Joseph Edgerton - The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery

At equal pace with the expansion of our territory has moved on and spread out the tide of human life, bearing on its bosom the religious faith of the christian, and the laws and institutions of the Celtic and German races purified by christianity and the love of freedom.

At the first census in 1790, the population of the United States amounted to within a fraction of 4,000,000 of people. In 1860 it will reach, if not exceed 30,000,000, and it is no vain boast to say, that in no other nation of equal population, is there so much of individual freedom, or so large an aggregate of rational, substantial, human happiness.

Such are the fruits of over seventy years trial and experience of the Federal Union and Constitution, and the heart of every true American patriot swells with a just and noble pride as he contemplates them, and more than this, it swells with an earnest longing – an ardent desire – that prompts him as he looks into the future, to breathe to the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, the prayer – "God save the Union and the Constitution!"

No American heart that honors God, and truly loves America and the human race, has ever yet dared to think, much less to say, of the Constitution of the United States, as William Lloyd Garrison has said, " It is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. "

The United States embrace a territory not touching either extreme of torrid heat or artic cold, but within those extremes – various in soil, in climate, in productions – a land we may say in the oriental style of Scripture language, "flowing with milk and honey," "a land of corn, and wine and oil," fitted by Providence for the home of races of differing constitutions, habits, capacities and pursuits; and practically we know, that within our borders we have alike the European, the Asiatic, the aboriginal American and the African races, with all their strongly marked constitutional peculiarities; but our system of State and Federal Government can give to each race the measure of power and protection due to each.

The admirer of natural scenery, who from some commanding point of view, surveys an expanse of mountain and valley, and plain and lake and river, clothed in the summer sunlight, does not pause and check his pleasing and elevated emotions, to note with cynical eye, each stagnant pool, or noxious weed, or unsightly decaying tree that may lie within the limits of the noble vision. He rather admires the harmony and beauty of the whole, though he may know that there are within the scene before him imperfect, unbeautiful and unwholesome things. Such is the feeling of the patriot of well-balanced mind, when he contemplates the Union and the Constitution as they are. While he knows the imperfection of all work of human hands, he accepts and admires in the political work of our fathers, the grandeur and symmetry of the whole, and will not condemn or destroy it because it is not in all its parts a perfect work.

But such is not the feeling of every American mind. There are men assuming to be philosophical and practical statesmen – men who rank with a great political party as their representative men, who in all their views and studies of the American Union, see only or chief of all, " the mean and miserable rivulet of black African slavery, stealing along turbid and muddy, as it is drawn from its stagnant sources in the Slave States ." I quote the language of William H. Seward, in his speech at Chicago on Oct. 2d, 1860.

This Republican statesman, familiar with the pages of history, which teaches him that the rivulet of domestic servitude has run among the nations almost coeval with the stream of time; familiar by personal observation with the aspect and condition of the civilization of Europe, where constitutional freedom is almost unknown; familiar also with the history, the institutions and the society of every portion of the American Union, and with the blessings which that Union, above all other systems of government the world has ever known, confers upon its people; sees all the glories of the Union dimmed, all its harmony destroyed, all its substantial benefits turned like Dead sea fruit to ashes and bitterness, when he beholds "the mean and miserable rivulet of black African slavery, stealing along turbid and muddy from its stagnant sources in the Slave States."

With this one idea ruling his mind, Mr. Seward labors in the Senate and before the people with all the learning and ability he possesses to rouse one half of the nation against the other to dam up, dry up or blot out "this mean and miserable rivulet." From Boston to Kansas, like another Peter the Hermit, he preaches a crusade against the institutions and people of the Southern States. He proclaims an irrepressible conflict between free labor and slave labor, between Free States and Slave States, between white suffrage and equality and black suffrage and equality, and he utters as he goes the atrocious sentiment, not of the statesman, but of the demagogue, " Henceforth I put my trust not in my native countrymen, but I put it in the exile from foreign lands ." I, the oracle of the Republican party, in effect says Mr. Seward, will not trust as the conservators of the American principle of freedom and the American system of free government, the sons of the men who fought the battles of American Independence, but I and they will trust the exiles from foreign lands – from Europe, from Asia and from Africa, to establish here upon the battle fields, rich with the blood of our fathers, the principles of universal suffrage and universal equality.

Mr. Seward hangs out the signal of uncompromising conflict. This, in effect, if not in words, says he, is the Holy Land of freedom and universal equality. Infidels and barbarians possess it in all its Southern borders, and hold there black christians their coequals in all the rights of men in an inhuman bondage. Let us then by the aid of the exiles from foreign lands overcome the infidels and barbarians, and plant in all that fair domain the standard of the higher law, of universal suffrage and universal equality; and forthwith all through the North, Republican Wide-Awakes muster their forces for this great political crusade. I am drawing no fancy picture. What I say is but a legitimate comment upon the language of Mr. Seward in his Chicago speech, already referred to, and in other speeches he has made during his recent pilgrimage through the North-west. Mr. Seward is the self-constituted exponent of the higher law in its application to political parties and measures, and to Constitutions and systems of government, but in his pursuit of one idea, he seems to forget that the sacred volume to which we all look as the source of our best and truest knowledge of the will and purposes of Providence concerning man, if it clearly reveals to us any thing, clearly reveals this fact, which all human history confirms: that man is not a perfect being; that this earth is not a perfect state; that disorder, and imperfection, and inequality, and change must ever pervade it, and mark all human institutions. This earth and its mortal life is but the threshhold – the vestibule of human destiny – that reaches far into the eternal ages. Believe, as he may, in human equality or in the perfectibility of humanity, no such theory has ever yet been realized, nor will it ever be realized in this probationary state of man. Philosophy may teach – political constitutions may declare, and political parties may attempt to enforce as a practical truth, that all men are equal. No such theory will ever find a perfect realization in any system of human government.

In his speech at Chicago, before referred to, Mr. Seward vauntingly asserts, as the idea or creed of the Republican party, as if to that party alone were committed the oracles of freedom – "That civilization is to be maintained and carried on upon this continent by Federal States, based upon the principles of free soil, free labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage." I pause but a moment here to note the pregnant meaning of this authoritative declaration of the representative man of the Northern sectional party. It means no less than that there shall be no Federal States on this continent where free soil, free labor, free speech, equal rights and universal suffrage shall not prevail. In other words it means that domestic servitude as now known in the Southern States of the American Union, shall be abolished , and that there shall be equal rights and universal suffrage among all the races who may inhabit the American continent. Herein is the end or ultimate goal of the higher law of Mr. Seward, and its coadjutor, "the irrepressible conflict."