Part 8

MR. PRESIDENT,--I present the petition of Henry Elwell, Jr., and four hundred and fifty-five others, of Manchester, in Massachusetts, earnestly petitioning Congress to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,--to abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the United States Territories,--to prohibit the inter-State slave-trade,--and to pass a resolution pledging Congress against the admission of any Slave State into the Union, the acquisition of any Slave Territory, and the employment of any slaves by any agent, contractor, officer, or department of the National Government; also, a like petition of Alvan Howes and fifty-five others, of Barnstable, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of John Clement and one hundred and nineteen others, of Townsend, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of Samuel L. Rockwood and seventy-three others, of Weymouth, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of J. H. Browne and sixty-four others, of Sudbury, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of Daniel Hosmer and ninety-eight others, of Sterling, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of Albert Gould and one hundred and thirty-one others of Leicester, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of James M. Evelett and two hundred others, of Princeton, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of Daniel Otis and seventy-nine others, of South Scituate, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of Calvin Cutter and eighty-four others, of Warren, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of R. W. French and thirty others, of Lawrence, Massachusetts; also, a like petition of Edmund H. Sears and two hundred and forty-five others, of Wayland, Massachusetts.

These several petitions I now present. On a former occasion, during this session, a similar petition presented by me was laid upon the table. A similar petition presented by another Senator was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. An authoritative precedent, established after debate, since I have been in the Senate, seems to be the best guide on this occasion. That was on a memorial from four thousand citizens of Boston, praying the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act. After ample consideration, during which much was said against the memorialists, no proposition was made to lay their prayer on the table. Following that precedent, and another established during the present session, I move that all these petitions be referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Mr. Mason, of Virginia, at once moved that the petitions lie on the table, thus precluding debate and stifling action. The yeas and nays were ordered on motion of Mr. Sumner, and resulted as follows, 25 yeas and 19 nays:--

YEAS,--Messrs. Bayard, Bragg, Chesnut, Clay, Clingman, Crittenden, Davis, Fitch, Fitzpatrick, Gwin, Hemphill, Hunter, Iverson, Johnson of Arkansas, Johnson of Tennessee, Kennedy, Lane, Latham, Mason, Nicholson, Polk, Rice, Sebastian, Slidell, and Thomson,--25.

NAYS,--Messrs. Bingham, Cameron, Chandler, Clark, Collamer, Dixon, Doolittle, Fessenden, Foot, Foster, Hale, Hamlin, King, Seward, Sumner, Trumbull, Wade, Wilkinson, and Wilson,--19.

So the petitions were ordered to lie on the table. The Democrats all voted yea; the Republicans all voted nay.

SAFETY OF PASSENGERS IN STEAMSHIPS FOR CALIFORNIA.

RESOLUTION AND REMARKS IN THE SENATE, MAY 21, 1860.

May 21, 1860, Mr. Sumner introduced the following resolution.

“_Resolved_, That the Committee on Commerce be instructed to consider the expediency of further action, in order to secure proper accommodations and proper safety for passengers on board the steamers between New York and San Francisco, and to increase the efficacy of the existing passenger laws of the United States in their application to California passengers; with liberty to report by bill or otherwise.”

The Senate, by unanimous consent, proceeded to consider the resolution.

MR. PRESIDENT,--I see the Senator from California [Mr. LATHAM] in his place, and I very gladly take the opportunity of calling his attention particularly to the resolution which I now have the honor to offer. By a communication in the newspapers, from a distinguished source,--a clergyman, who, during the last two months, sailed from Boston to San Francisco,[24]--it appears that the steamers are overloaded with passengers, and without adequate accommodations of other kinds for safety. His statement on the subject is explicit, and has been made in the newspapers, as also in private letters to his friends. I do not know that the evil can be reached by any additional legislation; perhaps no additional legislation is needed; but it is an evil which should be remedied in some way, or else we shall be startled some morning by the news of a great calamity,--the loss of one of these steamers, with, it may be, a thousand passengers.

CANDIDATES WHO ARE A PLATFORM.

LETTER TO A RATIFICATION MEETING AT BUFFALO, NEW YORK, MAY 30, 1860.

This was addressed to a meeting at Buffalo for the ratification of the nomination of Abraham Lincoln as President and Hannibal Hamlin as Vice-President.

SENATE CHAMBER, May 30, 1860.

DEAR SIR,--My duties here will not allow me to be with you at Buffalo; but I shall unite with you in every generous word uttered for Freedom, and in every pledge of enthusiastic support to the Republican candidates.

We have a Platform of noble principles, and candidates, each of whom, through his well-known principles and integrity of character, is a Platform in himself.

Accept my thanks for the honor of your invitation, and believe me, dear Sir,

Faithfully yours,

CHARLES SUMNER.

A. W. HARVEY, ESQ.

THE BARBARISM OF SLAVERY.

SPEECH IN THE SENATE, ON THE BILL FOR THE ADMISSION OF KANSAS AS A FREE STATE, JUNE 4, 1860.

Thou art a slave, whom Fortune’s tender arm With favor never clasped, but bred a dog. SHAKESPEARE, _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.

A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things. MILTON, _Paradise Lost_, Book II. 622-625.

Onward! onward! With the night-wind, Over field and farm and forest, Lonely homestead, darksome hamlet, Blighting all we breathe upon! LONGFELLOW, _Golden Legend_.

Instrumenti genus vocale, et semivocale, et mutum: _vocale, in quo sunt servi_; semivocale, in quo sunt boves; mutum, in quo sunt plaustra.--VARRO, _De Re Rustica_, Lib. I. cap. xvii. § 1.

Nil metuunt jurare, nihil promittere parcunt; Dicta nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant. CATULLUS, _Carm._ LXIV. 146, 148.

Pone crucem servo.--Meruit quo crimine servus Supplicium? quis testis adest? quis detulit? Audi; Nulla unquam de morte hominis cunctatio longa est.-- O demens, ita servus homo est? Nil fecerit, esto: Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. JUVENAL. _Sat._ VI. 219-223.

There is a tradition of the Prophet having said, that the greatest mortification at the Day of Judgment will be when the pious slave is carried to Paradise and the wicked master condemned to Hell.--SAADI, _The Gulistan_, tr. Gladwin, p. 242.

“And the Black Oppressor am I called. And for this reason I am called the Black Oppressor, that there is not a single man around me whom I have not oppressed, and justice have I done unto none.” … “Since thou hast, indeed, been an oppressor so long,” said Peredur, “I will cause that thou continue so no longer.” So he slew him.--_The Mabinogion_, tr. Lady Charlotte Guest, Vol. I. pp. 341, 342.

After we had secured these people, I called the linguists, and ordered them to bid the men-negroes between decks be quiet (for there was a great noise amongst them). On their being silent, I asked, What had induced them to mutiny? They answered, _I was a great rogue to buy them_ in order to carry them away from their own country, and that they were resolved to regain their liberty, if possible.--SNELGRAVE, _New Account of some Parts of Guinea and the Slave-Trade_, p. 170.

A system of concubinage was practised among them worse than the loose polygamy of the savages: the savage had as many women as consented to become his wives; the colonist as many as he could enslave. There is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races; there is a perpetual contradiction between their lust and their avarice. The planter will one day take a slave for his harlot, and sell her the next as a being of some lower species, a beast of labor. If she be indeed an inferior animal, what shall be said of the one action? If she be equally with himself a human being and an immortal soul, what shall be said of the other? Either way there is a crime committed against human nature.--SOUTHEY, _History of Brazil_, Chap. VIII., Vol. I. p. 258.

Negro slavery exists in no part of the world without producing indolence, licentiousness, and inhumanity in the whites; and these vices draw after them their earthly punishment,--to look no farther into their fearful, but assured consequences.--IBID., Chap. XLIV., Vol. III. p. 816.

I had observed much, and heard more, of the cruelty of masters towards their negroes; but now I received an authentic account of some horrid instances thereof. The giving a child a slave of its own age to tyrannize over, to beat and abuse out of sport, was, I myself saw, a common practice. Nor is it strange, being thus trained up in cruelty, they should afterwards arrive at so great perfection in it; that Mr. Star, a gentleman I often met at Mr. Lasserre’s, should, as he himself informed L., first nail up a negro by the ears, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown over him, so that the poor creature could not stir for four months after. Another much applauded punishment is drawing their slaves’ teeth. One Colonel LYNCH is universally known to have cut off a poor negro’s legs, and to kill several of them every year by his barbarities.--REV. CHARLES WESLEY, _Journal_, Charleston, S. C., August 2, 1736.

You are to have no regard to the health, strength, comfort, natural affections, or moral feelings, or intellectual endowments of my negroes. You are only to consider what subsistence to allow them and what labor to exact of them will subserve my interest. According to the most accurate calculation I can make, the proportion of subsistence and labor which will work them up in six years upon an average is the most profitable to the planter. And this allowance, surely, is very humane; for we estimate here the lives of our coal-heavers, upon an average, at only two years, … and our soldiers and seamen no matter what.--_A West-India Planter’s Instructions for his Overseers_: JOHN ADAMS, _Works_, Vol. X. pp. 339, 340.

The unfortunate man would have been tried upon five other indictments, some of them still more atrocious than the one upon which he was found guilty; and his general character for barbarity was so notorious that no room was left for me even to deliberate. His victims have been numerous; some of them were even buried in their chains, and there have been found upon the bones taken from the grave chains and iron rings of near forty pounds’ weight.… He had been three times married, has left several children; he had been in the Army, had a liberal education, and lived in what is called the great world. His manners and address were those of a gentleman. Cruelty appears in him to have been the effect of violence of temper, _and habit had made him regardless of the death and suffering of a slave_.--RIGHT HON. HUGH ELLIOT, Governor of the Leeward Islands: _Memoir_, by the COUNTESS OF MINTO, pp. 409, 410.

Is slavery less slavery in a Christian than in a Mahometan country? I entreat your attention, while I plead the general cause of humanity. In such a cause it is right to appeal to your sensibility as well as your reason. It is now no longer time to flatter petty tyrants by acknowledging that color constitutes a legitimate title for holding men in abject and perpetual bondage. In support of this usurpation what can be urged but the law of the strongest?--COL. DAVID HUMPHREYS, _Valedictory Discourse before the Cincinnati of Connecticut_, July 4, 1804, p. 29.

Christianity suppressed slavery, but the Christians of the sixteenth century reëstablished it,--as an exception, indeed, to their social system, and restricted to one of the races of mankind; but the wound thus inflicted upon humanity, though less extensive, was far more difficult of cure.--TOCQUEVILLE, _Democracy in America_, ed. Bowen, Chap. XVIII. sec. 2, Vol. I. p. 457.

The Kentuckian delights in violent bodily exertion; he is familiar with the use of arms, and is accustomed from a very early age to expose his life in single combat.… Were I inclined to continue this parallel, I could easily prove that almost all the differences which may be remarked between the characters of the Americans in the Southern and in the Northern States have originated in Slavery.--IBID., pp. 467, 468.

I visited our State Penitentiary a short time since, and from my own personal observation I am led to the inevitable conclusion that the plan of sending our slaves to the Penitentiary, as a _punishment_ for crime, is exactly the reverse: it is rather a reward than punishment. “Let sober reason judge.”

We punish offenders to prevent crime. I would ask any reasonable man, Is the sending a slave of any of our farms to the Penitentiary a punishment? The white man is punished by being deprived of his liberty for that length of time: what liberty is the slave deprived of? He has as much, and oftentimes _more_, liberty within the walls of the Penitentiary than on any of those large sugar or cotton plantations. Then where is the punishment? We send white men there, and the dread of going is a _stain_ on his character: what character has the negro to lose? Hence we must come to the conclusion that sending negro slaves to the Penitentiary is not a punishment.

A moment’s reflection will convince any man who has ever had the management of negroes on a plantation, that the well-being and safety of societies demand that any offence committed by a negro, for which the _lash_ is not a sufficient punishment, _death_ should be the penalty.

Taking these things into consideration, would it not be just and laudable to sell all negroes now in the Penitentiary to the highest bidder, on or about the first of November next, by the Sheriff of the Parish of East Baton Rouge, on the same terms and conditions that negroes are sold at present, under an ordinary _fi. fa._, and, as near as can be, two thirds of the net proceeds of each negro be paid to the former owners or their legal representatives, the balance be and remain in the State Treasury for ordinary purposes?--_Weekly Advocate_, Baton Rouge, La., Jan. 17, 1858.

A very large edition of this speech was printed at Washington, immediately after its delivery. Another appeared at Boston, with a portrait; and another at San Francisco, with the Republican Platform. While the Rebellion was still warring on the National Government, an edition was brought out in New York by the “Young Men’s Republican Union,” to which Mr. Sumner prefixed a Dedication to the Young Men of the United States, which will be found in its proper place, according to date, in this collection.

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A letter from that devoted friend of the Slave, the late George L. Stearns, of Boston, under date of March 1st, 1860, shows something of the outside prompting under which Mr. Sumner spoke.

“I have just read ----’s speech. He stands up to the mark _well_, for a politician; but we want one who believes a Man is greater than a President, and who would not lift his finger to obtain the best office in the gift of our nation, to raise this question above the political slough into its true position. Charles O’Conor, in his late speech in New York, affirmed, that, ‘if Slavery were not a wise and beneficent institution for the black as well as the white, it could not be defended.’ We want you to take up the gauntlet that he has thrown down so defiantly.”

A letter from William H. Brooks, of Cambridgeport, unconsciously harmonized with Mr. Stearns.

“Feeling that our nation is now in the very throes of her deliverance, and I trust her prompt deliverance, from bondage to her, not Thirty, but Three Hundred Thousand Tyrants, may I frankly say, that, if not inconsistent with your health and safety, which are on no consideration to be perilled, you could aid more than any single person, or score of them, in effectually accomplishing the great triumph.… The unseen forces of public opinion are gathering and forming for the great November conflict. Your long, enforced, and martyr silence will give a depth of impression and moving power and ten thousand echoes to your words beyond their accustomed might.”

Something about the menace of violence after this speech, with illustrations of its reception at the time, is postponed to an Appendix.

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Kansas was not admitted as a State into the Union until January 29, 1861, after the slaveholding Senators had withdrawn to organize the Rebellion, when the bill on which the present speech was made became a law.

SPEECH.

MR. PRESIDENT,--Undertaking now, after a silence of more than four years, to address the Senate on this important subject, I should suppress the emotions natural to such an occasion, if I did not declare on the threshold my gratitude to that Supreme Being through whose benign care I am enabled, after much suffering and many changes, once again to resume my duties here, and to speak for the cause so near my heart. To the honored Commonwealth whose representative I am, and also to my immediate associates in this body, with whom I enjoy the fellowship which is found _in thinking alike concerning the Republic_,[25] I owe thanks which I seize the moment to express for indulgence extended to me throughout the protracted seclusion enjoined by medical skill; and I trust that it will not be thought unbecoming in me to put on record here, as an apology for leaving my seat so long vacant, without making way, by resignation, for a successor, that I acted under the illusion of an invalid, whose hopes for restoration to natural health continued against oft-recurring disappointment.

When last I entered into this debate, it became my duty to expose the Crime against Kansas, and to insist upon the immediate admission of that Territory as a State of this Union, with a Constitution forbidding Slavery. Time has passed, but the question remains. Resuming the discussion precisely where I left it, I am happy to avow that rule of moderation which, it is said, may venture to fix the boundaries of wisdom itself. I have no personal griefs to utter: only a vulgar egotism could intrude such into this Chamber. I have no personal wrongs to avenge: only a brutish nature could attempt to wield that vengeance which belongs to the Lord. The years that have intervened and the tombs that have opened[26] since I spoke have their voices, too, which I cannot fail to hear. Besides, what am I, what is any man among the living or among the dead, compared with the question before us? It is this alone which I shall discuss, and I begin the argument with that easy victory which is found in charity.

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The Crime against Kansas stands forth in painful light. Search history, and you cannot find its parallel. The slave-trade is bad; but even this enormity is petty, compared with that elaborate contrivance by which, in a Christian age and within the limits of a Republic, all forms of constitutional liberty were perverted, all the rights of human nature violated, and the whole country held trembling on the edge of civil war,--while all this large exuberance of wickedness, detestable in itself, becomes tenfold more detestable, when its origin is traced to the madness for Slavery. The fatal partition between Freedom and Slavery, known as the Missouri Compromise,--the subsequent overthrow of this partition, and the seizure of all by Slavery,--the violation of plighted faith,--the conspiracy to force Slavery at all hazards into Kansas,--the successive invasions by which all security there was destroyed, and the electoral franchise itself was trodden down,--the sacrilegious seizure of the very polls, and, through pretended forms of law, the imposition of a foreign legislature upon this Territory,--the acts of this legislature, fortifying the Usurpation, and, among other things, establishing test-oaths, calculated to disfranchise actual settlers friendly to Freedom, and securing the privileges of the citizen to actual strangers friendly to Slavery,--the whole crowned by a statute, “the be-all and the end-all” of the whole Usurpation, through which Slavery was not only recognized on this beautiful soil, but made to bristle with a Code of Death such as the world has rarely seen,--all these I fully exposed on a former occasion. And yet the most important part of the argument was at that time left untouched: I mean that found in the Character of Slavery. This natural sequel, with the permission of the Senate, I now propose to supply.

Motive is to Crime as soul to body; and it is only when we comprehend the motive that we can truly comprehend the Crime. Here the motive is found in Slavery and the rage for its extension. Therefore, by logical necessity, must Slavery be discussed,--not indirectly, timidly, and sparingly, but directly, openly, and thoroughly. It must be exhibited as it is, alike in its influence and its animating character, so that not only outside, but inside, may be seen.

This is no time for soft words or excuses. All such are out of place. They may turn away wrath; but what is the wrath of man? This is no time to abandon any advantage in the argument. Senators sometimes announce that they resist Slavery on political grounds only, and remind us that they say nothing of the moral question. This is wrong. Slavery must be resisted not only on political grounds, but on all other grounds, whether social, economical, or moral. Ours is no holiday contest; nor is it any strife of rival factions, of White and Red Roses, of theatric Neri and Bianchi; but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong, between Good and Evil. Such a battle cannot be fought with rosewater. There is austere work to be done, and Freedom cannot consent to fling away any of her weapons.

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