thereof.

It does not appear to have been called up or discussed before the Senate.

The admission of Kansas, as a State of the Union, was made a question in the Senate by the report of a bill for that purpose. But the crisis of the country was the absorbing topic of the remarks of all speakers.

Mr. Nicholson, of Tennessee, expressed his conviction that the sentiments of a majority of the Northern people on the subject of slavery, as an abstract question, were embraced in these three propositions:

1. That slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, is a moral as well as social and political evil.

2. That the owners and their slaves are created equal; that they are endowed alike with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights equally to both. governments are instituted, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.

3. That as the owners and their slaves are created equal, the former cannot rightfully acquire or hold dominion over, or property in, the latter without his

consent.

He said "that, under the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience, they have a full and perfect right to entertain these opinions. It is no cause of quarrel between us and them. On the other hand, the South entertain directly antagonistic opinions as matters of conscience and as matters of political opinion, on each one of these propositions. They claim the right under the same high sanction to entertain these opinions, and we say that it is no cause of quarrel, and should be none.

"What we now complain of is, that in the year 1856 these questions, known to be questions of antagonism, morally and socially, if not politically, incapable of reconciliation between the North and South, were seized upon by political leaders at the North and incorporated as the basis, as the central idea,' of a political association which, rising upon the strength of this prevailing sentiment at the North, has finally taken possession of the Government of the country. Mr. President, the first fatal stab to this Union was made at the Philadelphia convention, in 1856, when these propositions were incorporated as a part of the Republican platform. There was the birth of Republicanism, and there was the birth of organized sectionalism; its legitimate fruits are agitation, dissension, alienation, and, finally, disunion, in some form or other. In my honest conviction, there is to be found the true origin of disunionism, and there the real responsibility for that catastrophe.

"Now, Mr. President, let us see what it is in this platform that is so offensive to the South; for the real foundation of our complaints is to be found here. Gentlemen of the North seem not to comprehend this. They even take up the idea that it is a mere suspicion that some wrong may be done; some, that it is merely because we were defeated in the election; beeause we have lost our candidates; because we have failed in holding the Government which

we have held so long, that we manifest such deep concern. I tell them, in all candor, that they are mistaken in this. If Mr. Lincoln had entertained opinions and stood upon a platform that did not, in our estimation, involve our final destruction-I mean the destruction of our Southern interests and institutions-we should have acquiesced in his election as cheerfully as in that of any other man. What, then, is it in this platform to which we take exception? The first thing is, that it recognizes the general principle that ALL men are created equal; and, ernments are made for the purpose of securing in recognizing this, asserts, as a fact, that Govalike the rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the slave and to his owner. That general principle, if applied in the States, would liberate four million slaves. This is a necessary deduction from the assertion of the principle of the equality of the two races. But the Republican party, I must do them the justice to say, do not in their platform make the application of this general principle to the States. They confine it to those places within which Congress has, according to the platform of 1856, exclusive jurisdiction.' Then, the position is this: you concede that in the States we have a right to enjoy this property, and you profess to be willing that this constitutional guarantee shall be maintained; yet, in so doing, you avow a principle to be applied to all other places within which Congress has jurisdiction, which principle fixes a stigma on every Southern man who is the owner of a slave; which principle would, if applied, (and which, if you had the power, it is fair to infer, you would apply,) would set free every slave of the South. Without undertaking to say that this would be done without regard to other consequences than the loss of property, yet to a Southern mind these other consequences are so frightful, that when a party plants itself on a principle so alarming and so destructive, if carried out into all its legitimate results, we can but feel that our security is small, when all we have to repose upon is the professions of that party, that it will regard our rights within the States, when the same party tells us that rights which we regard the same outside of the States, it intends to disregard.

"Mr. President, these, in my estimation, are the grounds on which the Southern mind is now resting, and upon which the Southern people have come to the settled conviction that the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, on the principles laid down in the Republican platform, is tantamount to a declaration of war against an institution which, in the South, is identified with all our interests, with all our happiness, with all our prosperity, socially, politically, and materially. This is our conviction, and this conviction is strengthened when we turn to the antecedents, politically, of the candidate whom you have succeeded in electing."

In his opinion the overwhelming sentiment of the South is that of demanding guarantees

which shall be unalterable-that shall recognize distinctly and fully the rights of the Southern man to his slave as property, and other points of much importance connected with the fugitive slave-law. This the South demands, or it demands secession or revolution. He then alluded to a border State Convention, to determine on these guarantees as a matter of extreme importance.

No direct reply was made to this speaker. Mr. Collamer, of Vermont, who followed, confined his remarks strictly to the question of the admission of Kansas. Much time was afterwards occupied in the details of the bill, and it was passed by the Senate-ayes, 36; noes, 16.

Subsequently the bill to provide a temporary government for the territory of Arizona being before the Senate,

Mr. Brown, of Mississippi, moved an additional section, providing that the act of the Legislature of New Mexico, providing for the protection of property in slaves, be extended to Arizona. To this motion Mr. Trumbull, of Illinois, moved an amendment, providing that the law of Mexico, respecting African slavery, as it existed in said territory upon its acquisition, should remain unchanged.

Mr. Doolittle, of Wisconsin, then took the floor, and declared that he should support the amendment. The people of this country have lived together in peace for more than seventy years. That peace has rested upon two fundamental ideas: first, that the Federal Government and the citizens of the free States shall make no aggression upon slavery in the States; and the other, equally fundamental, that neither the Federal Government nor the slaveholders of the slave States shall make any aggressions upon or undertake to overturn freedom in the territories. Upon these grounds the people may live for generations to come; but if the citizens of the free States or the Federal Government shall undertake, directly or indirectly, to overturn slavery in the States where it exists, or if the citizens of the slave States or the Federal Government shall undertake to overturn freedom in the territories, they cannot have peace. After examining the Constitution on the subject of slavery, and the objections urged to the Republican platform by Senator Nicholson, he emphatically declared his sentiment thus: "I say to these gentlemen that, upon that idea that the Constitution establishes slavery, you cannot have peace on the slavery question; and you may just as well know it first as last. The people of the United States do not believe that the Constitution is, and will never consent that it shall be altered so that it will become, a slavery-extending Constitution by force of its own terms. We do not ask either that you put upon it that construction which shall abolish slaery in any State or in any territory. We say, let the Constitution be as our fathers made it; let it be neutral-neither affirming nor deny ing, and then you can have peace."

After discussing the various causes of irritation, he observed that those men who are regarded as the Abolitionists in this country; those men who have denounced the Constitution as being a covenant with hell, because they were bound to return these fugitives to slavery, stand looking on with an anxiety and intensity of interest which cannot be conceived. Their prayers go up, day and night, that this Union may be broken-that the free States of the North may no longer be compelled by the bond of Union to surrender the fugitive slaves; and proceeded by saying that the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land, and every citizen of the United States, therefore, owes a double allegiance; one to this Federal Government, and another to the State in which he lives. He may be guilty of treason against either; he may be guilty of treason against both; but within their spheres each government is sovereign and supreme. If Congress steps beyond the powers delegated by the Constitution, to enact any law, it is abso lutely void. If the State should step beyond the Constitution of the United States, which limits the power of the States to enact a law in conflict with it, it is simply unconstitutional, null, and void.

Mr. Benjamin, of Louisiana, wished to ask the gentleman from Wisconsin, if, in his opinion, under that form of government a citizen. can be placed, by the conflict between these two governments, in a position where he must of necessity be guilty of treason to the one or the other, and therefore be bound to be hung any way?

Mr. Doolittle replied: "No, sir; he cannot; for if the State declares that to be treason which by the Constitution of the United States is void, as being in conflict with it, it is no treason; for the Constitution of the United States is the fundamental law of your State, and any act or declaration making it treason to do an act which is in conflict with the Constitution of the United States, cannot be made treason by the State, although they may declare it so."

Mr. Benjamin: "If they declare it so, and hang the citizen because they declare it so, what advantage would it be to him that in theory the decision was wrong?"

Mr. Doolittle: "The citizen must judge at his peril. If a law is enacted by Congress which is within the Constitution of the United States, the citizen will judge at his peril; and if he undertakes to break up the Government of the United States, and to be guilty of treason against the Government of the United States, any act which the State may declare in conflict with it is simply unconstitutional, null, and void."

Mr. Benjamin: "As a practical proposition, if the citizen of a State is, by the action of his State, which he cannot control, commanded to do a certain thing under the penalty of being hanged under the law of the State; and if that

thing is treason under the Constitution and laws of the United States, is it possible, under the law of nations, and under the common sentiments of humanity that govern mankind, for the Federal Government to undertake to act upon the individual who is placed under duress to commit treason, instead of first relieving him from that duress by making war upon the State?"

Mr. Doolittle: "If the man is to be hung if he does the act, and to be hung if he does not, undoubtedly, so far as he is concerned, it will make no great difference, (laughter;) but, as a question of law, if he does an act which is treason against the United States, and is compelled to do that act by a law of the State, the State law is void, because it is in conflict with the Constitution of the United States."

Mr. Benjamin: "Then would the hanging be void?"

Mr. Doolittle: "The hanging would be a certainty, (laughter;) it would not be void for uncertainty. I say, Mr. President, that where the Constitution of the United States speaks in language clear enough to delegate power to this Government, it is not in the power of one, ten, one hundred, or all the citizens of a State, to annul that act of Congress; because the Constitution and the acts in pursuance of it are the supreme law of that State, and binding on every citizen and upon all the citizens in that State, and every citizen must, of course, act at his peril."

Mr. Brown, of Mississippi, continued the debate by saying: "It seems to me that Northern Senators most perniciously overlook the main point at issue between the two sections of our Confederacy. We claim that there is property in slaves, and they deny it. Until we shall settle, upon some basis, that point of controversy, it is idle to talk of going any further. The Southern people have $4,000,000,000 locked up in this kind of property. I do not mean to say that their slaves are worth so much; but their real property, their stock, their household goods, and all that belongs to them, are dependent upon the security of that kind of property.

"During the first forty years of our national existence, I undertake to affirm that no man, North or South, pretended to deny the great fact that there was such a thing as property in slaves. About 1818, 1819, 1820, this doctrine of refusing to recognize the right of property in slaves sprang up. It has continued to intensify from that day to this, until we find ourselves in our present condition. Now, I ask Senators on the other side if, looking at this thing calmly, they can for an instant suppose that, under any possible conceivable state of the case, we can voluntarily consent to live under a Government passing into the hands of a power, on the 4th of March, which openly and undisguisedly tells us that all this vast interest is to be outlawed under the common Government; that the $4,000,000,000 invested in this property, the accumulation of centuries of hard labor, mus

cular and physical labor, is going to be voluntarily abandoned-abandoned, I mean, so far as the action of this Federal Government is concerned; and that we, the inhabitants of fifteen States of this Union, will consent to live under a Government outlawed by its authority? That is the stern proposition which you submit to us. That is the proposition which we as sternly reject. Can we ever consent to remain in any Government, and know it only through its taxing power? Do rational men of the North suppose that nine million Southern people can ever consent to live in a Government outlawed by the Government, and known by it only when it wants tribute?

"I have no hope, no expectation, of changing the judgment of Senators on the other side, and very little hope of ever reaching their constituents; but there are some stubborn facts in history, which it were well enough their constituents should come to learn."

Mr. Green, of Missouri, referring to the question before the Senate, observed that when Mexico ceded all this territory to us by the Gadsden treaty, no slavery existed there except the peonage; but the very moment it became ceded to us, and became part of the United States, it was under the Constitution of the United States. There is no such thing as a constitutional Government acquiring property, and yet that property not be subject to the Constitution; and it is a contradiction to say so. If we have the power to acquire, it is by virtue of our organization under the Constitution; and the moment you acquire it, it is subject to that Constitution.

Mr. Doolittle replied, that the Senator of Missouri assumed, as a proposition which ought not to be doubted, that the Constitution of the United States entered the territory acquired from Mexico, repealed the Mexican law abolishing slavery, and established a law in its favor. This proposition was in direct contravention of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Prigg case, in which they held expressly that 'the state of slavery is deemed to be a mere municipal regulation, founded upon, and limited to, the range of the territorial laws." It was in violation of the decisions of the supreme court of every State, both North and South, previous to 1848. When John C. Calhoun, on the floor of this Senate, first announced the doctrine that the Constitution of the United States, by its own positive force, guaranteed the right to take and hold slaves as property in the territories of the United States, it did not have half a dozen supporters in either House of Congress.

Mr. Mason, of Virginia, wished the privilege of saying, as Mr. Calhoun lives no longer, and had no representative of his State on that floor, that he never understood him, nor ever understood any jurist in the land, in giving a considered view of this question, as declaring that the Constitution of the United States established slavery anywhere; but he understood that