Part 7

It is not a great while since one who was endeavoring to pursue me with unfriendly criticism opened an article with my name and “gone to Boston!”—He seemed to think it a damaging reflection to say of me that I had gone to Boston—I wish he could have been here to look upon these Democratic faces to-night, and to listen to your resolutions and the words of your Massachusetts speakers, he might have been taught that a man might go and stay at Boston and learn better Democracy than many have acquired in other places.

I shall gratefully carry with me the recollections of this and of other meetings witnessed since I have been among you. In the hour of apprehension I will hopefully turn back to my observations here—here in this consecrated hall, where men so early devoted themselves to liberty and community independence; and will endeavor to impress upon others who know you only as you are misrepresented in the two Houses of Congress, [applause,] how true and how many are the hearts that beat for constitutional liberty, and with high resolve to respect every clause and guaranty which the Constitution contains, are pledged to faithfully uphold the rights of any and every portion of the States, and of the people. [Tremendous cheering.]

Speech in the City of New York,

Palace Garden Meeting, Oct. 19, 1858.

Countrymen, Democrats:—When I accepted this evening the invitation to meet you here, it was to see and to hear, not to speak. I have listened with pleasure to the language addressed to you by your candidate for the highest office in the State. It is the language of patriotism; it is an appeal to the common sense of the people in favor of that fraternity on which our Union was founded, and on which alone it can long continue to exist. I have rejoiced to hear the applause with which such sentiments, when he uttered them, have been received by those here convened, and trust it is but an indication of that onward progress of reaction which I believe has already commenced, and which is to sink to the lowest depths of forgetfulness the struggle which has so long agitated the country, and prompted an internecine war against your countrymen. [Applause.]

Truly has the distinguished gentleman pointed out to you the extreme absurdity of attempting to excite you upon the ground of southern aggression upon the north. We have nothing to aggress upon. We have not now, as he has told you, the power, though once we had, to interfere with your domestic institutions. We never had the will to do so. And if we had the power now, true to the instincts and history of our fathers, we would abstain from intermeddling in your domestic affairs. [Applause.] I have no purpose on this or any other occasion to mingle in the consideration of those questions which are local to you. I am not sufficiently learned in conchology to do it if I would, [laughter,] and I have too great a respect for community independence to do it if I could. My purpose then is, simply in answer to your call, to offer you a few reflections, such as may occur to me, as I progress, upon those questions which are common to us all, and which belong to the memories of our fathers, and are linked with the hopes of our children. [Applause.] If; then, without preparation, I do it in unvarnished phrase, if I cannot carry you along with me because of the want of that flowing diction which might catch the ear, still I ask you to hear me for my cause, for it is the cause of our country, it is the cause of democracy, it is the cause of human liberty. [Applause.]

Who now stand arrayed against the democratic party? The relations of parties and the issues upon which we have been divided have changed. What now is the basis of opposition to the democratic party? It is twofold—interference with the negroes of other people, and interference with the rights now secured to foreigners who expatriate themselves and come to our land. [“Hear, hear,” and applause.] To each community belongs the right to decide for itself what institutions it will have. To each people sovereign within their own sphere, belongs, and to them only belongs, the right to decide what shall be property. You have decided it for yourselves. Who shall gainsay your decision? Mississippi has decided it for herself; who has the right to gainsay her decision? The power of each people to rule over their domestic affairs lies at the foundation of that Declaration of Independence to which you owe your existence among the nations of the earth; that declaration which led your fathers into and through the war of the revolution. It is that which constitutes to-day the doctrine of State-rights, upon which it is my pride and pleasure to stand. [Applause.] Congress has no power to determine what shall be property anywhere. Congress has only such grants as are contained in the Constitution. And the Constitution confers upon it no power to rule with despotic hand over the inhabitants of the Territories. Within the limits of those Territories, the common property of the Union, you and I are equal; we are joint owners. Each of us has the right to go into those Territories, with whatever property is recognized by the Constitution of the United States. [Applause.] Congress has no power to limit or abridge that right. But the inhabitants of a Territory when as a people they come to form a State government, when they possess the power and jurisdiction which belongs to the people of New York, or any other State, have the right to decide that question, and no power upon earth has the right to decide it before that time. [Applause.]

The dull remarks, my friends, which I was in the course of making to you, have been interrupted by a beautiful episode, which I am sure will more than exceed the whole value of the poem, if I may thus characterize my dull speech. And I am glad that foremost among all the transparencies and banners, comes this flag which speaks of the “Young Men’s Democratic National Club.”—[Three cheers for Davis.] It is on the young men we must rely. I have found that in every severe political struggle, where the contest on the one side was for principle, and on the other for spoils, it has been the gray-haired father and the boy with the peach bloom upon his cheek upon whom principles had to rely for support. My own generation—and I regret to say it—seems too deeply steeped in the trickery of politics to be able to rise above the influence of personal and political gain into the pure field of patriotism. And I am therefore glad to see the “Young Men’s Democratic National Club” leading this procession.

But to return to the argument I was making. I said that Congress had no power to legislate upon what should be property anywhere; that Congress had no power to discriminate between the citizens of the different States who should go into the Territories, the common property of all the States, but that those Territories of right remained open to every citizen, and every species of property recognized in the Constitution, until the inhabitants should become a people, form a fundamental law for themselves, and, as authorized by the Constitution, assume the powers, duties, and obligations of a State. And now, my friends, I would ask you, further, of what value would a congressional decision upon that subject be? If it be a constitutional right, as I contend it is, then it is a matter for judicial decision. If Congress should assert that such is not the right of each of our citizens, and the courts appointed as an arbiter in such cases should decide that it is their right, the enactment would, therefore, be void. It, on the other hand, it is not a right, but Congress should assert it to be one, and the courts should declare that no such right exists under the Constitution, then, Congress has no power to create it; and it is in this sense that Congress has not the power to establish or prohibit slavery anywhere. [Applause.]

What, then, has been the foundation of all this controversy? Your candidate has justly pointed out to you that unpatriotic struggle for sectional aggrandizement which has brought about this contest—a contest, as it were, between two contending powers for national predominance—a contest upon the one side to enlarge the majority it now possesses, and a contest upon the other side to recover the power it has lost, and become the majority. This is the attitude of hostile nations, and not of States bound together in fraternal unity. This is the feeling that one by one is cutting the strands which originally held the States together. You have seen your churches divided; you have seen trade turned aside from its accustomed channel; you have seen jealousy and uncharitableness and bickering springing up and growing stronger day by day, until at last, if it continue, the cord of union between the States reduced simply to the political strand, may not suffice to hold them together. Once united by every tie of fraternal feeling, shoulder to shoulder, step by step, our fathers went through the revolution, prompted by a common desire for the common good, and animated by devotion to the principle of popular liberty. They struggled against the mother country, because that country endeavored to legislate for the colonies, and the colonies claimed as a right that they must not be taxed except by their own representatives, and refused to submit to unconstitutional legislation. If now, in this struggle for the ascendency in power, one action should gain such predominance as would enable it, by modifying the Constitution and usurping new power, to legislate for the other, the exercise of that power would throw us back into the condition of the colonies. And if in the veins of the sons flows the blood of their sires, they would not fail to redeem themselves from tyranny even should they be driven to resort to revolution. [Applause.]

And what is the other question of difference now? It is the agitation, as a national question, of the right of foreigners to suffrage within these States. Now, I ask, what power has Congress over the question? Yet members to Congress are elected upon that question. How would Congress legislate upon it?—They say, by modifying the naturalization laws. What do those laws confer? The right to hold real estate and the right to devise it by will; the right to sue and be sued in the courts of the United States; and the rights to receive passports and protection from the government of the United States. Who wishes to withhold those privileges from foreigners? Nobody alleges it. But they say that the ballot-box must be protected from foreign votes. Has Congress the right to say that foreigners shall not vote within the limits of your State? Are you willing to leave that to Congress? [Cries of “ No, no, no,” and applause.] In some of the States, by State legislation, foreigners are permitted to vote before they can become citizens under the naturalization laws. The naturalization laws are not, therefore, controlling over the question of suffrage. The power of Congress is limited to the establishment of a uniform rule of naturalization throughout the States. But what further do they couple with these demands which they make for congressional legislation? They proclaim their purpose to be to exclude paupers and criminals from abroad.—Do paupers and criminals come for the right of suffrage? They come here for bread, or to fly from the laws which they have violated. Whether they shall be entitled to vote or not, would neither increase nor diminish the number of that class by a single individual. But, my friends, who is a pauper, or who is a criminal? Is a man a pauper merely because he comes here without property, without money in his purse? Go, look along your lines of internal improvements, where every mile has mingled with it the bones of some foreigner who labored to create it. Go to your battle fields, where your flag has been borne triumphantly, and where fresh laurels have been added to the brow of your country, and there you will find the sod dyed as deep by the blood of the foreign born as by that of the native citizen. [Applause.] Is the able-bodied man, who comes here to contribute to your national interests by building up your public works, or aiding in the erection of your architectural constructions, or who bears your flag in the hour of danger, and who bleeds and dies for your country, is he the pauper you desire to exclude? And who is the criminal? Is it he who, flying from the persecution of despotic governments, seeks our land as the Huguenot did, as did Soule, the stern American orator, as many others within your limits have done under more recent struggles for liberty in Europe? [Applause.] Then, who are the paupers and criminals? Is that to be decided by the ruling of other countries, by the laws of France, or of England? Or is it to be decided by your own laws, by your own rules of judicature? If by the latter, then there is no good ground for controversy. We do not advocate that any country shall empty its poor houses, get rid of the duty of supporting its paupers, and throw that charge upon us. We could not permit any country to empty its prisons and penitentiaries to mingle that portion of its population with ours. But we do war against the use of terms that delude the people, and are intended to exclude the high-spirited and hard-working men who contribute to the bone, the sinew, and the wealth of our country. [Applause.]

Such, then, my friends, is the opposition to the democracy, the only national party. The opposition, I say, claims two things from the federal government, neither of which it has the constitutional power to perform. It agitates this section of the Union in relation to property which it has not, and of which, I say, it knows literally nothing. For had the orator (Mr. Giddings) who was quoted to-night, known anything of the relations between the master and the slave, he would not have talked of the slave armed with the British bayonet. Our doors are unlocked at night; we live among them with no more fear of them than of our cows and oxen. We lie down to sleep trusting to them for our defence, and the bond between the master and the slave is as near as that which exists between capital and labor anywhere. Now, about the idea of British bayonets in the hands of slaves: The delusion which has always excited my surprise the most has been that which has led so many of the northern men to strike hands with the British abolitionists to make war on their southern brethren. If they could effect their ends, and Great Britain could insert the wedge which should separate the States, what further use would she have for the northern section? You are the competitors of Great Britain in the vast field of manufacture, whom she most fears, and though she may be with you in the scheme which would effect a separation of these States, yet the moment that separation should be effected she would be under the promptings of interest your worst enemy. [Applause.] Our fathers fought and bled to secure the common interests of the country. They reclaimed us from colonial bondage to national independence. They stamped upon it free trade in order that the interests of all might be promoted, that each section might be interwoven with the other—in order that there might be the strongest bond of mutual dependence. And step by step, from that day to this, that common and mutual dependence has been growing.

From the seeds of narrow sectionality and purblind fanaticism, have sprung the tares which threaten the principles of that declaration which made the Colonies independent States, and of that compact by which the States were united by a bond to-day far more valuable than when it was signed. You have among you politicians of a philosophic turn, who preach a high morality; a system of which they are the discoverers, and it is to be hoped will long remain the exclusive possessors. They say, it is true the Constitution dictates this, the Bible inculcates that; but there is a higher law than those, and call upon you to obey that higher law, of which they are the inspired givers. [Laughter and applause.] Men who are traitors to the compact of their fathers—men who have perjured the oaths they have themselves taken—they who wish to steep their hands in the blood of their brothers; these are the moral law-givers who proclaim a higher law than the Bible, the Constitution, and the laws of the land. This higher-law doctrine, it strikes me, is the most convenient one I ever heard of for the criminal. You, no doubt, have a law which punishes a man for stealing a horse or a bale of goods. But the thief would find more convenient a higher law which would justify him in keeping the stolen goods. The doctrine is now advanced to you only in its relation to property of the Southern States, thus it is the pill gilded, to conceal its bitterness; but it will re-act deeply upon yourselves if you accept it. What security have you for your own safety if every man of vile temper, of low instincts, of base purpose, can find in his own heart a higher law than that which is the rule of society, the Constitution, and the Bible? These higher-law preachers should be tarred and feathered, and whipped by those they have thus instigated. This, my friends, is what was called in good old revolutionary times. Lynch Law. It is sometimes the very best law, because it deals summary justice upon those who would otherwise escape from all other kinds of punishment. The man who with sycophantic face and studied phrase, and with assumed philosophic morality, preaches treason to the Constitution and the dictates of all human society, is a fit object for a Lynch law that would be higher than any he could urge. [Applause.]

My democratic friends, I am deeply gratified by the exhibition which is before me. I see here a field of faces, assembled in the name of Democracy, and over it high, bright and multiplied for the occasion, as stars have been added by Democracy to the flag of our country, blaze the lights which typify democratic principles, pointing upward, to guide our country to that haven of prosperity which our fathers saw in the distant future, and which they left it for their sons to attain. It we are true to ourselves, true to the obligations which the Constitution imposes upon us, and if we are wise and energetic in the struggles which lie before us, our path is onward to more of national greatness than ever people before possessed. We are held together by that two-fold government, which is susceptible of being made perfect in the small spheres of State limits, and capable of the greatest imperial power, by the combination of these municipal powers into one for foreign action. It is a form of government such as the wit of man never devised until our fathers, with a wisdom that approached inspiration, framed the Constitution, and transmitted it as a legacy to us. It devolves upon every one of you, to see that each provision of that Constitution is cordially and faithfully observed. If cordially and faithfully observed, the powers of hell and of earth combined can never shake the happiness and prosperity of the people of the United States. [Applause.] With every revolving year there will arise new motives for holding tenaciously to each other. With every revolving cycle there will come new sources of pride and national sentiment to the people. Year after your flag will grow more brilliant, by the addition of fresh stars, recording the growth of our political family, and onward, over land and over sea, the progress of American principles, of human liberty illustrated, and protected by the power of the United States, will hold its way to a triumph such as the earth has never witnessed. [Applause.] On the other hand, what do we see? A picture so black that if I could unveil it, I would not in this cheery moment expose a scene so chilling to your enthusiasm, and revolting to your patriotic hearts. My friends, feeling that I have already detained you too long, I now return to you my cordial thanks for the kindness with which you have received me to-night.

Speech Before the Mississippi Legislature.

Mississippians: Again it is my privilege and good fortune to be among you, to stand before those whom I have loved, for whom I have labored, by whom I have been trusted and honored, and here to answer for myself. Time and disease have frosted my hair, impaired my physical energies, and furrowed my brow, but my heart remains unchanged, and its every pulsation is as quick, as strong, and as true to your interests, your honor, and fair fame, as in the period of my earlier years.

It is known to many of you, that at the close of the last session of Congress, wasted by protracted, violent disease, I went, in accordance with medical advice, to the Northeastern coast of the United States. Against the opinion of my physician, I had remained at Washington until my public duties were closed, and then adopted the only course which it was believed gave reasonable hope for a final restoration to health—that is, sought a region where I should be exempt from the heat of summer, and from political excitement.

In one respect at least, this accorded with my own feelings, for physically and mentally depressed, fearful that I should never again be able to perform my part in the trials to which Mississippi might be subjected, I turned away from my fellows with such feelings as the wounded elk leaves his herd, and seeks the covert, to die alone. Misrepresentation and calumny followed me even to the brink of the grave, and with hyena instinct would have pursued me beyond it.

The political positions which I had always occupied, justified the expectation that in New England I should be left in loneliness. In this I was disappointed; courtesy and kindness met me on my first landing, and attended me to the time of my departure. The manifestations of comity and hospitality, given by the generous and the noble, aroused the petty hostility of the more extreme of the Black Republicans, and their newspapers assailed me with the low abuse which for years I had been accustomed to receive at their hands. I had always despised their malice and defied their enmity; their assaults did not surprise me, but when I found them echoed in Southern papers, it did astonish, I will confess, it did pain me, not for any injury apprehended to myself, but for its evil effect upon the cause with which I was identified.

Was it expected that to public and private manifestations of kindness by the people of Maine, I should return denunciation and repel their generous approaches with epithets of abuse? If they had deserved such reproach, they could not merit it at my hands. A guest hospitably attended, it would have been inconsistent with the character of a gentleman, to have done less than acknowledge their kindness, and it was not in my nature to feel otherwise than grateful to them for the many manifestations of a desire to render pleasant and beneficial the sojourn of an invalid among them. But they did not deserve it, and I am happy to state as the result of my acquaintance with them, that we have a large body of true friends among them, men who maintain our constitutional rights as explicitly and as broadly as we assert them, and who have performed this service with the foreknowledge that they were thereby to sacrifice their political prospects, at least, until through years of patient exertion they should correct error, suppress fanaticism, and build for themselves a structure on the basis of truth, which had long been unwelcome and might not soon be understood.

But there were other evidences of regard more valuable to me than exhibitions of personal kindness. Regard for the people of Mississippi, founded on a special attention to their history; the gallant services of your sons in the field, were publicly claimed as property which Mississippi could not appropriate to herself; but which were part of the common wealth of the nation, and belonged equally to the people of Maine. Could I be insensible to such recognition of the honorable fame of Mississippi? No, the memory of the gallant dead, who died at Monterey and Buena Vista, forbade it.

At a subsequent period, when in Massachusetts, one of her distinguished sons, (Gen. Cushing,) paid a compliment to the feat performed by the Mississippi Regiment in checking the enemies cavalry on the field of Buena Vista one Black Republican newspaper denied the originality of the movement, and claimed it to have been previously performed by an English regiment at Quatre Bras. This claim was unfounded; the service performed by the British Regiment having been of a totally different character and for a different purpose.—A Southern paper, however, has gone one step beyond that of the Massachusetts paper, and denies the merit claimed for the service rendered by saying that it was the result of accident, growing out of the peculiar conformation of the ground on which the regiment rallied and that it was necessary for the safety of the regiment, being like the act of a man who leaps from a burning ship and takes the chance of drowning.

If this only affected myself, I should leave it, like other misrepresentations, unnoticed, but it concerns the hard earned reputation of the regiment I commanded. It affects the fame of Mississippi, and propagates an error which may pollute the current of history.

We live in an age of progress, and it requires a progressive age to produce a military critic who should discover that a soldier deserved no credit for availing himself of the accidents of ground. One half of the science of war consists in teaching how to take advantage of the irregularities of the ground on which military movements are to be made, or defensive works are to be constructed. The highest reputation of Generals in every age has resulted in their skill in military topography. The most marked compliment ever paid by one General to another, was that of Napoleon to Cæsar, when he halted on his encampments without a previous reconnoisance. But the regiment did not rally as stated, for it had not been dispersed; neither was their movement the result of their own necessity, or adopted for their own safety. They were marching by the flank, on the side of a ravine, when the enemy’s cavalry were seen approaching. They could have halted on the side of the ravine, which was so precipitous that they would have been there as sate from a charge as if they had been in Mississippi. They could have gone down into the ravine, and have been concealed even from the sight of the cavalry. The necessity was to prevent the cavalry from passing to the rear of our line of battle, where they might have attacked, and probably carried our batteries, which were then without the protection of our infantry escort. It was our country’s necessity and not our own which prompted the service there performed. For this the regiment was formed square across the plain, and there stood motionless as a rock, silent as death, and eager as a greyhound for the approach of the enemy, at least nine times, numerically, their superiors. Some Indiana troops were formed on the brink of the ravine with the right flank of the Mississippi Regiment, constituting one branch of what has been called the “V”. When the enemy had approached as near as he dared and seemed to shrink from contact with the motionless, resolute living wall which stood before him, the angry crack of the Mississippi rifle was heard, and as the smoke rose and the dust fell, there remained of the host which so lately stood before us but the fallen and the flying. The rear of our line of battle was again secured, and a service had been rendered which in no small degree contributed to the triumph which finally perched upon the banner of the United States.

I am not a disinterested, and may not be a competent judge, but I know how I thought, and still believe, that your sons, given by you to the public service in the war with Mexico, have not received the full measure of the credit which was their due. They, however, received so much that we might be content to rest on the history as it has been written. But it constitutes a reason why we should not permit any of the leaves to be unjustly torn away.

To return to the consideration of the less important subject, the misrepresentation of myself; I will again express the surprise I felt that when abolition papers were assailing me with a view to destroy any power which I might acquire to correct the error which had been instilled into the minds of the people of the North in relation to Southern sentiments and Southern institutions, that they should have received both aid and comfort from Southern newspapers, and been bolstered up in the attempt to misrepresent my political position. When the charge was made, which was copied in Northern papers, that I had abandoned those with whom I co-operated in 1852, to produce a separation of the States, my friend, the editor of the Mississippian, seeing the misrepresentation of my position, and naturally supposing, as we had no discussion in 1852, the reference must have been made to the canvass of 1851, quoted from the resolutions of the State-Rights Democratic Convention, and from an address published by myself to the people, to show that my position was the reverse of that assigned to me. Before proceeding, I will advert to a reference which has been made to him, as my “organ.” He is no more my “organ” than I am his. We have generally concurred, I and have been able to understand and anticipate his positions as he has mine. I am indebted to him for many favors. He is indebted to me for nothing. As Democrats, as gentlemen, as friends, we occupy to each other the relation of exact equality.

Notwithstanding that irrefutable answer to the charge, it has been reiterated, and, as before, located in the year 1852. It is known to you all that our discussions were in 1851. I then favored a convention of the Southern States, that we might take counsel together, as to the future which was to be anticipated, from the legislation of 1850. The decision of the State was to acquiesce in the legislation of that year, with a series of resolutions in relation to future encroachments. I submitted to the decision of the people, and have in good faith adhered to the line of conduct which it imposed. Therefore in 1852 there is no record from which to disprove any allegation, but you know the charge to be utterly unfounded, and charity alone can suppose its reiteration was innocently made. Neither in that year nor in any other, have I ever advocated a dissolution of the Union, or the separation of the State of Mississippi from the Union, except as the last alternative, and have not considered the remedies which lie within that extreme as exhausted, or ever been entirely hopeless of their success. I hold now, as announced on former occasions, that whilst occupying a seat in the Senate, I am bound to maintain the Government of the Constitution, and in no manner to work for its destruction; that the obligation of the oath of office, Mississippi’s honor and my own, require that, as a Senator of the United States, there should be no want of loyalty to the Constitutional Union. Whenever Mississippi shall resolve to separate from the Confederacy, I will expect her to withdraw her representatives from the General Government, to which they are accredited. If I should ever, whilst a Senator, deem it my duty to assume an attitude of hostility to the Union, I should, immediately thereupon, feel bound to resign the office, and return to my constituency to inform them of the fact. It was this view of the obligations of my position, which caused me, on various occasions, to repel, with such indignation, the accusation of being a disunionist, while holding the office of Senator of the United States.

I have been represented as having, advocated “Squatter Sovereignty” in a speech made at Bangor, in the State of Maine, A paragraph has been published purporting to be an extract from that speech, and vituperative criticism, and forced construction have exhausted themselves upon it, with deductions which are considered authorized, because they are not denied in the paragraph published.