The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030903797 Comdl Unlw«rilty Library E660 .V95 1875 •ches of Daniel W. Voorhees 3 1924 030 903 797 z^^-'^^-^^ SPEECHES DANIEL W. VOORHEES OF INDIANA EMBRACING HIS MOST PROMINENT FORENSIC,. POLITICAL, OCCASIONAL, AND LITERARY ADDRESSES COMPILED BY HIS SON CHARLES S. VOORHEES A SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH CINCINNATI EOBEET CLAEKE & CO., PEINTBES 1875 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, By CHARLES S. VOORHEES, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Stereotyped by Ogden, Campbell & Co., Cincinnati: TABLE OF CONTENTS. 1. DEFENSE OF JOHN E. COOK. An argument delivered at Charlestown, Virginia, November 8, 1859, upon the trial of John E. Cook, indicted for Treason, Murder, and inciting slaves to rebel, at the Harper's Ferry Insur- rection 1 2. THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. An address delivered before the Literary Societies of the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville, July 4, 1860 27 3. THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. A speech delivered in the House of Representatives on the 18th of February, ]sCi3, on " An Act to indemnify the President and other persons for suspending the privilege of the writ of Habeas Corpus, and acts done in pursuance thereof" 62 4 THE CONSCRIPT ACT. A speech delivered in the House of Representatives, February 23, 1863, on the Conscription Bill 103 5. THE STATE OF THE UNION. A speech delivered in the House of Representatives, March 5, 1S64 127 6. THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT. A speech on the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, deliv- ered in the House of Representatives, January 9, 1865 175 7. DEFENSE OF MARY HARRIS. An argument delivered at Wa.shington, D. C, July 18, 1865, upon the trial of Mary Harris, indicted for the murder of Adoniram J. Burroughs 1°^ (iii) iv CONTENTS. S. RECONSTEUCTION. A speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives, January 9, 1866 229 •9. RECONSTRUCTION OF GEORGIA. A speech delivered in the House of Representatives, April 7, 1869, on a "Bill to promote the reconstruction of the State of Georgia" v 260 10. THE NATIONAL DEBT. A speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives, January 28, 1870 271 11. RECONSTRUCTION OF GEORGIA. A speech delivered in the House of Representatives, December 21, 1869, on a "Bill to promote the reconstruction of the State of Georgia" 303 12. ENFORCEMENT OF THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT. A speech delivered in the House of Representatiyes, February 15, 1871, on a " Bill for the enforcement of the Fifteenth Amend- ment" s 328 13. DEFENSE OF HARRY CRAWFORD BLACK. An argument delivered at Frederick City, Maryland, April 21, 1871, upon the trial of Harry Crawford Black, indicted for the murder of Col. W. W. McKaig, Jr 343 14. PLUNDER OF ELEVEN STATES BY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. A speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives, March 23, 1872 382 15. AMEEICAN EELATIONS WITH SPAIN AND CUBA. A speech delivered in the House of Eepresentatives, February 23, 1872, on a "Bill making appropriations for the consular and diplomatic expenses of the Government, for the year ending the 30th of June, 1873" 415 16. EEPLY TO SENATOR MOETON. A speech delivered at the Opera House, Terre Haute, August 7, 1874 439 CONTENTS. 17. FINANCIAL CONPITION OF THE COUNTRY. A speech delivered at Greencastio, Ind., September 24, 1874 469 la TEIBUTE TO JUDGE LAW. Bemarks made before the Terre Haute Bar, October 10, 1873, on occasion of the decease of Judge John Law 501 19. INFLUENCE OF THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES ON THE PRO- GRESS OF CIVILIZATION. An address delivered before the Literary Societies of the University of Missouri, June 22, 1ST4 506 20. TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR MORSE. Remarks made at a meeting held in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1S72, in commemoration of the memory of the great philosopher and discoverer, Samuel F. B. Morse 540 21. LOUISIANA AFFAIRS. Remarks made in the House of Representatives, January 22, 1872, npon the diiBculties attending the organization of the Legislature of Louisiana, in January, 1872 546 22. ENFORCEMENT OF THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT. A speech delivered in the House of Representatives, April 6, 1871, upon the bill to enforce the provisions of the fourteenth amend- ment to the constitution of the United States „.... 554 23. PROTECTION OF AMERICAN CITIZENS ABROAD. Remarks made in the House of Representatives, January 6, 1871, upon the imprisonment of American Minister, Washburn, and other American citizens, in Paraguay 56S 24. TRIBUTE TO JUDGE HUNTINGTON. Remarks made in the United States Circuit Court, at Indianapolis, Indiana, May 7, ISC';, announcing the death of Judge Elisha M. Huntington 571 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. The publisher of this work having committed to the writer the task of prefacing the book with some explanatory remarks and a short biographical sketch of Hon. Daniel W. Voorhees, it is deemed proper to state at the outset, that, for many years past, Mr. Voorhees has received, from all parts of the Union, many letters requesting copies of one or another of his speeches. For example, his speech in defense of John B. Cook, in Vir- ginia, in 1859, has been in constant demand ever since that time; and now, after the lapse of fifteen years, scarcely a week passes without a request to Mr. Voorhees by letter, often from the most remote parts of the Union, for a printed copy of that speech. The same is true of the defense of Mary Harris ia Washington City, the defense of Harry Crawford Black in Maryland, and a number of literary and Congressional ad- dresses. These,, with other considerations, induced 'the publisher to believe that a volume of Mr. Voorhees' speeches was a desidera- tum with the reading public, especially with young professional men, politicians, and persons of a literary turn of mind. Be- sides, it was certain that the " Old Guard," Voorhees' constitu- ents for so many years — such constituents as no other man ever had — would be pleased to see published in permanent form, those speeches that had delighted, instructed, and encouraged them.in days gone by. The publisher having promised a biographical sketch, fulfills his promise more literally than he intended. After many importunities, he has had very little help from Mr. Voorhees, nothing more than a few dates, etc., he insisting, in his modest (vii) TJii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. and princely way, that he had not done or said anything of sufficient importance for a biography. But the writer of this sketch, having known Mr. Voorhees intimately for nearly two decades, is able to give some particulars of his life and public services. Daniel W. Yoorhees was born on the 26th of September, 1827, in Butler county, Ohio, and was only about two months old when his parents moved to Fountain county, Indiana, where they now reside. His father, Stephen Voorhees, was born in Mercer county, Kentucky, in 1798. He emigrated, when young, to Butler county, Ohio, and in December, 1827, removed -to Fountain county, Indiana, on the farm on which he now lives. D. W. Voorhees' grandfather, Peter Voorhees, was born in New Jersey, and soon after the close of the Eevolutionary War, emigrated to Kentucky. Peter Voorhees' wife was born in Bryant's Station, then a fort. Her name was Van Arsdale. Her father, Luke Van Arsdale, fought gallantly at the battle of Blue Licks, and distinguished himself in several Indian battles under the celebrated Col. Daniel Boone. His great grandfather, Stephen Voorhees, for whom his father was named, was a Eevolutionary soldier, under Washington, and fought at Princeton, Monmouth, and other celebrated fields. Mr. Voorhees' ancestors, on the father's side, came from Hol- land, and the original name was Van Voorhees. En passant, Mr. Voorhees fires with indignation whenever anything is said to the disparagement of the Hollanders, and he always dwells with enthusiasm upon the valor and genius of the Dutch Ee- publie. Mr. Voorhees' mother, Eachel Elliott, was born in Bal- timore county, Maryland. She is still living, and is a lady of superior natural endowments and great sensibility. Her people were originally from the north of Ireland. She was married to Stephen Voorhees in 1821, and D. W. Voorhees was their third child. The subject of this sketch was raised on a farm about ten miles from Covington, in Fountain county. There he remained and helped to open a large farm, until he was sent to college iu BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. IX 1845. Thi3 farm life of Mr. Voorhees has always boon of great value to him in his public caroor. It has enabled him to got close to the hearts of the people, and often in his political speeches, ■while discoursing on public affairs, in a manner en- tirely satisfactory to the severest literary critics, he has given the most apt, witty, and humorous illustrations from farm life, that made the sun-browned sons of toil feel that " Dan " was with them and of them. It was in 1845 that he entered college at the Asbury Univer- eity, at Greencastle, Putnam county, Indiana, where he was graduated in 1S49. Here it was that he married his wife, and from the time of his first entrance into college, Putnam county has always stood by him through good or evil report. His col- lege life gave ample warrant for his future career. Shortly after he left college, the writer of this sketch heard from one of the professors of the institution, Prof Larrabee, a glowing account of Mr. Yoorhees as " a natural orator," coupled with a prediction that he would " take rank with the first men of the nation." Immediately after leaving college Mr. Voorhees went into the law oflBce of Lane & Wilson, at Crawfordsville, Indiana, as a student of law. The following spring, he settled at Covington, Indiana, the county-seat of Fountain county. Hon. Edward A. Hannegan, formerly a United States Senator from the State of Indiana, being a casual listener to a "Fourth of July speech " by Mr. Voorhees, then a raw stripling, immediately proposed a law partnership, which was accepted, and Mr. Voorhees, in April, 1852, went into Mr. Hannegan's oflSce. In June, 1853, Mr. Voorhees was appointed prosecuting attorney of the Circuit Court by Grov. Joseph A. Wright, in which position he made a fine reputation as a criminal lawyer, and broke up a " nest " of notorious malefactors, whose headquarters were in Lafayette, Indiana. In 1856, Mr. Voorhees was nominated by acclamation, on motion of Hon. John Pettit, as the Democratic candidate for Congress in his district. Two years before, the Eopublican candidate had carried that district by a majority of two thou- BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Band six hundred and nineteen. In this contest, in 1856, Mr. Voorhees was beaten by Hon. James Wilson, a very talented Eepublican, by a majority of only two hundred and thirty votes. In November, 1857, Mr. Voorhees, at the earnest solicita- tion of the accomplished Judge Huntington, removed to Terra Haute, in Vigo county, Indiana, situate on the "Wabash river, one of the most charming and enterprising cities in the West, ■with a population, at the present time, of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants. In April, 1858, he was appointed United States District At- torney for the State of Indiana, by President James Buchanan, in which position he still further increased his reputation as a lawyer and an orator. In the Congressional elections of 1860, 1862, and 1864, Mr. Voorhees was successful ; but in the election of the last-named year, although his majority was six hundred and thirty-four, yet the "temper of the times" was such that his election was successfully contested by his opponent, Hon. Henry D. Wash- burn. In 1866, Mr. Voorhees refused to become a candidate for Con- gress, but he was elected to that position in 1868, and again in 1870. In 1872, he was defeated for Congress by Horace Greeley, in the name of Hon. Morton C. Hunter. As a precursor of the late war, the " insurrection, treason, and murder " at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in which old John Brown, John E. Cook, and others were concerned, and for which they were convicted and hanged in 1859, will always stand prominent in the history of the country. At that time the gifted and gallant Ashbel P. Willard was Governor of Indiana. He was the champion of the Indiana Democracy. With sorrow and dismay his friends learned that the John B. Cook arrested with old " Ossawatomie Brown " was a brother of Governor Willard's wife! Here was a seeming dilemma. But there was no dilemma with the chivalrous Willard ; he was not the man to turn his back on a brother or a friend'. His first thought was "Dan Voorhees;" but Voorhees was not BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xi in the capital. He was in Vincennes trying an important gov- «)rnment cause. Willard sent a messenger for him. The busi- ness was made known to Judge Michael F. Burke, then on the circuit bench, who immediately continued the cause, and Mr. Toorhees at once went to Indianapolis to see Governor Willard. Botbro he met Governor "Willard, he was accosted by several friends, who advised him not to go to Virginia to defend Cook. fle listened to all they had to say, and then asked: "When does the next train go East? I am going to defend my friend's brother without regard to consequences." He went that day, and took a prominent part in that celebrated trial. The result is well known. While old John Brown was convicted of murder and treason, Mr. Yoorhees succeeded in having a Virginia jury bring in a verdict against John E. Cook for murder only; bringing the case within the constitutional power of the gov- ernor, in the exercise of the pardoning prerogative — ^which, however, the governor, Hon. Henry A. Wise, refused to extend, and John E. Cook was hanged with the other prisoners. This trial, however, was the beginning of Mr. Voorbees' national reputation. His si^eech was listened to, by the vast audience, with the most rapt attention, and was received with the most unqualified approbation. He was the recipient of the most enthusiastic congratulations. The speech was published all over the country, and, like the author of " Childe Harold," he might truly have said, " I awoke one morning and found myself famous." From this time forward, Mr. Voorbees has held a conspicuous place in the eyes of the public. At the, bar, on the "stump," and in the halls of Congress, he has been a man of mark. The speeches here collated will speak for themselves. However highly they may be appreciated by strangers, it is certain that BO correct estimate can be formed of Mv. Voorbees by those who have never met him, and never heard him speak. In the famous trial of Mary Harris, in Washington City, for killing Adoniram J. Burroughs, the jury, after having been in consultation fifteen or twenty minutes, returned a verdict of Xii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. acquittal. The trial of Harry Crawford Black, at Frederick City, Maryland, indicted for killing the seducer of his sister^ terminated in a verdict of "not guilty," after the jury had been absent from the court-room one hour and five minutes. Of Mr. Yoorhees' Congressional career, his political principles, and his powers as a parliamentary orator and statesman, the speeches here presented will afford a good illustration. From the sobriquet so generally applied to Mr. Voorhees, of the "Tall Sycamore of the Wabash," it will be understood that he is of high stature. He is about six feet one inch tall, and weighs over two hundred pounds. He is of fair complexion, dark -gray hazel eyes, and carries himself very erect. He was married early in life, in 1850, to a most estimable lady. Miss Anna Hardesty, of Greencastle, Indiana. This volume is now committed to the public, with the hop© that some contribution is thus made to the forensic and political literature of the country, and something done to perpetuate the fame of a distinguished gentleman, whose name will long bo remembered in the annals of the State and Nation. A. B. CAELTON. Tebeb Haittb, Ind., January^ 1875. DEFENSE OF JOHN E. COOK. [An argament delivered at Charlestown, Virginia, Novembers, 1859, upon, the trial of JoHX E. Cook, indicted for treason, murder, and inciting, slaves to rebel, at the Harper's Ferry insurrection.] With the Permission of the Court — Gentlemen of the Jury : — The place I occupy in standing^ before you at this time is one clothed with a responsibility as weighty and as delicate as \^■as ever assigned to an ad- vocate in behalf of an unfortunate fellow-man. No lan- guage that I can employ could give any additional force to the circumstances by which I am surrounded, and whicK press so beavily upon the public mind as well as on my own. I come, too, as a stranger to each one of you. Your faces I know only by the common image we bear to our Maker; but in your exalted character of citizens of the ancient and proud Commonwealth of Virginia, and of the American Union, I bear to you a passport of friendship and a letter of introduction. I come from the sunset-side of your western mountains — from beyond the rivers that now skirt the borders of your great State ; but I come not as an alien to a foreign land, but rather as one who returns to the home of his ancestors, and to the household from which he sprang. I come here not as an enemy, but as a friend, with interests common with yourselves, hoping for your hopes, and praying that the prosperity and glory of Virginia may be perpetual. Nor do I forget that the very soil on which I live in my western home was once owned by this venerable Common- wealth as much as the soil on which I now stand. Her laws there once prevailed, and all her institutions were there established as they are here. Not only my own State of Indiana, but also four other great States in the North- west, stand as enduring and lofty monuments of Virginia's 2 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. magnanimity and princely liberality. Her donation to the general government made them sovei'eign States ; and since Ood gave the fruitful land of Canaan to Moses and Israel, such a gift of present and future empire has never been made to any people. Coming from the bosom of one of these States, can I forget the fealty and duty which I owe to the supremacy of your laws, the sacredness of your cit- izenship, or the sovereignty of your State? Eather may the child forget its pai'ent, and smite with unnatural hand the author of its being ! The mission on which I have visited your State is to me, and to those who are with me, one full of the bitterness and poison of calamity and grief. The high, the sacred, the holy duty of private friendship for a family fondly be- loved by all who have ever witnessed their illustrations of the purest social virtues, commands, and alone commands, my presence here. And, while they are overwhelmed by the terrible blow which has fallen upon them through the .action of the misguided young man at the bar, yet I speak their sentiments as well as my own when I say that one .gratification, pure and unalloyed, has been afforded us since our melancholy arrival in your midst. It has been to witness the progress of this court, from day to day, sur- rounded by all that is calculated to bias the minds of men, but pursuing with calmness, with dignity, and impartiality the true course of the law and the even pathway of justice, I would not be true to the dictates of my own heart and judgment did I not bear voluntary and emphatic witness to the wisdom and patient kindness of his honor on the bench; the manly and generous -spirit which has character- ized the counsel for the prosecution ; the true, devoted, and highly professional manner of the local counsel here for the ■defense ; the scrupulous truthfulness of the witnesses who have testified, and the decorum and justness of the juries who have acted their parts from the first hour of this court to the present time— I speak in the hearing of the country. An important and memorable page in history is being writ- ten. Let it not be omitted that Virginia has thrown around a band of deluded men, who invaded her soil with treason DEFENSE OP JOHN B. COOK. 3 aad murder, all the safeguards of her constitution and laws, and placed them in her courts upon an equality with her own citizens. I know of what I speak, and my love of truth and sense of right forbid me to be silent on thia point. Gentlemen, I am not here on behalf of this pale-faced, fair-haired wanderer from his home and the paths of duty, to talk to you about technicalities of law born of laborious analysis by the light of the midnight lamp. I place him be- fore you on no such ground. He is in the hands of friends who abhor the conduct of which he has been guilty. But does that fact debar him of human sympathy ? Does the sinful act smite the erring brother with a leprosy which for- bids the touch of the hand of affection ? Is his voice of re- pentance and appeal for forgiveness stifled in his mouth ? If so, the meek Sa\-ior of the world would have recoiled with horror from Mary Magdalene, and spurned the repent- ant sorrow of Peter, who denied him. For my client I avow every sympathy. Fallen and undone, broken and ruined as he is by the fall, yet, from the depths of the fearful chasm in which he lies, I hear the common call which the wretched make for sympathy more clearly than if it issued from the loftiest pyramid of wealth and power. If He who made the earth, and hung the sun and moon and stars on high to give it light, and created mau a joint heir of eternal wealth, and put within him an immortal spark of the celestial flame which surrounds his throne, could re- member mercy in executing justice when His whole plan of divine government was assailed and deranged; when His law was set at defiance and violated ; when the purity of Eden had been defiled by the presence and counsels of the serpent — why, so can I, and can you, when the wrong and the crime stand confessed, and every atonement is made to the majesty of the law which the prisoner has in his power to make. Let us come near to each other and have a proper under- standing. I am laboring with you for an object. I think I know something of the human heart, and of the leading attributes by which it is governed throughout the world. SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. By virtae of those attributes, I feel that we may annihilate the distance that separates our homes, sweep away all blind- ing excitement, and sit down together and reason upon this most tragic and melancholy affair as becomes citizens of the same government, proud of the same lineage, actuated by the same interests, and forever linked to the same des- tiny. You are not merely impaneled in your capacity as jurors to pass upon the life of this erratic youth before you, liut the nation can not be divorced from a deep and per- manent interest in your deliberations. The crime for which the law claims his life as forfeit is one connected with a question of the weightiest national import — a ques- tion which, without any fault of yours, has rudely strained and shaken the bonds which embrace and hold together the States of this Union. This trial is incident to that question, and must be met in the face of the whole nation, and in the view of the American people, as a matter of universal interest and concern. The very nature of the offense now under discussion lifts us all to a point of ob- servation on which statesmen and patriots have long bent tbeir anxious looks. And the pressing, ever present, and determined question of the hour which now sits with you in the jury-box, and will retire with you to your delibera- tions on your verdict, is, how shall you most fully meet the requirements of the Amei'ican people at large; best con- duce to the peace and repose of the Union ; allay the rush- ing winds that are abroad on the face of the great deep ; say peace, be still, to the angry elements of passion and treasonable agitation, and at the same time do all your duty as honest and conscientious men administering the laws of your State? If it shall be in my power, in some measure, to point out the course by which these great objects tnay be attained, I shall mark this, otherwise sad day on which I address you, as the brightest to me in the calendar of time. And, further, if these objects are to be attained on your part by invoking into your midst, and following the winning coun- sels of the meek-eyed and gentle angel of mercy — if you can faithfully discharge your oath as jurors, and, at the DEFENSE OF JOUN E. COOK. same time, best meet the obligations which rest upon you as American citizens, by tempering the bitter cup, which justice commends to the Ups of tlie prisoner with the in- gredient of clemency, I know you, by the universal law of the human heart, will rejoice in such an opportunity, and join in the public and private happiness which will flow from your verdict. l>y the help of God, and appealing to Him for the purity of the motives which animate my breast, I now proceed to demonstrate such a course as both just and wise in the case of John E. Cook. First of all things, gentlemen of the jury, is your duty to Virginia. Whatever she requires at your hands, that you are to give. Your first love belongs to her ; she is the matron who has nursed you, and the Queen Mother to whom you owe allegiance. As an advocate and defender it home of the doctrines 0|f the State-rights men of the Bchool of 1798, I do not come here to ask you to abate one jot ortittle of your affection and jealousy for the honor and interest of A'irginia. Indeed, were such an invoca- tion necessary, which I know it is not, I would invoke you by the great names of your history, by the memory of your ancient renown, by the thrilling associations of the classic soil on which we stand, and by the present commanding attitude which your Commonwealth holds before the world, to be true and loyal to what she has been, what she is, and what she hopes to be. But how stands Virginia in reference to the assault which was made upon her citizens and her soil at Harper's Ferry on the 17th day of October, 1859 ; and what vindica- tion does she need at your hands for the outrage ? Are the circumstances such as to require of her re-enactment of the Mosaic law, repealed by the benign teachings of the K^azarene on the shores of Galilee ? Is she required to say, in a stern and inexorable spirit : " And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life. " Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. 6 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHBES. " Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe fof Btripe ?" Not so. She asks nothing of the kind at your hands. Punishment has already been swift and sure. The measure of her vengeance for the great wrong committed against her is full, and her vindication is ample before the world. She met her invaders on the spot, and those who lifted their hands against her are, most of them, in the graves to which Virginians consigned them ; a few bound in her prisons, and a few others wanderers and fugitives on the face of the earth. The executive and citizens of your State guided the bolt, which fell upon this mad offspring of a loathsome fanaticism, and the invasion perished at a single blow. And in the spirit of the answer of Cushi to King David, I would say to you : " The enemies of the State of Virginia, and all that rise against her to do her hurt, be as these men are." But as the great King of Israel rose up and went to his chamber, and wept over the untimely fall of Absalom, the rebellious son of his own loins, who had lifted his paricidal hand against the life of an indulgent father, may not the world commend a similar emotion in the breast of a jury of Virginians over the sorrowful fate of the youthful prisoner at the bar ! You will probably say that the lives of your citizens have been sacrificed. I answer that it is lamentably true ; but it is also true that life has been taken already to atone for life ; that the blood of murderers, older and wiser than the prisoner, has been poured out in response to the cry of the blood of your citizens from the ground. You will say that your State has been polluted by the foot of the traitor. I answer that the footstep rested but for a moment on your border, and was swept away by a whirlwind of patriotic indignation. You will say that your law has been violated; your dignity and honor as a free people insulted. I answer that, alas! it is too true • but I answer, also, that it is equally true that your laws tave been fully, thoroughly, and justly vindicated. Here in this court, again and again, the swoi'd of justice, wielded by an even hand, has fallen upon' the miserable remnant DEFENSE OF JOHN E. COOK. of the confederated band who impiously mocked the in- tegrity of the American Union by assailing the institutions of Virginia. The leader stands at the foot of the gallows, and its heights will expiate many crimes against the peace and laws of the country — not least amongst which is the crime of enlisting young men, such as the prisoner, in a cruise of piracy against you and me, and all law-abiding citizens of this happy Union. Let the leader of the mutiny on ship-board perish ; but if it appears that young men have followed false guidance, and been bound in the despotism of an iron will, order them back to duty, and give them one more chance to show whether they are worthy of life or death. Virginia can thus aflbrd to act. It is one of the chief blessings of power that it can extend mercy to the weak, and the crown jewel of courage is magnanimity to the fallen. But there is another point on which Virginia, though mourning for the death of her citizens, has triumphantly met the aspersions and calumnies of the enemies of her domestic institutions by reason of the late outbreak at Harper's Ferry. The institution of domestic slavery to- day stands before the world more fully justified than ever before in the history of this or, indeed, perhaps, of any other country. The liberator, urged on by false and spurious philanthropy, deceitful and sinister in its origin, and self- ish and corrupt in its practice, came into your midst to set the bondsman free, and though violence tore him from his master, though liberty was sounded in his ear, though a leader was proclaimed to lead him to the promised land, though an impiously self-styled Moses of deliverance came in the might of the sword and placed arras of bold attack and strong defense in his hands, yet what a spectacle do we behold ! The bondsman refuses to be free ; drop's the implements of war from his hands ; is deaf to the call of freedom ; turns against his liberators ; and, by instinct, obeys the injunction of Paul by returning to his master ! Shall this pass for nothing ? Shall no note be made of this piece of the logic of our government? Shall the voice of the African himself die unheard on the question of his 8 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. own freedom ? ITo. It shall be perpetuated. It shall be put in the record. The slave himself, under circumstances the most tempting and favorable to his love of freedom, if he has any, surrounded by men and scenes beckoning him on to vengeance, to liberty, and dominion, with the power of life and death over his master in his hands, and the world open before him, with the manacle and chain, which was never forged or welded except in the heated furnace of a riotous and prurient im- agination, stricken from his body, turns eagerly and fondly to the condition assigned him by the laws, not merely of Virginia, not merely of legislatures and law-makers, but by the law of his being, by the law which governs his re- lation to a white man wherever the contact exists, by the law which made the hewers of wood and drawers of water under a government formed by God himself, and which, since the world began down to the present time, has made, the inferior subordinate to the superior whenever and wherever two unequal races have been brought together. Let this fact go forth to the country. Let it be fully un- derstood by those men and women who languish and sigh over the condition of your institutions that their sympathy is repudiated, and that they themselves are despised by both races in the South. This, too, Virginia has proven. Is there anything left to be done by your verdict in per- emptorily taking the life of the prisoner, and offering it a sacrifice to heal the wrongs of your State ? I humbly conceive that Virginia in no respect needs such a sacrifice. This much I think I have shown. And now let us turn to the prisoner. If Virginia, through you, can afford to be clement, your inquiry will then be, is the object on whom you are asked to bestow your' clemency worthy to receive it ? I know the field on which I now enter is filled with preconceived ideas, but in the spirit of truth I shall explore it, and by the truth of what I say I am willing that my unfortunate client may be judged by you, and, moreover, by that God in whose presence no hidden things exist, and before whom, at no dis- tant day, you and I shall stand with him and see him and DEFENSE OF JOHN K. COOK. 9 know him as he is, and not as we see him and know him now, encompassed by the dread and awful calamities of the present hour. Who is John E. Oook ? He has the right himself to bo heard before you ; but I will answer for him. Sprung from an ancestry of loyal attachment to the American govern- ment, he inherits no blood of tainted impurity. His grand- father an officer of the- Tvcvolution, by which your liberty as well as mine was achieved, and his gray-haired father, who lives to weep over him, a soldier of the war of 1812, he brings no dishonored lineage into your presence. If the blood which flows in his veins has been offered against your peace, the same blood in the veins of those from whose loins he sprang has been offered in tierce shock of battle and foreign invasion in behalf of the people of Virginia and the Union. Born of a parent stock occupying the middle walks of life, and possessed of all those tender and domestic virtues which escape the contamination of those vices that dwell on the frozen peaks, or in the dark and deep caverns of society, he would not have been here had precept and example been remembered in the prodigal wanderings of Lis short and checkered life. Poor deluded boy ! wayward, misled child ! An evil star presided over thy natal hour and smote it with gloom. The hour ia which thy mother bore thee and blessed thee as her blue- eyed babe upon her knee is to her now one of bitterness aa she stands near the bank of the chill river of death and looks back on a name hitherto as unspotted and as pure as the unstained snow. May God stand by and sustain her, and preserve the mothers of Virginia from the waves of sorrow that now roll over her ! K'ot only the ancestry of John E. Oook, but all with whom his life is now bound up, stand before the country as your friends, and the friends of the constitution as handed down to us by the valor and wisdom of Washington. I will not shrink from the full and absolute recognition of my position. You and I, gentlemen of the jury, can have no secrets in this case from one another. We will with- draw the curtains, and look each other fully in the face. 10 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHBES. A citizen of the State in which I live,* who, by virtue of his brilliant and commanding intellect, and because of his sound and national principles, has been placed at an early period of his life in the highest position in the power of a State to give, is here beside me, and wears near his heart a sister's likeness to this boy. And there is not in the wide world, on the broad green face of the earth, a man, whose heart is not wholly abandoned to selfish depravity, who will not say that his presence here is commanded by honor, love, duty, and fidelity to all that ennobles our poor, fallen race. Let poor, miserable, despised, loathed, spurned, and abhorred miscreants cavil and revile at this proud act of painful duty. The true and eternal impulses of the human heart, the world over, constitute our appellate court. But the Grovernor of the State of Indiana needs neither vindication nor defense as a statesman of catholic opin- ions, nor as a man fully appreciating the duties of domestic life. Rather do I allude to his presence here and his posi- tion on the agitating questions of the day, to show that something else besides ancestral inheritance or the teach- ings of family connections has given the fatal bias to the prisoner's mind, which led him away from the worship of his own household gods, and into the communion of idol- aters, aliens, and enemies of the pure faith of an American citizen. And it seems to me, in view of the services which those who love this boy have rendered to their country, and in view of their devotion to the true construction of the constitution and the injunctions of our fathers, I might rehearse and quote to you with propriety a passage from the history of the latter years of the wisest king Israel ever had : " For it came to pass when 'Solomon was old that his wives turned away his heart after other gods ; and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God as was the heart of David, his father. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom, the abomina- tion of the Ammonites. "And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord, and went not fully after the Lord as did David, his father. *GoT. Ashbell P. Willard. DEFENSE OF JOHN E. COOK. 11 "And the Lord was angry with Solomon because his heart was turned from the Lord God of Israel which had appeared unto him twice. " And had commanded him concerning this thing that he should not go after other gods ; but he kept not that which the Lord commanded. "Wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant and my statutes which I commanded thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and will give it to thy eervant. " iSTotwithstauding, in thy days I will not do it for David, thy father's sake." The king, who was forgiven, and spared not merely his life, but his kingdom also, and his glory during his life- time because of the loyalty of his father who had gone before him, was old and very wise and full of experience. The prisoner before you has done no more than to disobey your covenants and statutes, and pleads that it has been done in the early morning of life, his first offense, and under the baneful influence of a school of philosophy which he once thought sincere and right, but which he now here, once and forever, to you, and before the world, renounces as false, pernicious, and pestilential. Shall man be more in- tolerant than God ? Shall you be less merciful than He, in whose presence your only plea will be mercy ! mercy I mercy ! "Will you say you dare not recommend mercy to John E. Cook, when divine examples and the appeals of your own conscience are on your side ? I will never be- lieve it until the appalling fact is announced by you. But let us advance. I have spoken of Cook, his parent- age, and connections. Again comes the question, who is he? And now I proceed to answer it with reference to the transactions at Harper's Ferry, and with reference to the facts of the case. Let us spread broad and wide before ■as the moving panorama of evil which reaches its denoue- ment at Harper's Ferry. There are hearts and feelings woven in. the destiny of the prisoner which will be relieved and solaced as far as 12 SPEECHES OE HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. truth dragged up from the depths of this misfortune can relieve and solace them. In an evil hour— and may it be forever accursed !— John E. Cook met John Brown on the prostituted plains of Kansas. On that field of fanaticism, three years ago, this fair and gentle youth vras thrown intd contact with the pirate and robber of civil warfare. To others whose sympathies he has enlisted I will leave the task of transmitting John Brown as a martyr and hero to posterity. In my eyes he stands the chief of criminals, the thief of property stolen — horses and slaves — from the citizens of Missouri, a falsifier here in this court, as I shall yet show, and a murderer not only of your citizens, but of the young men who have already lost their lives in his bloody foray on your border. This is not pleasant to say, but it is the truth, and, as such, ought to be a,nd shall be said. You have seen John Brown, the leade^. Now look on John Cook, the follower. He is in evidence before you. Never did I plead for a face that I was more willing to show. If evil is there, I have not seen it. ^f murder is there, I am to learn to mark the lines of the murderer anew. If the assassin is in that young face, then commend me to the look of an assassin. No, gentlemen, it is a face for a mother to love, and a sister to idolize, and in which the natural goodness of his heart pleads trumpet-tongued ■against the deep damnation that estranged him from home and its j)rinciples. Let us look at the meeting of these two men. Place them side by side. Put the young face by the old face ; the young head by the old head. We have seen somewhat of the history of the young man. Look now for a moment at the history of the old man. • He did not go to Kansas as a peaceable settler with his interests linked to the legit- imate growth and prosperity of that ill-fated Territory. He went there in the language of one who has spoken for him since his confinement here, as the Moses of the slaves' deliverance. He went there to fulfill a dream, which had tortured his brain for thirty years, that he was to be the leader of a second Exodus from bondage. He went there for war and not for peace. He went there to call around DEFENSE OP JOHN B. COOK. 13 him the wayward and unstable elements of a society in which the bonds of order, law, and religion were loosened, and the angry demon of discord was uncbained. Storm was his element hy his own showing. He courted the fierce tempest. He sowed the wind that he might reap the whirl- wind. He invoked the lightning and gloried in its devas- tation. Sixty summers and winters had passed over his head, and planted the seeds of spring and gathered the har- vests of autumn in the fields of his experience. He was the hero, too, of battles there. If laurels could be gained in such a fratricidal war as raged in Kansas, he had them on his brow. Ossawatomie was given to him, and added to his name by the insanity of the crazy crew of the North as Napoleon conferred the names of battle-fields on his favorite marshals. The action of Black Jack, too, gave him consideration, circumstance, and condition with philanthro- pists of bastard quality, carpet knight heroes in Boston, and servile followers of fanaticism throughout the country. His courage is now lauded to the skies by men who have none of it themselves. This virtue, I admit, he has — linked, however, with a thousand crimes. An iron will, with which to accomplish evil under the skillful guise of good, I also admit to be in his possession — rendering his influ- ence over the young all the more despotic and dangerous. Imagine, if you please, the bark on which this young man at the bar and all his hopes were freighted, laid along- side of the old weather-beaten and murderous man-of-war whose character I have placed before you. The one was stern and bent upon a fatal voyage. "Grim-visaged war, civil commotion, pillage and death, disunion and universal desolation thronged through the mind of John Brown. To him law was nothing, the Union was nothing, the peace and welfare of the country were nothing, the lives of the citizens of Virginia were nothing. Though a red sea of blood rolled before him, yet he lifted up his hand and cried forward. Shall he now shrink from his prominence, and attempt to shrivel back to the grade of his/ recruits and subalterns ? Shall he deny his bad pre-eminence, and say that he did not incite the revolt which has involved his 14 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. followers in ruin? Shall he stand before this court and before the country, and deny that he was the master spirit, and gathered together the young men who followed him to the death in this mad expedition ? No ! his own hand signs himself " Commander-in-chief," and shows the proper distinction which should be made between himself and the men who, in an evil moment, obeyed his orders. Now turn to the contrast again and behold the prisoner. Young and new to the rough ways of life, his unsandaled foot tender and unused to the journey before him, a waif on the ocean, at the mercy of the current which might assail him, and unfortunately endowed with that fearful gift which causes one to walk as in a dream through all the vicissi- tudes of a lifetime ; severed and wandering from the sus- taining and protecting ties of kindred, he gave, without knowing his, destination or purpose, a pledge of military obedience to John Brown, " Commander-in-chief." Gentlemen of the jury, there is one character which, in the economy of God's providence, has been placed upon the earth, but perhaps has never been fully drawn, and is most difficult to draw. It is the character of him who glides down the stream of life in a trance, dreams as he floats along, and sees visions ou either shore. Realities ex- ist in this world, no doubt. Practical views are certainly the best. But that impalpable, airy, and unsubstantial creations of the busy imagination come now and then, and lure the children of men to chase the "Will-o'-the-wisp" over the dangerous morass of life, is as true as that .we have our allotted • pilgimage of threescore years and ten. Who has not beheld the young man of strict moral culture, impressed with high principles of right, and gifted with good intellect, start out upon the dusty and well-beaten highway, which millions have trod before him, only to turn aside at the first invitiug grove of pleasure, the first call of some fanciful wood nymph, or to follow over the falls of ruin and death some meandering stream whose beauti- ful surface caught his eye? To such a one right and wrong are utter abstractions, and have no relation what- ever to things that exist. Give to such a mind a premise. DEFENSE OF JOHN K. COOK. 15 however false, and from it will spring a castle in the air with proportions as true and just as the most faultless architecture ever framed by mathematical skill. Some lay the foundation of their actions on the rock and are never overthrown. Some build upon the shifting sand, and fall when the storm comes. But in each instance the building may be the same in its symmetry. So with the deductions of the mind. All depends, not upon the reasoning, but upon the basis on which thought rests, and which sup- ports the edifice of our conclusions. The enthusiast and visionary takes his stand-point, and fixes the premises of his conduct from caprice and the circumstances which have obtained the ascendency over his mind. That such has been the character and such the conduct of the prisoner, without one spark of malignity of heart, or a single im- pulse of depravity, all the evidence in this case clearly establishes. Some general ideas gilded over by the alluring title of freedom were held out to him by Brown, and formed the basis of what seemed to him duty and honor. If ever man charged with crime was lifted up by the evidence of his case above the ignoble traits of the ordinary felon, the prisoner is thus distinguished. Instead of the eager and willing bandit, anxious to join a hoary leader bent on mis- chief — instead of the outlaw in mind and character gloomily and fiercely pondering revenge against his fellow-men for fancied or real injuries — we see from the evidence a kind though wayward heart, a cheerful, obliging, though vision- ary mind. With children everywhere he has been a favor- ite; and since little children crept upon the knee of the Savior eighteen hundred years ago, they have been the most infallible judges of a gentle and affectionate heart. Amiability and sweetness of temper he has carried with him through the world ; and he brings that trait now be- fore you to show that strong inducements and powerful in- centives must have been brought to bear in order to engage him in an enterprise so desperate as that for which his life is now so sadly imperiled. What motive controlled him to this action ? A crime without a motive can not 16 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. exist. Was it a motive of bloodshed ? His character for- bids the thought. Was it the motive of disloyalty to a government cemented by the blood of his ancestors, and defended by all who are near to him by ties of kindred ? IN'ot a syllable of proof warrants such a conclusion. Was his motive robbery or unholy gain ? Other fields are more inviting to the land pirate; but the thought of plunder never crossed a mind like his. One answer, and one alone, is to be given to all these questions. John Brown was the despotic leader and John E. Cook was an ill-fated follower of an enterprise whose horror he now realizes and deplores. I defy the man, here or elsewhere, who has ever knowa John E. Cook, who has ever looked once fully into his face, and learned anything of his history, to lay his hand on his heart and say that he believes him guilty of the origin or the results of the outbreak at Harper's Ferry. Here, then, are the two characters whom you are think- ing to punish alike. Can it be that a jury of Christian men will find no discrimination should be made between them ? Are the tempter and the tempted the same in your eyes ? Is the beguiled youth to die the same as the old offender who has pondered his crimes for thirty years? Are there no grades in your estimation of guilt? Is each one, without respect to age or circumstance, to be beaten with the same number of stripes? Such is not the law, human or divine. We are all to be rewarded according to our works, whether in punishment for evil, or blessings for good that we have done. You are here to do justice, and if justice requires the same fate to befall Cook that befalls Brown, I know nothing of her rules, and do not care to learn. They are as widely asunder in all that con- stitutes guilt, as the poles of the earth, and should be dealt with accordingly. It is in your power to do so, and by the principles by which you yourselves are willing to be judged hereafter, I implore you to do it ! Come with me, however, gentlemen, and let us approach the spot where the tragedy of the 17th of October oc curred, and analyze the conduct of the prisoner there. It 13 not true that he came as a citizen to your State and DEFENSE OF JOnX E. COOK. 17 gained a home in your midst to betray you. lie was or- dered to take his position at Harper's Ferry in advance of his party for the sole xmrpose of ascertaining whether Colonel Forbes, of Xew York, had divulged the plan. This order came from John Brown, the " Commander-in- chief," and was doubtless a matter of as much interest to others of prominent station as to himself. Cook simiily obeyed — no more. There is not a particle of evidence that he tampered with your slaves during his temporary resi- dence. On the contrary, it is admitted on all hands that he did not. His position there is well deiined. Nor was he from under the cold, stern eye of his leader. From the top of the mountain his chief looked down upon him, and held him as within a charmed circle. "Would Cook have lived a day had he tried to break the meshes which envi- roned him? Happy the hour in which he had made the attempt even had he perished, but, in fixing the measure of his guilt, the- circumstances by which he was surrounded must all be weighed. At every step we see him as the instrument in the hands of other men, and not as originating or advising- anything. His conduct toward that elegant and excellent gentle- man, Colonel Washington, is matter of sore regret to hi* friends, and also to himself. It is the one act most difficult of all others to reconcile with the well-known character of the man. But even there his offense is palliated by the- dictatorship which governed him. At the first glance we see a high-toned gentleman's hospitality abused. This has been used to aggravate his acknowledged ofienses. But the truth is, that when Cook first visited Colonel Washing- ton's house and received from him various acts of kindness, the thought that soon he was to be ordered back over that threshold in a hostile manner, had never entered his brain. The act was not Cook's but Brown's. The mere soldier is never punished for the outrages of his commander. And when you allow that the prisoner's great error was the en- listment under the leadership of Brown in the first place, then you must admit that everything else has followed in 18 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEBS. logical sequence. Obedience and fidelity to a leader in a false and pernicious cause are entitled to offset, in some measure at least, the evil that has flown from them. But the prisoner took certain weapons hallowed by great and sacred associations from the possession of Colonel Wash- ington. Ah ! in this he is once more consistent with the -visionary and dreamy cast of his mind. The act was not plunder, for he pledged their safe return to their owner, and has faithfully kept that pledge to the full extent of his power. But his wayward fancy was caught with the idea "that a spell of enchantment hung around them, and that, like the relics of a saint, they would bless and prosper any ■cause in which they were invoked. The sword of Fred- •erick the Great and the pistols of Lafayette linked to the name and family of Washington ! With what a charm «uch associations would strike the poeticj temperament of a young enthusiast embarked in an enterprise presenting to his perverted imagination the incentives of danger and _glory ; and if a new order of things was to be inaugurated, and storm and revolution were to shake the country and the world, like the heart of the Bruce, or the eagles of !N"apoleon, these warlike incentives of heroes were to fas- ■cinate and allure followers, and hallow the battles in which they were lifted. The mind of the prisoner is fully capa- ble of dreaming such dreams, and nursing such visions. But it has been said that Cook left the scene at Harper's Ferry at an early hour to avoid the danger of the occasion, ;and thus broke faith with his comrades in wronar. Even this is wholly untrue. Again we find the faithful, obedient subaltern carrying out the orders of his chief, and when ;he had crossed the river and fulfilled the commands of Brown, he did what Brown's own son would not do — by returning and exposing himself to the fire of the soldiers ;and citizens for the relief of Brown and his party. We see much, alas ! too much, to condemn in his conduct, but nothing to despise; we look in vain for an act that belongs to a base or malignant nature. Let the hand of chastise- ment fall gently on the errors of such as him, and reserve DEFENSE OF JOHN E. COOK. 19 jour heavy blows for such as commit crime from motives of depravity. Up to this point I have followed the prisoner, and traced his immediate connection with this sad afl'air. You have «verything before you. You have heard his own account of his strange and infatuated wanderings up and down the «arth with John Brown and his coadjutors ; how like a fiction it all seems, and j'et how lamentably true; how un- real to minds like ours ; how like the fever dream of a mind warped and disordered to the borders of insanity does the part which the prisoner has played seem to every practieal judgment! Is there nothing in it all that affords you the dearest privilege which man has on earth — the privilege of being merciful ? Why, the very thief on the cross, for a single moment's repentance over his crimes, received absolute forgiveness, and was rewarded with par- adise. But, gentlemen, in estimating the magnitude of this young man's guilt, there is one fact which is proven in his behalf by the current history of the day which you can not fail to consider. Shall John E. Cook perish, and the real criminals who for twenty years have taught the principles on which he acted hear no voice from this spot ? Shall no mark be placed on them ? Shall this occasion pass away, and the prime felons who attacked your soil and murdered jour citizens at Harper's Eerry escape ? The indictment before us says that the prisoner was " seduced by the false and malignant counsels of other traitorous persons." Never was a sentence written more just and true. "False and malignant counsels" have been dropping for years, as deadly and blighting as the poison of the Bohun Upas tree, from the tongues of evil and traitorous persons in that sec- tion of the Union to which the prisoner belongs. They have seduced not only his mind, but many others, honest and misguided like him, to regard the crime at Harper's Ferry as no crime, your rights as unmitigated wrongs, and the constitution of the country as a league with hell and a covenant with death. On the skirts of the leaders of abolition fanaticism in the North is every drop of blood 20 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. shed in the conflict at Harper's Ferry ; on their souls rests the crime of murder for every life there lost ; and all th& waters of the ocean could not wash the stains of slaughter from their treacherous and guilty hands. A noted Boston abolitionist (Wendell Phillips), a few days ago, at Brooklyn, l^ew York, in the presence of thou- sands, speaking of this tragic occurrence, says : " It is the- Datural result of anti-slavery teaching. For one, I accept it. I expected it." I, too, accept it in the same light, and so will the country. Those who taught, and not those who believed and acted, are the men of crime in the sight of God. And to guard other young men, so far as- in my power, from the fatal snare which has been tightened around the hopes and destiny of John E. Cook, and to show who are fully responsible for his conduct, I intend to- link with this trial the names of wiser and older men than he ; and, if he is to be punished and consigned to a wretched doom, they shall stand beside him in the public stocks; they shall be pilloried forever in public shame as " the evil and traitorous persons who seduced him to his ruin by their false and malignant counsels." The chief of these men, the leader of a great party, a senator of long standing, has announced to the country that there is a higher law than the constitution, which guarantees to each man the full exercise of his own incli- nation. The prisoner before you has simply acted on the law of Wm. H. Seward, and not the law of his fathers. He has followed the Mahomet of an incendiary faith. Come forth, ye sages of abolitionism, who now cower and skulk under hasty denials of your complicity with the- Moody result of your wicked and unholy doctrines, and take your places on the witness stand. Tell the world why this thing has happened. Tell this jury why they are try- ing John E. Cook for his life. You advised his conduct and taught him that he was doing right. You taught him a higher law and then pointed out to him the field of ac- tion. Let facts be submitted. Mr. Seward, in speaking of slavery, says : •' It can and must be abolished, and you and I must do it." What worse did the prisoner attempt? DEFENSE OF JOHN E. COOK. 21 Again, he said, upon this same suhject, " Circumstances determine possibilities ;" and doubtless the circumstances ^vith which John Brown had connected his plans made them possible in his estimation, for it is in evidence before the country, unimpeachod aud uncontradicted, that the great senator of Xew York had the whole matter submit- ted to him, and only whis[iered back, in response, that he- had better not boon told. He has boldly aianounced au irrepressible conflict between the free and slave States of this Union. These seditious phrases, "higher law" and " irrepressible conflict,'' warrant and invite the construc- tion which the prisoner and his young deluded companions placed upon them. Yet they are either in chains, with the frightful gibbet in full view, or sleep in dishonored graves, while the apostle and master-spirit of insurrection is loaded with honors and fares sumptuousl}'^ every day. Such is poor, short-handed justice in this world. An old man, and for long years a member of the l^ational Congress from Ohio, next shall testify here before you that he taught the prisoner the terrible error which now in- volves his life. Servile insurrections have forever been ou the tongue and lips of Joshua R. Giddings. He says " that when the contest shall come, when the thunder shall roll and the lightning flash, and when the slaves shall rise in the South, in imitation of the horrid scenes of the West Indies, when the Southern man shall turn pale and trem- ble, when your dwellings shall smoke with the torch of the incendiary, and dismay sit on each countenance, he will hail it as the approaching dawn of that political and moral millennium which he is well assured will come upon the world." The atrocity of these sentiments chills the blood of honest patriots, and no part of the prisoner's conduct equals their bloody import. Shall the old leader escape and the young follower die? Shall the teacher, whose doctrines told the prisoner that what he did was right, go unscathed of the lightning which he has unchained? If 60, Justice has fled from her temples on earth, and awaits us only on high to measure out what is right between maa and man. 22 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. The men who have misled this boy to his ruin shall here receive my maledictioBS. They shrink back from him now in the hour of his calamity. They lift up their hands and say, Avaunt! to the bloody specter which their infer- nal orgies have summoned up. You hear them all over the land ejaculating through false, pale, coward lips, " Thou canst not say I did it," when their hands are reeking with all the blood that has been shed and which yet awaits the extreme penalty of the law. False, fleeting, perjured traitors, false to those who have acted' upon your princi- ples, false to friends as well as country, and perjured befoi"© the constitution of the Republic — ministers who profess to be of God who told this boy here to carry a Sharpe's rifle to Kansas instead of his mother's Bible — shall this jury, this court, and this country forget their guilt and their infamy because a victim to their precepts is yielding up his life before you ? May God forget me if I here, in the presence of this pale face, forget to denounce with the withering, blighting, blasting power of majestic truth, the tall and stately criminals of the Northern States of this Union. The visionary mind of the prisoner heard from a mem- ber of Congress from Massachusetts that a new constitu- tion, a new Bible, and a new God were to be inaugurated and to possess the country. They were to be new, because they were to be anti-slavery, for the old constitution, and the old Bible, and the God of our fathers, the ancient Lord God of Israel, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, were not on the side of abolitionism. Is there no mitiga- tion for his doom in the fact that he took his life in his hand, and aimed at that which a coward taught him, but dared not himself attempt. Base, pusillanimous dema- gogues have led the prisoner to the bar, but while he suf- fers—if suffer he must— they, too, shall have their recreant limbs broken on the wheel. I will not leave the soil of Virginia, I will not let this awful occasion pass into his- tory, without giving a voice and an utterance to its true purport and meaning, without heaping upon its authors the load of execration which they are to bear henceforth DEFENSE OP JOHN E. COOK. 23 and forever. Day after day and year after year has the baleful simoon of revolution, anarchy, discord, hostility to the South and her institutions, swept over that section of the country in which the lot of the prisoner has been cast. That he has been poisoned by its breath should not cut him off from human sympathy ; rather should it render every heart clement toward him. He never sought place or station, but sought merely to develop those doctrines which evil and traitorous persons had caused him to believe were true. Ministers, editors, and politicians — Beecher, Parker, Seward, Giddings, Sumner, Hale, and a host of lesser lights of each class — who in this court-room, who in this vast country, who in the wide world who shall read this trial believes them not guilty as charged in the indictment in all the counts to a deeper and far more fearful extent than John E. Cook. Midnight gloom is not more somber in contrast with the blazing light of the meridian sun than is the guilt of such men in comparison with that which over- whelms the prisoner. They put in motion the maelstrom which has engulfed him. They started the torrent which has borne him over the precipice. They called forth from the caverns the tempest which wrecked him on a sunken reef Before God, and in the light of Eternal truth, the disaster at Harper's Ferry is their act, and not his. May the ghost of each victim to their doctrines of disunion and abomination sit heavy on their guilty souls ! May the fate of the prisoner, whatever it may be, disturb their slumbers and paralyze their arms when they are again raised against the peace of the country and the lives of its citizens ! I know by the gleam of each eye into which I look irk this jury-box, that if these men could change places with young Cook, you would gladly say to him, " Go, erring- and repentant youth, our vengeance shall fall on those who paid their money, urged on the attack, and guided the blow." Let me appeal to you, gentlemen of the jury, in the name of Eternal truth and everlasting right, is nothing to be forgiven to youth, to inexperience, to a gentle, kind heart, to a wayward and peculiar though not vicious char- acter, strangely apt to be led by present influences? I 24 -SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOOEHBES. have shown you what those influences, generally and specially, have been over the mind of the prisoner. I have shown you the malign influence of his direct leader. I have shown you, also, the "false and malignant counsels" in behalf of this sad enterprise, emanating from those in place, power, and position. It might have been your prod- igal sou borne away and seduced by such counsels, as well as my young client. Do with him as you would have your own child dealt by under like circumstances. He has been stolen from the principles of his ancestors and betrayed from the teachings of his kindred. If he was your own handsome child, repentant and confessing his wrong to hia country, what would you wish a jury of strangers to do? That do yourselves. By that rule guide your verdict ; and the poor boon of mercy will not be cut off from him. He' thought the country was about to be convulsed ; that the slave was pining for an opportunity to rise against his master; that two-thirds of the laboring population of the country, North and South, would flock to the standard of revolt ; that a single day would bring ten, fiftj' — yea, a hundred thousand men — to arms in behalf of the insurrec- tion of the slaves. This is in evidence. Who are respon- sible for such terribly false views? and what kind of a' visionary and dreaming mind is that which has so fatally entertained them ? That the prisoner's mind is pliant to the impressions, whether for good or for evil, by which it is surrounded, let his first interview in his prison with Gov- ernor Willard, in the presence of your senator. Colonel Mason, bear witness. His error was placed before him. His wrong to his family and his country was drawn by a patriotic, and, at the same time, an affectionate hand. His natural being at once asserted its sway. The influence of good, and not of evil, once more controlled bim as in the days of his childhood ; and now here before you he has the merit at least of a loyal citizen, making all the atonement in his power for the wrong which he has committed. That he has told strictly the truth in his statement is proven by every word of evidence in this cause. Gentlemen, you have this case. I surrender into your DEFENSE OF JOHN B. COOK. 25 hands the issues of life and doath. As long as you live, a more important case than this you will never be called to try. Consider it, therefore, well in all its bearings. I have tried to show you those facts which go to palliate the con- duct of the prisoner. Shall I go home and say that in justice you remembered not mercy to him? Leave the door of clemency open ; do not shut it by a wholesale conviction. Eemember that life is an awful and a sacred thing; remember that death is terrible — terrible at any time, and in any form. " Come to the bridal chamber, Death I Come when the mother feels For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake's shock, the ocean's storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet, song, and dance, and wine, And thou art terrible. The groan, The knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know, or dream, or feai Of agony, are thine." But when to the frightful mien of the grim monster, when to the chill visage of the spirit of the glass and scythe, is added the hated, dreaded specter of the gibbet, we turn shuddering from the accumulated horror. God spare this boy, and those who love him, from such a scene of woe. I part from you now, and most likely forever. When we next meet — when I next look upon your faces and you on mine — it will be in that land and before that Tribunal where the only plea that will save you or me from a worse fate than awaits the jjrisoner, will be mercy. Charity is the paramount virtue ; all else is as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Charity suffereth long, and is kind. Forbid it not to come into your deliberation ; and, when your last hour comes, the memory that you allowed it to plead for your erring brother, John E. Cook, will brighten 26 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. your passage over the dark river, and rise by your side as an interceding angel in that day when your trial as well as his shall be determined by a just but merciful God. I thank the court and you, gentlemen, for your patient kindness, and I am done. This noted cause was conducted by Hon. D. W. Voorhees, of Indiana; Hon. Jos. E. McDonald, of Indiana; Lawson Botts, Esq., of Virginia j Thomas Green, Esq., of Virginia, for the defense. The prosecution was under the management of Hon. -Andrew Hunter, of Virginia. THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 27 THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. [An address delivered before the literary societies of the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville, July 4, I860.] Ladies and Gentlemen : — "We stand to-day in an august and venerable presence. The associations by wbich we are Burrounded are connected with a great and unparalleled age. The scenes on which our eyes rest call up before the mind with vivid power the early and the exalted days of the Republic. The soil on which we tread teems with classic memories. The sky that bends above us is the same that once drew the gaze of the philosophers of Amer- ican liberty and American science. The barren mountaina that sleep off yonder in the dim blue distance are fruitful and luxuriant in the bright and beautiful historical pictures which the youths of America, whether they be dwellers on the Aroostook or the Mississippi, have treasured away in their lessons taught by the wintry fireside. The rivers that encircle the eastern slope of a mighty continent, and that roll away from these plains to the ocean, murmur a song- of everlasting praise to the deeds of immortal renown which were once enacted on their shores. All around ua breathes the fame of grand and wonderful achievements. The very air is redolent of the rich odors of a short, though felicitous, blessed antiquity. "We turn our faces around toward the past. "We look along down the fleeting years of little more than an ordi- nary lifetime, and we see the young and struggling insti- tutions of our country arise from chaos and civil conflict. The birthplace of distinguished merit, of genius, of him who serves his country and his race in au eminent ca- pacity, has ever been the theme of faithful commemora- tion. But what shall be said of the spot where the prin- 28 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOOKHEES. ciples of a great free government were born — where the throes of constitutional liberty were first felt in a definite form — where the volcanic ideas were first engendered, which tore, as by a mighty eruption, an ancient monarchy in twain, and made the dissevered fragments overshadow the colossal proportions of the parent trunk ? We ponder over our answer in awe-struck silence, for we are in and about that place. The ground whereon we tread is holy, and the burning bush from which was spoken the independence of the American people, is blazing in full view of us from where we stand. These walls are full of a strange, touch- ing eloquence. Freedom of action, freedom of thought, and a generous love of science and letters, constituted the trinity at whose shrine the illustrious patron of this insti- tution paid his devotions. The spirit of a regenerated, progressive era in the history of mankind is here. It be- comes us, therefore, to gather in upon our minds the ele- ments of the moral, political, and philosophic world which surround us. And, as for me, I bow with reverence before the genius of the place and the hour, and acknowledge with profound sensibility the honor that attaches to the position in which I stand. But not only the wonderful and gigantic proportions of the past arise at this hour, like the shadowy, though splen- did creation of some fabled enchanter. The present — the living, breathing present, with its arteries of action inter- lacing the globe ; with its pulses of life beating high and bounding with an irresistible energy ; its great heart throb- bing beneath the weight of the destiny of the human race — it, too, is here, and demands the recognition of practical minds. We may not ignore it. It is the lineal descendant and legitimate offspring of those days wherein the arts of war and peace first assumed to act for American interests, guided by American valor and wisdom. The importance of the present epoch in the history of the world is, however, simply the importance which attaches to the condition and probable destiny of that universal herO of all earthly dramas — man himself. I propose to-day to discuss him m one of his present and most important rela- THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 29 tions to the age in whicli we live — to God and to the human race — as the American citizen. And though I come here from a yonug and distant State — a province, as it ^ve^e, of Rome in her ancient days — pcoj^lcd but yesterday by the progressive spirit of the race and the age to which we be- long, yet the bond of our citizenship is a joint inheritance, and links us together in a firm and fraternal alliance. I come to you with the grand hailing sign, not of distress, not of peril and disaster, not of shuddering, affrighted and appalled extremity, but of liberty, of peace, of glory, and of hope : I, too, am an American citizen. It is not merely, however, for the purpose of calling to mind the luster which attaches throughout the earth to the idea of American citizenship, that I have chosen that theme on this occasion. It is true that everywhere beneath the sun, on the high seas, and in the midst of the desert, wher- ever the insatiate thirst for knowledge or gain has lured the children of civilization, the magic power of the Amer- ican name is never invoked in vain. It is true that, wher- ever the human heart, galled by tyranny, feels the faintest aspiration for freedom, there the image of our laws and our civil polity appears as a heavenly visitant. It is true that the Roman, when sinking beneath the scourge, made his appeal for relief and protection to a government unequal to that which, having her seat of empire here in the west, reaches forth her hands to the uttermost parts of the earth to protect the humblest citizen that ever reposed on her bosom. All this is true, and the patriotic heart fondly dwells on these rich and fascinating evidences of national renown. And, like the care-worn and heavily-burdened traveler, who turns aside from the wearisome highway, and revels for a season amidst seductive groves, refreshing fountains, and shaded lawns, so might we dispose of weighty and serious thoughts, and give ourselves to exul- tation and honest pride over the political, physical, moral, and mental greatness of the land we inhabit. Eut the times we live in, the scenes by which we are surrounded^ are mixed with gloom as well as glory. The precise mo- ment of time to day which we occupy is too fearfully 30 SPEECHES OE HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. fraught, too ominously filled with grave, grand, and ter- rible interests to the American people, and indeed to the friends of liberty throughout the world, to admit of any- thing but a severe and candid scrutiny into the solemn duties, as well as the privileges ; the imposing responsibil- ities, as well as the pleasures, of the American citizen. The hour draws nigh in which the pure and lofty love of country, for which our fathers were famed, will be in anxious demand. The American citizen, in his full and proper development, and movingiu the grand sphere which the constitution marks out for him, is equal to the high mission whereunto he is called — the perpetuation of liberty, regulated by law. Let us look briefly at the nature of the trust reposed in his hands. Government is a social necessity. While each successive generation of mankind has acknowledged and acted on this fact, yet every people and every age have had their distinctive principles as the basis of the institutions by which they were governed. The history of human gov- ernment is one over which the student and the philo- sophic statesman ponder long and wonder much. Since the world began, all the powers of man, good as well as evil, have been concentrated on the stupendous prob- lem of governing himself and- his fellow-men. He was born in a paradise, and another of celestial splendor and eternal duration awaits him, if he shall happily pass the mystic river that flows between the two worlds, that were given to him from the beginning. He is the bright, supreme intelligence of this beautiful sphere ; he is linked to endless ages by the immortality of mind, and is allied to Deity by the divine origin and destiny of the soul; he is the master-piece of the handiwork of Him who con- ceived the flaming sun, when all was dark, and bade it shine a full realization of his conceptions, — ;who measured the just proportions and laid the architrave of hemispheres and continents before matter had emerged from chaos, — • who bade the imperial ocean seek its bed, who reared the mountain and sunk the valley, and put all nature under the supremacy, not of chance, blind as fate, but of Order, the THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 31 vicegerent of Jehovah on earth. Such is man, such the source whence he came, and such is the destiny that awaits him. ISTo wonder that this government has engaged, not only the deep and protracted solicitude of himself, but even also of the Author of his being, who promulgated that great code of laws in the midst of the lightnings on Sinai, which have withstood all revolutions, and have neither been repealed, nor amended, nor loosened from the pedestal of majestic authority on which they rest. But even the strong hand and paternal reasoning of God himself could not prevent from arising, in the breasts of His own people, a desire for change in the institutions which governed them, and which they knew to be of divine ordainment. All subsequent time, all subsequent human experience, has been a reiteration of the principle of rest- less discontent, which caused Israel to murmur against the constitution and laws of the fathers, and demand a king. Xot that I mean here to state, that the tendency of the race, when acting under enlightened impulses, is toward despotism, or the government of a single-sceptered hand, but that revolution has been the order of the world. Change has always been the desire of man's heart. He has never ceased to recognize the imperious necessity of government, but its forms have been as changing and diversified as the capricious movements of a dream. He who tells you that stability has ever been attained in the principles or the practice of any government hitherto established by the children of men, or, indeed, that perma- nence. has ever marked any of the works of human hands, has read the history of his race in vain. It is not so: and I allude to the fact to show that struggling systems of political institutions have forever been jarring against each other, have alternately triumphed and alternately fallen, have forever been engaged in conflict — whether at the Red Sea or at Marathon, whether at Thermopylfe or at York- town. This fact, which comes down to us with all the sanction of universal history, commends itself with over- whelming force to the American citizen who fondly imag- ines that to his government has been issued the sublime 32 SPEECHES OF HON, DANIEL W. VOORHEES. edict, Usto perpetua ! May it be so. May the broken col- umn and desecrated temple never mark the downfall of American freedom. But the murky gloom of the political heavens — the angry ocean of human passion which now imperils the landmarks of the constitution — the voice of hoarse sedition, which, like the boding cry of birds of ill omen, now fills the land — the harsh sounds of unnatural, fratricidal strife between the tribes of one covenant — all admonish us that the hour for idle wishes and vain entrea- ties, addressed to some imaginary genius of concord, has passed away, and that action — ^bold, honest, and patriotic action — on the part of the citizen, can alone guarantee a long lease of life to the present form of the American gov- ernment. This universal instability in the political institutions of men has stamped history with its striking diversity. Men- tal ingenuity and mental power have examined, grasped, adopted, and discarded every theory, built on every basis, and, in turn, destroyed their own creations. In the vast and complicated annals of the past, we behold all the multiplied forms in which human government has been attempted. But in all its thousand shapes, there have been hut two contending principles in behalf of which men have enlisted their minds in council and their arms in action. The unlawful assumption of power by those who hold authority, has been waging an unbroken contest with the rightful sovereignty of political institutions from the earliest dawn of history to the present time. Liberty and despotism have been the two great opposing forces which have convulsed the world, torn down old systems and planted new ones, and marked the world's highway of progress with fields of battle. Their struggles for the supremacy have never ceased. It is in the heart of man to grasp at power. Dominion is sweet, and the earth and the sea, with all that in them dwell, have not sufficed, in their subserviency to fill the measure of man's ambition, to govern. Alexander the Macedonian, following the gilded meteor of conquest through all the domain of the East, and, at last, pausing upon the Indus to weep, because the limita THE AMERICAX CITIZEN. 83. of the earth were smaller than the boundaries of his impe- rial desires, was simply the illustration and type of that love of power which is inherent in the human heart. A crown with its jewels, a scepter, and the robes of royalty, have never failed to lure the daring mind, unchastened hy the love of legal liberty, to tempt the dangerous heights of sole supremacy. But, on the other hand, resistance to the power of one over many, to the spirit of royal domina- tion, and to the absorbing prerogatives of kingly rule, has beeu ohstinate, fierce, and perpietual. The love of power is shared by all alike, and the laboring millions of a gov- ernment cherish it as dearly as he who wears away his days, and consumes his nights in feverish longings after the fleeting emblems of temporal greatness. Freedom from the impositions and restraints of one supreme will ha» been the wholesome object sought in almost every popular revolution in which mankind ever engaged. We may ex- haust ourselves in the exploration of past ages ; we may travel back beyond the area of Christ, and ascend still higher up the stream of time beyond the flood, and there, by the dim, mysterious twilight of oriental history, scan the traces of ancient conflicts ; we may take our stand at a period two thousand years ago, and with the clear light of a high civilization streaming around us, contemplate the contending parties of Greece — Athens, with her democ- racy and her aristocracy, in a perpetual struggle, with varied results, and Sparta, torn by rival parties ; we may turn and survey Eome in the days of her greatness, when she was the full perfection of a political power, with her Gracchi and Tribunes of the people arrayed in high and fierce contest with the advocates of royalty and centralized power ; we may sadly watch the expiring agonies of Ro- man liberty, and behold Brutus slay Csesar at the base of Pompey's statue, in a mad attempt to reinstate the fallen fortunes of the republic; we may then leave the banks of the yellow Tiber, as did the genius of liberty veiled and mourning, and cross over the dark ages, the gulf in which centuries lie buried ; we may take our stand at Runnymede, and witness Magna Charta wrenched from the unwilling S4 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHBES. hand of the tyrannical and perfidious John ; we may stand on the soil of France, and shrink aghast and horror-struck fromthegory memories which arise on every hand as awful ■witnesses of the bloody baptism which that nation under- went in the Reign of Terror; we may call to mind the Dutch Republic — heroic and glorious little Holland — main- taining, in the midst of strife within, and of European ■despotism without her borders, a free government more than two hundred years ago; we may appeal to all nations, to the living and the dead, wherever the sun has looked ■down on a people enlivened by a sense of their rights, and we find the same opposing principles, th^ same elements at war, the same parties in contest — liberty forever lifting its bright and radiant crest against the haughty pretensions ■of defiant despotism. But the success of freedom as a practical and substantial fact, as an acknowledged and palpable measure for the pro- motion of human happiness, has only been achieved by one distinct race of the human family. Free government, occu- pying the wholesome medium ground betwfeen anarchy and the licentious violence of the unrestrained populace on the ■one hand, and rigid tyranny on the other, has been aimed at and sought after, but never fully attained until the Anglo-Saxon race laid its hand on the destinies of the world, and became the champion of liberalized civilization. Plato, it is true, dreamed of his perfect government. Uto- pia arose as a vision of primeval purity, peace, and order. He saw men moving among their fellows in obedience solely to the higher attributes of our nature, and utterly insensi- ble to the passions which thirst for pleasure and power. He witnessed the elevating and sacred precepts of his almost divine philosophy reduced to daily practice, by the citizens of this fanciful republic. Law and liberty moved in exquisite harmony, and no jarring sounds were heard to issue from the various spheres of w^ell-regulated action. But all this was simply the beautiful creation of a philoso- pher's genius. He, alone, beheld it, and that with the far-reaching glance of inspiration. The world never saw anything of the kind. The great tide of action and busy THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. life has rushed on in its fierce, headlong course, guided liy no system of such Lioneficenoe as was displayed to the view of the Grecian sage. But, after the AvorUl had experi- mented and failed — after philosophers had dreamed their dreams, and awakened to find them vanished — a new and mighty race gradually emerged from the rude condition of nature, and gradually became the patron of science, the friend of letters, the nurse of Christianity, and the defendei of constitutional freedom. To that race the American citi- zen belongs, and his time may l>c usefully employed, and his attention profitably engaged for a brief space, in con- templating its history and its powerful characteristics. I hold nothing in common with that false and pernicious system of political ethics, which proclaims as its favorite dogma, the uncpalified equality of the whole human fam- ily. The social fabric, wherever it has been reared, has always had its virulent and determined enemies, seeking, under the specious guise of good, to implant evil in its constitution, and to undermine and drag down the pillars of its virtue and wisdom. Our age and our nation can claim no exemption from this class of destroyers. Seizing npon some isolated expression of the founders of our gov- ernment, and perverting it totally from its original appli- cation—losing sight of, or studiously misrepresenting the circumstances under which it was originally uttered — we see men in our midst, forgetful of the proud lineage of the American citizen, and seeking to debase and tarnish the armorial bearings of the great race to which he belongs, advance the doctrine and urge the theory of absolute hu- man equality. It is time that the great minds that dressed naked liberty in the habiliments of the American consti- tution and confided her to the care and sleepless vigilance of the Anglo-Saxon race on this continent, should be vin- dicated from the odium which would justly attach to their memories if they had denied the superiority of the race for whom they made this government. Abstract equality is visible in none of the works of Ood. Inanimate creation presents an endless variety. One star ditfereth from another star in glory. The heavens 36 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. that declare the glory of God, and the firmament that Bhoweth His handiwork, display to the eye of the astron- omer, planets, spheres, orbs, and worlds, scattered iu mar- velous and prolific profusion through their azure fields and awful depths, but an individuality marks each from the other — fiery Mars and lovely Venus, ringed Saturn, and majestic Jupiter, Arcturus, Orion and the Pleiades- with their " sweet influences," have each and all their sep- arate, distinguishing characteristics. The broad face of the great globe on which we stand presents also one vast panoramic view of change, diversity, inequality. Our minds grow dizzy in the attempt to grasp an idea of that Omnipotence, capable of producing a measureless universe,, and yet, with detailed accuracy, creating no two things of exact equality. The traveler who has been the pilgrim of every land, and whose adventurous foot has touched everj shore, who has traversed every plain, scaled every moun- tain, crossed every river, navigated every sea and ocean^ has been lured from spot to spot, and from clime to clime^ because new scenes break upon his vision at every step, because each object he beholds has its novelty, though he- may have gazed upon thousands of its species before. Animal life is full of the same wonderful lesson ; but the most striking feature of the grand system of inequality designed and accomplished by. the great Author of all, is. furnished by that highest perfection of animal existence — man himself. The inequalities of the human race are the more striking and numerous because of man's various en- dowments. "We pause with solemn wonder at the versatil- ity of the creative power when we try to call to mind the countless throng of human beings who have here- tofore peopled the earth, together with its millions who- now people it, and reflect that in mere physical con- formation no two were ever alike — were ever equal. But the great inequality which marks one branch of the human race from another, which distinguishes one people from another, consists in those immortal parts — the intellect and the moral attributes, which elevate their possessors to the- social grade of angels, or drag them down to the compau- THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 37 ionsliip of the damned. Let us raise ourselves to the full -couception' of this question. Lot ns nioasure, to some ex- teut at least, the inequalities which exist between tlie dif- ferent races of the earth. Let us especially determine the due supremacy ^Yhich belongs to our. own race, and thus vindicate the wisdom of our ancestors and the policy of the American Eepublic. In the light of history, we see the Anglo-Saxon race for twenty centuries steadily assert- ing and maintaining its right, in the face of all opposing forces, to assume the guardianship of the best and dearest interests of humanity. What though its origin is in the wild mountains of Scandinavia and amidst the dark Druid oaks of Britain ; yet within the breasts of that yellow-haired, fair-faced, and blue-eyed race were the germs of a greatness and a power which mocked at the strength of the gates of Rome, and humbled the pride of civilized Europe before the American continent was dis- •covered. It arose from the fresh, untamed regions of [STorthern Europe with all the newness of life — with the bounding energy of a youthful giant. The oriental races had played their several parts, and had each contributed something to the slow and halting progress which the world was painfully making in those infant ages of history. The Chaldeans bad watched the stars and studied the dim rudiments of astronomy from the hills and plains of the eastern hemisphere; the Pharaohs and Ptolemys had •developed a high order of mechanism and reared the Pyramids, built the temple of ]\Iemnon and carved the Sphynx ; the Hebrew race had given warriors, statesmen, poets, and sages to the world, and had been the medium through which the awful presence of Deity was manifested on earth ; the Persian hosts had swarmed over toward Southern Europe to subject it to the vassalage of Xerxes a,nd his successors ; Atilla and Alaric had scourged the nations, and sunk forever, leaving nothing save the crimson sign of strife and battle to mark their presence on earth ; the land of Pericles had reached its acme of fame, and all the great republics of ancient days wherein liberty, ficience, and elegant literature were supposed to dwell, had 38 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEBS. grown to their full stature and were hastening to their downfall, when the tall and magnificent forms of our re- mote progenitors first became visible to the eye of the an- nalist and the historian. The eftete and worn-out races- of the East were no longer the controlling agencies of human affairs. Their labors and their discoveries were scattered along the shores of time,Jike fragments from the bosom of the stormj"- ocean, and these were left for the- new race to ponder over, and appropriate in the enter- prise of regenerating the world. A second commencement toward the ultimate destiny of man had to be made when the world slowly awakened from the lethargy of the mid- dle ages, and the race to which you and I belong stood ready to assume the task. The former principal races of the earth existed then as they exist now, simply as th& shrunken mementos of their once all-absorbing gran- deur; and the superiority which must exist somewhere amongst the tribes of men declared itself with the blood of Edward the Confessor, and Alfred the Law-giver. Since- then, what do we behold? Shall the mock jjhilanthro- pist and spurious reformer tell, and convince the en- lightened world, that this race of which I speak shall he- recognized only as equal to those who have stood still, or whose foot-prints point backward toward ignorance and original barbarism ? In the establishment of governments- shall the predominant race of the earth abjure and anni- hilate the eternal distinctions and inequalities, which were decreed from the beginning of time between superior and inferior races ? The entire supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in all usefal achievements will not be questioned by the en- lightened student. It has justly won this proud distinc- tion. Its trophies exist in every department of human- thought and action. The wisdom of the Chaldeans is ob- scure and forgotten, while the philosophic wand of ISTew- ton rolled back the curtains of the universe, and exposed the great arcana of its mysteries to the gaze of men as^ long as men shall exist and matter retain its present form. Homer invaded the heathens' Elysium, and bor- THE AMERICAN CITIZEX. 39 rowed thence his heroes for a souej of the warlike deeda of Ilium; but his counterpart of the sixteenth century — blind, sublime Milton — rose to the familiar presence of angels, soared with an even and unshaken wing through the celestial world, and then turned Unnn the dayliglit glories above, and explored tlic dismal vaults, and walked unharmed over the burning marl of hell. Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal dwelt upon all the chords of the human heart, that were then known to re- spond to the invocations of genius ; but from the loins of the Anglo-Saxon raee, there sprang a wayv\ard bard on the banks of the Avon, who has supplanted them all, and transcended their combined glories — who stands as the acknowledged high-priest and interpreter of the myste- ries, the sorrows and joys of human nature in its loftiest and in its lowliest moods, and will so stand forever more. Socrates, Zeno, Aristotle, and their disciples, both in Greece and in Rome, philosophized and laid down labori- ously wrought rules of moral conduct and mental progress ; but the world was startled and awakened with a sense of new being, and a revolution swept over the universal mind of civilization, when Francis Bacon launched his Novum Orfianum upon the tide of time. Cicero was eloquent, and immortalized the forum and the senate of Rome by his defense of the liberal principles of his country ; Demos- thenes filled the world with the majestic music of the Grecian tongue ; but greater themes have hallowed the lips and insjiired the genius of Burke, of Chatham, of Gur- ran, and of Henry, than ever awakened the thinking pow- ers of classic ages. Lycurgus and Solon inscribed their laws, as they imagined, for endless durability, and Justin- ian prepared his Pandects for universal application ; but the Common Law of England has proved the basis of a superstructure beneath whose shadow all other systems have dwarfed, and abandoned their hold on human affairs. Sylla and Marius, and Caesar, and Pompey, and other con- querors of the olden time without number, wrote their names with their swords high up on the canvas of fame ; but ever since our ancestors stormed the walls of the Imperial City, 40 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. and climbed her Capitol Hill in triumph, the blood of the Tudors and the Plantagenets has been the steadiest, the coolest, the boldest, and the bravest that ever joined in the shock of battle. The ancestry of the American citizen has achieved greatness and glory in every field of mental, moral, and physical action, and it remains only for him to be true to the supremacy which has already been won and which all history concedes. But this western hemisphere, this great American con- tinent is the chief theater for the display of the vast power and resources of the Anglo-Saxon race. And as if there should be a fitness and a propriety in the chain and con- nection of human events, the discovery of the New World was made by the descendants of those E'orthern tribes who first desolated Southern Europe, and then permanently peopled its most beautiful portions. The ancient Castilian of Spain has the blood of the marauding Vikings in his veins ; and Columbus discovered the land where his far- away kindred should perfect the glory of the race. The early settlement of the American colonies presents a sublime spectacle. A superior people, full of the wisdom and experience of an advanced stage of civilization, taking possession of the country in the name of human progress, could not fail to stamp the era as one distinguished in im- portant results. Certain great laws of nature — laws born of the will and knowledge of God himself — controlled the conduct of the American citizen, in his first settlement upon this continent. An aboriginal race was here. A people of remote origin, and long prescriptive title to the soil, were in possession of all the land that lies between the two oceans. But the same fundamental principle which governed the settlement of Canaan by the children of Israel, and which operated, under the direct sanction of God, to exclude and exterminate, and to reduce to subser- viency, the various aborigiual tribes of that chosen spot, produced precisely the same results when American colo- nists lauded at Jamestown and at Plymouth. But one race was ever designed to participate in the labors, the duties, and the privileges of one government. I speak of THE AMERICAN CITIZEN. 41 races distinct from each other, by their origin, their rnen- talitv, their moral tendencies, and with distinct reference to their physical characteristics. The Indian vanished into the shades of the forest as the white man enlarged the boundaries of civilization. The law of total extermination was against him and his ; and the decree that he should give place to the pale-faced con- queror was written in sole and special reference to the in- «Titahle relation which distinct and unequal races bear toward each other when Israel was commanded to cast out the " seven nations greater and mightier" than Israel herself — greater and mightier in numbers, wealth and ex- tent of possessions, but not linked to a superior and im- mortal destiny. The experiment of commingling the blood -of separate races, or of combining their energies in the •control of a single government, met the disapprobation of the Almighty, and has disgracefully failed wherever it has been attempted. Extermination was more desirable to the haughty Red man than subserviency ; but that the philos- ophy and teaching of all ages, as well as the wisdom of God himself, sanction and justify the existence of a dependent and vassal condition on the part of an inferior toward a superior race, when the two are brought in contact, no well-informed and impartial mind will deny. This, too, is a natural and inevitable result of the irreconcilable inequal- ities of the human race. It is founded on a principle co- eval with the birth of man. We can not turn a leaf of history on which are written the achievements of the best and brightest eras of civilization without finding the bondman as one of its developments. I know that the ■experiment of equalizing distinct races has been and may be made again. But compare for a moment the condition in all respects, and the progress of the Xorth American Re- public, with the sunken and degraded population and fallen fortunes of the Southern portion of this hemisphere. The reflective mind needs but a glance. We would sicken to ■dwell long on the blighting eftects of a total disregard of a natural, supreme law of humanity. Lot those who will «avil at the positions which I have assumed, find the de- 42 SPEECHES OE HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. lights, the prosperity, and the national glory of the sys- tem amidst the jarring, discordant scenes of the mongrel races of Mexico, Central and South America. To my mind it is sufficiently clear that the founders of our colonies, and afterward of our federal government, wisely fi'amed and fashioned our institutions for themselves and their poster- ity, and proclaimed no equality, entered into no partner- ship, and divided no civil rights with any other race. The American citizen who superintended the early labors- that were bestowed on the question of our liberties and the construction of our constitution, never asserted that all men were created equal in the sense which modern con- spirators against the peace of the nation attach to those memorable words. The withdrawal by a portion of the subjects of Great Britain from their allegiance to their prince, on account of heavy grievances committed against them, and not against their British fellow-subjects, was the object at which our fathers aimed when that phrase- was given by them to the world. They asserted their own equality to the other citizens of the British realm, and they appealed to arms against the unjust discriminations which -were made against them by a corrupt Parliament and an imbecile king. They did more. They asserted for them- selves the right to become their own rulers, and denied the superiority any longer of that branch of their own blood which they had left behind them on the isles of Great Britain. They asserted their right to become their own noblemen, their own aristocracy, and their own king. This was one of the species of equality which they pro- claimed. But looking out upon the grand future which was awaiting the work of their hands, they asserted still another kind of equality which will forever be a question of the first magnitude with their posterity — the equality of American citizenship. With an eye on the temple whose beautiful proportions were gradually rising, and re- membering all the time for whom it was being constructed, they proclaimed the lawful inmate of that temple free from the despotic forms of government which then darkened the whole face of the globe, and equal to all others whose THE AMERIO \X OITIZEX. 43 rights wore thus recognized. A reasonable and sensible construction of the declaration of our indopendenec as ii nation, can only be arrived at in the light of the circum- stances which surrounded its production and adoption. It had reference to the causes which called it into existence, and the purposes it was designed to accomplish. If it was intended as a sweeping assertion of universal human equal- ity, it stands in the face of six thousand years of testimony to the contrary: and if it was intended as a broad charter under which all men within the jurisdiction of its opera- tions could claim their freedom and become free, then it stamps its author and its advocates as falsifiers of their own words, and is itself the greatest failure in the history of human eflbrts. But if, on the contrary, it receives its just purport, its palpable meaning as a declaration of civil rights, on behalf of those whose rights were invaded, and who were solemnly reclaiming them from the grasp of power, then it stands in harmony with the facts which pre- ceded as well as those which succeeded its ado]Dtion, and should be venerated by rising generations as the grand enunciation of the principles of freedom which made us a free people. We have thus seen the necessity of government, and the various shapes and phases it has assumed under the willful and restless spirit of man. "We have seen the eternal con- flict, throughout all changes and revolutions, between the principle of liberty and the iron force of despotism. We have seen the inequalities of the human race, and witnessed freedom choosing for her guardian and defender the supe- rior branch of that race. We have seen the theater of hu- man greatness and national excellence transferred by slow marches, moving as the great cycles of time move, from the gorgeous and luxurious plains of the ancient seats of empire, from the banks of the Euphrates and the Indus, from the banks of the XiJe, from the shores of the dark Euxine, from the wa'ters of the Mediterranean, from the regions of the swift and arrowy lihone and the dark roll- ing Danube — yea, in a powerful measure, from the very banks of the Thames itself— to the banks of the Potomac 44 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOOKHEES. ^nd the Mississippi. And we have seen, at last, a govern- ment here assume shape and form, founded on the philo- sophic relation which exists between the different races that inhabit this continent, and dedicated to the freedom and equality of its citizens. We might here, perhaps, appropriately pause and reflect ■upon the position which that government has so quickly attained before the world. Strange, strange, and without -a parallel : alone, solitary, and without a peer in all history, has been the career of American progress. It is a mystery which the tongue is too feeble, and our language too bar- Ten, adequately and fully to interpret. It seems as fabu- lous as the palace of Aladdin; and yet it bears a moral too vast and overwhelming for human comprehension. The statesman with his proudest periods, and the poet with his -sublimest passages, have dwelt upon the sudden and bril- liant promotion of the American government to the fore- most rank, and, indeed, far in advance of the foremost rank of nations. But, in the presence of the great fact itself, in the presence of the living glory, all description fails, and eulogy falls weak and bafiled to the ground. The voice-of our brief history drowns and stifles all other voices that may be raised in its behalf, as the voice of the ocean would overwhelm the song that was uttered in its praise on ■the beach. Liberty has not merely conferred unequaled civil rights on the American citizen, but, like Briareus of old, it ha,s touched with a hundred hands all the springs of liuman progress. The physical improvement of the coun- try has especially obeyed its gigantic impulse. The ancient works of scientific labor, the Egyptian Pyramids, the Ro- man Aqueducts, the Appian Way, and the Temple of Ephesus sink into utter insignificance when compared with the industrial glories of this young Republic. But, however delightful it may be to the American to dwell upon the various developments of his country, yet there are other achievements in the cause of human freedom which have rendered their names immortal. Sir, we live in the midst of storm and revolution. A memorable epoch in history is transpiring in our view. The air is dark with the elements of strife and change. The convulsions which have signalized the past are being reproduced in the present. The murderous roar of cannon, the sanguinary crash of war, and the pallid, appealing faces of the dead mark our time and our country as they have marked all climes and ages heretofore. History is being rewritten ; and what man has done, man is doing again. I «ee nothing new in the calamities which now assail tlie destiny to which we aspire. We are treading over again the footsteps of generations which have passed away. Mutation and change is the order of the world. Stability and permanence in the works of human hands is the Uto- pian dream of abstract speculation. The different forms which governments have assumed to redeem society from chaos constitute no exception to this remark. On the con- trary, all history stands as an awful witness to the fact that no government has ever yet been established which has been exempt from the fierce blasts of human passion and human ambition. Bat instability and tempestuous struggles do not neces- sarily roll backward, or even check the wheels of progress. Great principles are immortal. They can not die. The forms in which they are incased may perish and decay to dust; but, like the liberated soul, truth puts on new glories in every phase of her existence. Our course is onward, like the mighty river, to the ocean of destiny. I believe in the steady advancement and ultimate civilization of the world by the benignant power of a higher and purer gospel than that of hate or of force. The trinity which presides over my belief is composed of those handmaidens of God — liberty, charity, and justice. With faith in these, the American people, though assailed by those painful convul- sions which no nation ever escaped, though desolated and heavy in heart, and weeping over departed glories and joys, may yet look off across the dark and angry face of 66 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. the waters, and in the distance behold the star of peace and honor, and around it chistering the heavenly constel- lation of individual and national happiness.- But if this people refuse, from this time forward, to be led by these principles, an abyss of horror awaits our speedy entrance, as terrible to the upright soul of a free-born American citizen as the flaming depths where the lost angels writhe in agony. The world, it is true, will not stand still. Some other people more worthy the high trust will take up the cause of constitutional government; but we will be dropped in gloom and despair by the wayside. Sir, times like the present are always full of danger to the rights of the people. In an hour like this, if we expect to retain the institutions of liberty, an increased degree of vigilance is required; for, when the elements of political organization are in commotion, and disorder pervades the whole face of aflFairs, bad men in authority unbridle the spirit of tyranny in their breasts, and leap over the walls of constitutional restraint. Such periods in history have been the rich harvests of despotism. When the thunder rolls along the sky, and midnight gloom increases the ter- rors of the storm, the savage beasts of the desert go forth and raven for their prey. The rulers of the nation do the same. Benjamin was a ravening wolf, and stands as the «mblem of unlawful and sanguinary power. Seditions and civil wars are the unhappy occasions for the exercise of this baleful propensity which high official station so generally begets in the heart of man.. And, Mr. Speaker, the mournful evidences are thick and fearful on every hand, whichever way we turn, that the public confusion which no-^ reigns in our own once peaceful land has brought with it to us this pernicious evil in its most frightful and aggra- vated forms. Disaster has followed disaster in terrible and startling rapidity to a people who, two short years ago, had never tasted the cup of humiliation or sorrow. Our terri- torial grandeur has been torn and disputed by the sword, homes have been desolated and filled with the bitterness of ■death, debt and taxation tower up like a gloomy specter in our midst and cast an appalling shadow over the hopes THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 67 of the present and of future gouoralions of labor for more than a hundred years to come ; but such scenes have not softened the heart of executive authority, tempered the insatiable lust of personal domination, or stayed the hand of official trespass and ojtpression any more in the admin- istration of the American Republic than they have in the administration of govornnicnts of former ages. The usurper seizes the moment when the constitutioia of his country is •weakened by some deadly peril to assist in breaking it 4own. He watches the opportunity when the laws are un- settled to trample them under his feet and substitute his own imperious and unhallowed will in the place of their ■well-defined and peaceful operations. Mr. Speaker, on the 24th day of last September, the President of the United States, in a few brief lines pub- lished in the newspapers and styled a proclamation, de- clared that the people of this country were under martial law, and that all ci^■il rights and remedies touching their personal liberties were suspended. The blow was sudden, quick, and radical. It was a piece of the inevitable logic of executive encroachment. Tyranny has its rules of ac- tion as well as other systems of wrong. Chicanery, fi'aud, and subtle, obscure false-dealing characterize its attempts when it does not feel secure in the more daring efforts. But this act of the President and his Cabinet is the un- blushing assumption of power which has ceased to respect or fear the constitution or laws which the people have made, and which these servants of the people have sworn to support. It throws aside all disguise, tears ofl" its vail, and displays the horrible features of despotism to Ameri- can citizens. "Will any member of this House dispute'the correctness of the terms which I employ ? Let us divest ourselves of all passion and resentment. Let us take a calm view of facts and principles, as history will do, and, by the steady light of truth and reason, let us examine and discover, if we can, what the administration now in power has done in behalf of the constitution of the fathers, and in behalf of the cause for which this Republic was founded. The object for which our ancestors revolted from the 68 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. British empire, and enacted that sublime tragedy of his-, tory, the American Revohition, was to secure to the citizeit more liberty and personal security than he possessed under the jurisdiction of the British crown. Their complaints^ were not against the constitution of England, but against a weak king and a wicked ministry, who violated it in, order to oppress the subject. They studied the dangerous- nature of a lawless executive during seven years of grief^ of bitterness, and of blood. When day dawned on their independence, the great secret of free government was no longer a secret to them. They had learned it, and learned it forever in the high and holy inspiration of battles fought for the inherent right to govern themselves. Their wisdonv then succeeded their swords, and the American constitution became the offspring of the American Revolution, and in- herited all its ideas. In immediate view of the unparal- leled struggle which had just closed, and of the causes- which produced it, the constitution of the United States came forth from the hands of its framers, the great mis- sionary of freedom to the citizens of this chosen land first,, and afterward to the whole earth. This is the spirit with which it was born, and such the purpose for which it was^ set apart. It is an old maxim of law, that every instru- ment shall be construed and interpreted according to the intention of those who made it. This maxim was followed until these modern days have engendered not merely a spirit of false construction, but of open and audacioua usurpation, such as never haunted the disprdered brain of George III., even in his hours of madness. I am not about here to enter into an elaborate discussion of th& various primary functions of the constitution. It is the text-book of the people's happiness and security, and they know it by heart; but in order that the dangers which now assail it, here in the house of its pretended friends,, may be more plainly seen, I may be allowed to dwell a moment on some of its simplest, but most important fea- tures. By the letter and by the spirit of the constitution, this i» peculiarly and emphatically a popular government. The THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 69 people make every part of it, uphold the entire fabric, and -control its whole economy. It is true that the constitution makes three departments, in which the powers of the gov- ernment are placed, but the voice of the people is supreme -over them all. The executive can make no law, annul no law, change no law. He is not responsible for the laws as be finds them. They are made by the people in their leg- islative capacity, and he is simply their servant to execute their will thus expressed. The department of the judiciary was created to intei'pret and pronounce the meaning of law; and if the law, as thus declared by the courts, is not in accordance with the popular wishes, it is to be corrected t)y new legislation. But one department can not invade or -coerce the other, when each confines itself to its constitu- tional boundai'ies. These rules are very old and very familiar, but they assume a new and wonderful signifi- cance in the light of present events. They are like the face of an old friend beheld unexpectedly under terrible .and startling circumstances. I do not allude to them at this time because I suppose they are new to the humblest -mind in the land. I allude to them, however, sir, for the porjiose of asserting, as I do here now in my place as a representative of the people, that the present executive of this government has usurped the powers of the judicial .and the legislative departments of the constitution to an -extent which is totally subversive of republican institu- tions, and not to be borne by a free people. I make the ■charge, and will submit the j)roof to my candid country- men. It will not be denied on this floor, or elsewhere, that the suspension of the writ of Jiobcas corpus by proclamation, to which I have alluded, closed the civil courts of this coun- try, from one ocean to the other, against the trial of any one arrested by the order of the President or his subordi- nates. It gave access to the vaults of the prison, but not to the bar of justice. It is a part of the nature of frail man to sin against laws, both human and divine, but God himself secures him a trial i)eforc punishment, and tyrants xilone repudiate the justice of the Almighty. To deny to 70 SPEECHES OE HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEBS. an accused person the right to be heard in his defense, is pre-eminently the attribute of the worst ages of brutal? despotism. Condemnation without trial, and punishment without limitation, is the exact definition to my mind of the most atrocious tyranny that ever feasted on the groans^ of the captive, or banqueted on the tears of the widow and the fatherless. And yet on this spectacle of horror and of shame American citizens have been gazing for more than a- year ! The great bulwark which generations in bloody toil have erected against the wicked exercise of unlawful power, has been torn away with a parricidal hand. Every citizen- in this Republic — the farmer at his plow, the mechanic in his shop, the merchant at his counter ; every calling and profession in life, from the proud man in his mansion to- the good man in his cabin — all stand this day naked and exposed, utterly and entirely at the mercy of one man, and of the fawning minions who crouch before him for pay. I state a fact in the hearing of the country, and wherevei" my feeble words may penetrate, witnesses will rise up and solemnly attest its truth. It would be the natural supposition of every intelligent- mind, that an argument to prove that there is a warrant in- the constitution for this state of affairs, would be an insult to the genius of the Revolution in which our liberties wer& won, an outrage on the memory of the great dead of that period, and a mockery to the common sense of the world. But the spirit of abject serviHty, which always invites the- arrogant assumptions of power and precedes the downfall of liberty, is performing its loathsome ofiice on every hand. We hear on every side the old cry of the courtier and the- parasite. At every new aggression, at every additional- outrage, new advocates rise up to defend that source of patronage, wealth, and fame— the department of the execu- tive. Technical and obscure rules, cunningly devised spe- cial iDleas, and skillful and deceptive sophistry, all combine,, in the hands of the supporters of this administration, to tear away from the people the protection of the laws of their own making. Such assistance has always waited on the most malignant efibrts of tyranny. STero had his poet THE LIBKRTT OF THE CITIZEN. 71 laureate, and Seneca wrote his defense for the murder of his mother. The present dark hour att'ords ample evidence that human nature is the same that it was two thousand yeai-s ago. Amid the opening seenes of this disastrous and deplora- ble war, the President suspended the operations of the writ of habeas corpus iu certain unsettled and afflicted cities and portions of the country. This was, in my judgment, with- out authority of the constitution ; but the people bore with heroic patience their own wrongs rather than add to the disorder and calamities of the nation. But this partial assault on the principles of free government is rendered insignificant in view of the daring and gigantic stride taken in September, and which the blandishing tongue of flattery and adulation commend and sustain in the Ameri- can Congress, and in the face of the American people. With this last act in the mournful tragedy of national honor, and, I fear, national existence, I shall more espe- cially deal at tliis time. Sir, I might content myself as to the power of the Presi- dent to suspend the writ of habeas corpus by resting upon judicial precedent. I might declare to this Ilouse and to the country, in the language of that eminent jurist, late Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Benja- min Rand Curtis, of ^Massachusetts, that " the only judicial decisions which have been made upon this question have been adverse to the power of the President." I might array negative upon negative, and cite in support of my position the great names of judicial history-, before whose glory in the higher walks of useful fame among men the most exalted names of to-day would be as the feeble sparks of the glow-worm in vain competition with the blazing sun at its meridian. I might show from the recorded transactions of the past that the nineteenth century and the land of much vaunted freedom liavc produced a Presi- dent and a Cabinet who, in a species of delirium, have de- fied, spurned, and sought to crush and humiliate tlie legal decisions of centuries made in behalf of personal security and personal independence — decisions which salute the eye 72 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. of the wayfarer and down-trodden of every age and of every clime like lighthouses on the stormy beach, beckoning the mariner in the midst of darkness and despair to the shelter of a peaceful harbor. I might do all this, and' it would seem that it would be ample enough ; but it would be no more than has already been done with far more ability than belongs to my humble powers. All the world knows these things. Even the representatives who misrepresent the people on the other side of this chamber know all this, and shrink and tremble before the application which future history will make of past history. I wish, however, to dwell for a few moments amidst the historical associations of this immortal writ of human freedom and human pro- gress. I wish to scan its purpose and discover its spirit. I wish to inquire what causes produced it. I wish to see why it was ever thought of in connection with civil gov- ernment. What did it propose to accomplish? What did it oppose, and what did it favor ? Who have been for it, and who have been against it ? The answers to these questions, drawn from history, will, according to my mode of reasoning, throw immense light on the question of the power of any executive officer to suspend its operations and deprive the people of its benefits. Sir, the history of the progress of liberty, next to the history of the Christian religion, is the most sublime and instructive lesson taught in the annals of the world. Its fortunes, indeed, have been various, but no season of ad- versity has ever sufficed to quench the vestal fires which burn on its altars. And in all the terrible struggles with which it has jarred the nations and liberated the people, its sole antagonist has been the principle that to one man belongs the right to govern the many. Kings, and the courtiers of kings, who talk of the divine right to the possession and ex- ercise of power, have been the enemies which liberty has had to encounter. Every contest it ever waged has been to put restraint and control on the will, the pretensions, the au- thority of one man. Every battle fought beneath its ban- ners, in all the four quarters of the earth, has been fought to resist and repel the arrogant and unlawful claims of THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 73 power made by one man. Every law which was enacted in its interests, from the laws of God on INIount Sinai to the present hour, has been enacted to protect the masses from the ravages and oppressive hand of one man. This has forever been the issue, and it is the issue now. When the light of liberty faded away in the sky of Southern Europe, and the Grecian and Roman glory went ■down in the gloom and night of despotism, ages of dark- ness followed, over whose paralyzed faculties the spirit -of absolutism held undisputed supremacy. Bat liberty had made one grand epoch. It had built a monument of law, literature, science, and art, which still stands, and will for- ever stand, towering up on the background of history like some awful pyramid against the distant sky. The states- man, the philosopher, the poet, the ai'tist, and the historian, slW bend reverently before the grand achievements of that age of liberty. Then came, however, that mysterious tomb of a thousand years, in which the principles of free gov- ernment slept. But it was not the sleep of death. Liberty found its resurrection at the hands of that great race from whose loins the American citizen has descended. It awoke with returning consciousness on the soil of our ancestors, 3,t the touch of Edward the Confessor and Alfred the Law- maker. But it awoke simply to renew the struggles of the past with its ancient foe. One man in the robes of ■office, loving power with a selfish love, and exercising it in disregard of law, met the genius of liberal institutions at every step on this side of the dark ages, as well as in the days of Tiberius and Philip of Macedon. The struggle has never ceased. The people grasped at power ; for to them the possession of power is freedom. Crowned heads -claimed it as their right ; for to them it was the gratifica- tion of a passion more consuming than all others that ever corroded the human heart — the avarice of dominion — the lust for personal supremacy. The safety of the people lay in written laws Judicially interpreted, and this they soon learned. Kings sf)Uglit to govern by proclamations which suspended or disregarded law. Hence arose those glorious •efforts to fix the boundaries between the ruler and the cit- 74 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOOEHBES. izen— to put restraint on the one, and give security to the other, which constitute the chief glory of England and the just pride of Englishmen. Why did the British barona meet at Eunnymede ? "Why is the name of that spot im- mortal ? What causes produced that wonderful assemblage in the month of June, and in the year 1215 ? Why is it that we talk to-day of that event transpiring more than six hun- dred years ago with the familiarity which belongs to an event of yesterday ? Sir, the old contending principles were there brought face to face, and a great landmark was erected in behalf of personal liberty and against the abuse of power, as high as the heavens and as enduring as the earth. The people confronted King John, who had been arresting- citizens without charge, and punishing them without trial, and made him to record an oath before angels and men that he would forever abandon the practice of such out- rages. This was Magna Charta. These were the causes, which produced it. It became a perpetual law, and every English monarch, from John to Victoria, has sworn, in ex- press form of words, as a part of the coronation oath, to support it. Listen, sir, to its old-fashioned and homely, but most glorious text : " No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseized or outlawed, or banished or anyways destroyed, nor will we pass upon him, nor will we send him, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. " We will sell to no man ; we will not deny to any man either justice or right." This was the voice of a people in whose minds a clear perception of legal forms had not yet dawned ; but it was the clear, high voice of liberty, which, when once spoken, never ceases to echo and resound from age to age, until the angel shall close the book of time. I love to listen to its pealing strains. JSTo music this side of the winged cher- ubim of God is so sweet to my ear. I contrast it with the- harsh, discordant notes of the executive usurpations of the present hour, and the abject tones of those who feed on the smiles of executive favor. I turn away from the sad omens- THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 75- which surround us to ronowaml .strengthen my faith in the ultimate success of free institutions, l)y contemplating the scenes through which they have already passed. I turn away from the sight of expiring liberty in this land to as- sure myself, by a contemplation of other days, that it can not altogether die. ;Mr. Speaker, we can not overestimate the value of the victory obtained by the popular will over the doctrine of the one-man power when the Great Charter was extorted from England's perfidious king. Every enlightened lover of human freedom has borne testimony to the importance of this grand achievement. The great Earl of Chatham, in pleading the cause of constitutional liberty in 1770, paid tribute to it as follows : " It is to your ancestors, my lords — it is to the English barons, that we are indebted for the laws and constitutions. we possess. Their virtues were rude and uncultivated, but they were great and sincere. Their understandings were as little polished as their manners ; but they had hearts to distinguish right from wrong ; they had heads to distin- guish truth from falsehood ; they understood the rights of humanity, and they had spirit to maintain them. " My lords, I think history has not done justice to their conduct. When they obtained from their sovereign that great acknowledgment of national rights contained in Magna Charta, they did not confine it to themselves alone, but delivered it as a common blessing to the whole people." Sir James Mackintosh dwells upon it in glowing periods.. Says that brilliant historian and statesman : " Whoever, in any future age or yet unborn nation, may admire the felicity of the expedient which converted the power of taxation into the shield of liberty, by which dis- cretionary and secret imprisonment was rendered imprac- ticable, and portions of the people were trained to exercise a larger share of judicial power than ever was allotted to them in any other civilized State, in such a manner as to secure, instead of endangering, public tranquillity ; whoever exults at the spectacle of enlightened and independent as- semblies, which, under the eye of a well-informed nation^ 76 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEBS. ■discuss and determine the laws and policy likely to make -communities great and happy ; whoever is capable of com- prehending all the effects of such institutions, with all their possible improvements, upon the mind and genius of a people, is sacredly bound to speak with reverential grati- tude of the authors of the Great Charter. To have pro- duced it, to have preserved it, to have matured it, consti- tute the immortal .claim of England upon the esteem of mankind." "Why, Mr. Speaker, has Magna Charta been thus esteemed by the wisest minds of the world to be worthy of such lofty ■encomiums ? Why does it tower up with such magnitude over all other considerations in the construction of free governments ? The answer is very simple, plain, brief. It is because, in the language of Hume, the historian — " This famous deed either granted or secured very im- portant liberties and privileges to every order of men in the kingdom — to the clergy, to the barons, and to the people." It is immortal and dear, sir, to all people, and more es- pecially to the American people at this time, because, in the discussion of its principles, Hallam declares : " From the era, therefore, of King John's charter it must have been a clear principle of our constitution that no man •can be detained in prison without trial." It is an authority in point to-day against the daily practices ■of those who now administer the affairs of this Republic, i)ecause Sir James Mackintosh has pronounced its crown- ing glories, which fill the world with grateful admiration, to be "those essential clauses which protect the personal liberty and property of all freemen, by giving security from arbitrary imprisonment and arbitrary spoliation." Such, sir, are its claims upon the dearest affections of mankind. It was born in the hearts of a proud, free race, and its mission on earth was to confront and resist that pernicious dogma of tyrants, that the liberties of the people ■can in any event be left to the control of any solitary indi- vidual, whether he be called czar, emperor, king, or presi- -dent. And, in every contest with its enemy, it has beea THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 77 eventually victorious. The people of England compelled' their sovereigns to solemnly ratify it more than thirty times in the space of four hundred years. But, bearing in mind the causes which produced Magna Charta, and the great object it was designed to accomplish, let us take another step in the history of the progress of personal liberty and personal security. In 1627 commenced that wonderful English revolution which fills so many mem- orable and bloody pages of history. It commenced over the old question of power. The king arrested Hampden, Dar- nel, and other citizens for refusing to pay certain taxes, and threw them into prison. They applied to the court of king's bench for the writ of habeas corpus, in order that it might be known whether their commitment was " by the law of the land," and upon what charge it was made. " The writ was granted ; but the warden of the Fleet made return that they were detaind by a warrant froni the privy council, informing him of no particular cause of imprison- ment, but that they were committed by the special com- mand of his majesty." We have had many such returns in this land of freedom, during the past year, and every mind will suggest the- ready parallel by a simple change of names. But in the days of Charles I., more than two hundred years ago, our ancestors did not allow the subject to drop at the haughty bidding even of a king. They met the issue. Bold and fierce discussion followed, until the unwarranted arrest and imprisonment of five Englishmen gave rise to the famous Petition op Right, which was a clear and explicit affirma- tion of the principles of 31agna Charta, and an application of them to existing grievances. I quote that portion of it which so forcibly reminds us of the high and sacred rights which have been stricken down by the present ad- ministration in our own midst : " ni. And whereas, also, by the statute called ' the Great Charter of the Liberties of England,' it is declared and enacted that no freeman may be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but 78 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHBES. l)y the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. " IV. And in the eighth and twentieth year of the reign of King Edward III., it was declared and enacted by au- thority of Parliament that no man, of what estate or con- dition that he be, should be put out of his lands or tene- ments, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law. " V. !N"evertheless, against the tenor of said statutes, and other the good laws and statutes of your realm, to that end provided, divers of your subjects have of late been impris- oned without any cause showed, and when, for their deliv- erance, they were brought before your justices, by your majesty's writs of habeas corpus, there to undergo and re- ceive as the court should order, and their keepers com- manded to certify the causes of their detainer, no cause was certified, but that they were detained by your majesty's special command, signified by the lords of your privy coun- cil, and yet were returned back to their several prisons with- out being charged with anything to which they might make answer according to law." The king signed new guaranties of liberty to meet these complaints, but, in an unhappy hour for him, broke his royal word, and again trespassed upon the rights of the people. The struggle again commenced, and raged until Charles I. fell beneath the ax of the executioner ; and that mysterious and unexplained enigma of history — Oliver Cromwell triumphed over him in the name of popular right and consti- tutional government. And, though the practical fruits of this mighty revolution were for long years turned to dust and ashes upon the lips of England, yet the public mind of the world had learned a grand and overwhelming les- son. The English people taught mankind of every age and of every country that no sanctity of prerogative, no dignity of blood, no prescriptive customs, no pageantry of royal state, no bayonets surrounding the palace, can pro- tect one man in plundering the multitude of their per- sonal liberties. It is a lesson, sir, which the humblest THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 79 American citizen knows by heart to-day and treasures up as an everlastins; inheritance. But there was another great period in history iu which our ancestors dovolo|)ed their devotion to tlie progress of liberty, to tlie princijiles of Majna Charta. In 1G89 another member of the house of Stuart, forgetful of the fate of his father, possessed himself of the atrocious instruments of oppression, and attempted to subvert the laws and liberties of his kingdom. But the spirit which brought Charles I. to the block exiled James II., and changed the dynasty for- ever from the house of Stuart. And the same causes, the same aggressions against the personal rights of the subject ■which produced the Petition oe Rights under ChaTles I., produced the Bill of Eights under James II. It was the same venerable issue, and is contained in the following sections : '• 1. That the pretended power of suspending laws by regal authority, without consent of Parliament, is illegal. " 2. That the pretended power of dispensing with laws, or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal." Mr. Speaker, we have here, then, the three grand acts in the sublime drama of English liberty; and the unity of immortal principle which pervades and sustains them all is 60 complete that Lord Chatham consolidated them in his mind, and proclaimed them to be " the Bible of the English constitution." Their inspiration was confined, however, to no nation and to no age. Their application to civil rights was as universal as mankind itself. They speak in tones of hope, of dignity, and of manhood to every heart, worthy to be free, which beats beneath the sun. They con- stitute a frowning and defiant bulwark against arbitrary and despotic power, but a radiant and smiling angel of liberty, peace, fraternity, and security to the toiling millions whose strong arms uphold the wealth, the commerce, the progress, and the civilization of the world. And when the next great struggle in behalf of constitutional liberty for the citizen against the unlawful assumption of power by one man, which startled the nations in 1776, had closed in 80 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHBBS. triumph on the soil of Virginia— where the voice of Pat- rick Henry first aroused it— the material for those clauses^ of the American constitution which secure the personal independence and personal rights of the citizen, was ready and ample, a rich inheritance of the past, and only needed to be reasserted in the form of an organic law. Our con- stitution is simply one more denial recorded in history of the power to transcend the written law in order to reach and injure the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property. It is simply one more declaration, added ta those already made, that the people possessed an inherent power to protect themselves against their old enemy — ex- ecutive usurpation. It was a solerdn protest, in the name- of human nature, that one man should have the liberties of this people within his control no more forever. It was the promulgation of Magna Charta, the continuation of the Petition of Eight, the extension of the Bill of Eights, and a concentration of them all. -Here are the noble, fa- miliar sections, the due observance of which alone renders American citizenship more valuable than the condition of the slave on his plantation : "Art. IV. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and efi'ects, against unreasonable- searches and seizures, shall not be invaded, and no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. " Art. V. !N"o person shall be held to answer a capital or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or in- dictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia when in actual service in time of war or public danger ; nor shall any person be Bul^ject, for the same offense, to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb ; nor shall he be compelled, in any criminal case, to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. " Art. VI. In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall THK LIBBRTT OF THE CITIZEN. 81 enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impar- tial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previ- ously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation ; to l)c confronted with the witnesses against him ; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense." I have thus, sir, given a brief and summary view of the results which have attended a contest between free princi- ples and the abuse of power for more than six hundred years in England and America. I have endeavored to point out the issue which has at all times been involved. It will be observed, however, that all these great instru- ments, which stand as beacon lights of liberty along the pathway of the last six centuries, and from which I have 60 freely quoted, are only declaratory of what the rights of man are, and depend for their execution on an additional agency in the policy of government. Magna Charta, as I have shown, declared a mighty principle in the science of just government, and it has been repeated over and over again many times since, and at last finds a polished and detailed embodiment in the American constitution ; but something more is necessary and indispensable in order to carry it out and confer its practical benefits on mankind. The barons said that the executive should not take, im- prison, or punish any citizen of the realm, except accord- ing to the law of the land; the subjects of every English king have repeated it, and the framers of our constitution assert the same thing with great particularity and care in the sections which I have just read ; but what would all this be worth if no means had been provided to enforce this often reiterated principle of liberty ? It would simply stand as an expression — a sublime one, it is true — in favor of immutable justice and right; but without the machinery of some active process of administrative law, it would be powerless to extend succor to the oppressed. Therefore, all the proud declarations against the infringe- ment of personal liberty by the executive, from Runny- 82 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. mede to the present hour, have been accompanied by that messenger of speedy justice, the writ of habeas corpus. It executes what they declare. It gives motion and efficacy to the laws of a free government. It is the active agent by which the will of the people, as expressed in the consti- tution and laws made for their own protection, is enforced. Without it, the tyrant may laugh to the winds every doc- trine of Magna Charta, every provision of our own consti- tution. Without it, an executive ruler is beyond legal restraint or coercion, and can with impunity substitute his own will for the constitution and the laws. Without it, arbitrary power may roam over the rights of the people, like the wild boar in the rich vineyards of Gaul, and tear and rend its victims with pleasure. Sir, the habeas corpus is the, life of liberty. It is of an- cient origin. It was born amid the opening struggles of our remote ancestors in behalf of popular freedom. It was recognized at once by a race unwilling to accept the doom -of slaves to be a law of necessity. It sprang from no stat- ute. It depends for its existence on no enactment. It is one of those high, unrepealable laws which liberty writes on the hearts of all her worshipers, and which, without the aid of legislation, became a part of the common law of England, simply because of that rule of God's providence, which prescribes an eternal fitness of things. It is, per- haps, older than Magna Charta itself. Hallam, in his His- tory of the Middle Ages, referring to the period when the ^reat charter was obtained, says : "Whether courts of justice framed the writ of habeas corpus in conformity to the spirit of this clause, or found it already in their register, it became from that era the right of every subject to demand it." And again, this great author says : " From earliest records of the English law no freeman could be detained in prison except upon a criminal charge or conviction, or for a civil debt. In the former case it was always in his power to demand of the Court of King's Bench a writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, directed to the person detaining him in custody, by which he was eH- THE LIBERTY OP THE CITIZEN. 83 joined to bring up tlie body of the prisoner, with the war- rant of commitment, that the court might judge of its sufficiency, and romaud the jiarty, admit him to bail, or discharge him, according to the nature of the charge." This h\w, thus described, the Ameritan colonies inher- ited and possessed from the earliest period of their settle- ment. It took no legislation to bestow on them its blessing, for, as an eminent law-writer observes : " And it must now be taken as a settled axiom of Amer- ican law, that the territory of the colonies was claimed by right of occupancy or by finding it " desert and unculti- vated ;" and that the common law of England first ob- tained in that part of the empire as a law personal to the English-born colonists." And, in the formation of our constitution, our fathers assumed that it already existed in all its ancient force and benevolent mission, and simply made the following pro- vision against its suspension : " That the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when, in cases of rebellion or inva- fiion, the public safety may require it." And now, Mr. Speaker, in view of the historical grandeur of this writ ; in view of the duties which belong to its na- ture to perform ; in view of the evils which it alone can restrain ; in view of the causes which produced it, and in view of the abuses against which it is leveled, I am filled with wonder and amazement that any healthy intellect has «ver been found to entertain the opinion that it was in the power of the executive department of any government to suspend its privileges and deny to the people its protection. It came into existence to compel English kigns to obey the principles of Magna Charta, and it is the only means, this side of the sword, by which an American president can be made to obey the constitution ; and yet the air is filled with a clamorous cry that these kings and this president can escape this obedience by nullifying, with a single word, the only peaceful means which the people possess to enforce it. It is the only legal means by which the American citizen can resist and antagonize the most infamous out- 84 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. rages against personal rights ; and yet the doctrine is daily proclaimed here and elsewhere that it is wholly left to th& executive to determine whether he will be resisted at all^ or whether he will enjoy the spectacle of a people devoted to liberty imploring, not the law, but his clemency, through the iron grates of prisons, with less legal redress for their wrongs than the dusky slaves of the Carolinas. The writ of habeas corpus was originated for the sole purpose of con- trolling one man and his subordinates ; and yet it is claimed, in this enlightened age, that very man can con- trol it. It has been the master of every executive since- it was known among men ; but in these modern days the majority of the American Congress assert that the Presi- dent of the United States has become its master. You might as well lock the convict in his cell and give him the key, and expect to find him there when you return, as ta expect the executive ruler of a nation to abide within the- limits of constitutional restraint when the people have sur- rendered to him the only engine of power which they hold over the question. You might as well expect an enemy who had laid siege to a city to refrain from entrance when, the gates were thrown open and the sword delivered up, as to expect ofiicial station to respect at all times popular rights when all their safeguards are abandoned to their ancient enemy. Sir, the very purpose, the single object for which the writ of habeas corpus has survived the lapse of centuries and rocked the world with revolutions, would be- utterly defeated if the President of the United States can, suspend its operations and paralyze it by his touch. It might as well never have adorned the pages of jurispru- dence. It becomes a useless, an idle thing by such a con- struction. It is only needed when the executive attempts- to deprive the citizen of his liberty contrary to law; and according to the construction of the supporters of this ad- ministration, that attempt need never fail, for it is within the power of the President to remove every obstacle which stands in his way by the suspension of this writ. ^ Let this construction be maintained, and the cause of liberty recedes back into the twilight dawn from which it THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 85 emerged nearly a thousand years ago. Then there waa no law for the king except his arbitrary will; and there will be no other law here now lor the I'resident. Every -effort made in behalf of free government will have been made in vain. The barons will have assembled in Tain. John Hampden, on the plains of, Chalgrave, will have died in vain. Our own martyred host, robed in glory, who fell for freedona on the battle-iields of the Revo- lution, will have tasted the bitterness of death in vain. The lights ■which have been hung up over our heads by the ■wisdom and the sufferings of the past will all be stricken •down. Magna Charta will fall from its exalted sphere like a falling star, and our own constitution, like the eagle tow- ering in his pride of place, will be by a mousing owl hawked ,at and killed. The gloom of absolutism will once more fill the sky, and it will only be left to American citizens to creep around in its shadows as secret and stealthy mourn- •ers at the tomb of liberty. One man's supremacy, the ever- lasting foe to free institutions, will be complete. In the place of written constitutions and laws, we will enjoy the government of one mind and one will, embittered and swayed by the passions and prejudices which make their tome in every frail mortal breast. Xo, sir. This darling ■writ of the people, which has caused the venerable states- man to abound in warm and swelling periods of eulogium, and the cool lips of the judge to indulge in unwonted judi- cial eloquence ; this guardian of ever}' home ; this saint in every freeman's calendar; this friend of every fireside ; this key to every dungeon ; this ^tlessiah of the law, which comes to redeem the lost, and to visit those that are sick and in prison, was not born to be suspended and crucified :at the command of some ruling Csesar. The people who made it, and who own it by the title of a hundred battles fought for its principles, can alone, through their repre- sentatives, say when they are willing to waive for a season its protection, and enact its temporary suspension. iSTot ■only is this the law, as decided by every court in the his- tory of English and American jurisprudence, but it is also 86 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. the law as decided by every maxim of reason, by every principle of political philosophy. If I err, Mr. Speaker, in asserting that the Pai'liament alone in England, and the Congress alone in the United States, can jndge of the necessity and exercise the power of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, I err in most noble company. I am but following, at an humble distance, in the footsteps of those whose illustrious names have long' since become proverbs of wisdom and justice. If I am lost and going astray in the doctrines I have enunciated to-day,. I am consoled with the reflection that I am wandering with Blackstone, with Hale, with Mansfield, with Coke ; that I share my delusion with Kent, with Story, with John Mar- shall. If I am insensible at this time to the claims of mod- ern political lawyers, it is because my mind is absorbed ire the contemplation of the teachings of those whose names^ are of the immortal few not born to die. If I turn a deaf ear on this occasion to the arrogant pretensions of provost marshals and police officials, the representatives of execu- tive usurpations, it is because I prefer to fix my attention upon a lofty and virtuous class, the latchets of whose shoes they are not worthy to unloose. If I am to be denounced for my utterances here, in behalf of liberty and justice, by the eager servility of the hour, the storm will spend its- fury in vain on my head, sustained and protected as I am by the unanimous voice of those whom mankind has beea taught to revere as benefactors of the human race. My eye shall not be withdrawn from the constitution as the- guardian of liberty. I will not turn away from the written law, judicially expounded, for any consideration of earthly importance. It is to me the star that hovered over the cradle of liberty in its infancy, the spirit which upheld and strengthened it when tempted in the wilderness, and the- power which will roll away the stone from its tomb if it should ever again be betrayed and put to death. I belong, sir, to a profession which is glorious in history, I rejoice that I have spent some of the days of my man- hood in the study of a science in the adornment of which Erskine and Curran, Webster and Grimke, spent their THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 87 lives. The legal profession has had much to bear in the hostile criticism provoked by an unworthy class who in- habit the vestibule of her temple, and allure to their meslies the unwary pilgrims who seek Iier shrino for snbstinitial relief. The artful trickery of ignoble minds has been as- signed as an attribute of the profession of the law, and its lower walks; that pestilential brood which swarms around the base of the pedestal of honorable fame, has, to tlje casual observer, sanctioned such a view. But this is all unjust. There is an atmosphere near the sun in which the great jurists of twenty generations dwell. Thej' have been the forerunners of legal liberty. They have never hung upon the skirts of governmental progress. Other profes- sions have formed technical barricades against the advance of popular freedom, and questioned the divinity of the people ; but those who have drunk deep from the fountains of that " perfection of reason," English and American law, recognize the voice of the people as the voice of God. It is matter of record that the legal profession has been the patient, the toiling, and the inspired handmaiden of liberty. I might dwell upon its services, and recall the circum- stances, in historical order, which will forever commend its fame to the lovers of free institutions, if the fleeting hoar assigned to me would allow. But these things will all suggest themselves to the student of the law and the student of history. I pause, however, to inquire whether my brethren of the law have forgotten the examples of the past ; whether the exalted chivalry of the profession is dead? Do you stand by power with its robes of purple, or do you stand by the oppressed in destitution ? Is your motto the scepter of exaggerated and bloated authority, or is it the farmer at his plow-handle, in grand though hum- ble demand for his right as a free man under the constitu- tion ? The mission of the law, as the chosen apostle of freedom, has always been to succor the oppressed, the feeble, the suiFering and the poor, and to minister, in the spirit of the great Master, to those whom Christ blessed upon the mountain of Olives. Sir, for me, my way is chosen. I shall turn my back on the blandishments of ex- SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. ecutive power, and, though prison, though death assail me in the pathway of duty, I shall follow the examples and the precepts of old, and vindicate alike the dignity of my birth and the honor of my profession by defending the privileges of the people. To me this is a labor of love. My whole nature responds to its burning appeal. Wher- ever the spirit of unlawful aggression has been repelled ; wherever tyranny has been defied and resisted ; wherever honest, upright manhood, in whatever condition found, has asserted its right to a glorious sovereign equality, there my heart has paid a devout pilgrimage, and prayed for the success of every effort which tends to enlarge the liberty of the citizen. But, sir, the blow has fallen, and I turn to survey for a few moments its ghastly consequences. In defiance of all law, in contempt of the judiciary, in derision of the teach- ings of history, and in scorn and mockery of the holy principles of personal liberty, the writ of habeas corpus stands suspended. The will of the executive has for more than a year been the sole law of the land to which the out- - raged citizen has been permitted to appeal. The constitu- tion with its harmonious machinery of justice has been set aside, and the exact principle of a supreme aud irresponsi- ble despotism has reigned in its stead. ]!>[or has this been the mere naked assertion of an unwarranted and danger- ous power on the part of the executive, unaccompanied by those revolting scenes which always distinguish an arbi- trary from a free government. It has borne to the lips of the American people a fruit, in horrible abundance, more bitter and deadly than the Dead Sea apples of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sir, how shall I dwell upon the deep humilia- tion, the open shame which this Republic has suft'ered in the imprisonment of its loyal and faithful citizens ? How shall I fashion my tongue to speak in the hearing of a free people, in the presence of their representatives, surrounded on all hands in this hall by the symbols of liberty, and looking on the benignant face of the Father of his Country, of deeds enacted in our midst which recall to the mind in all their frightful detail the mournful stories of the dungeon THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 89 which have been waftod to us across the ocean, and which coiue down to us from the ages of chaos, night, and cruelty? Shall I stop to count over in a melancholy array the names of those who, without crime, without criminal charge, with no law but the law tif hideous violence, have been seized by the rapacity, the felonious rapacity of this administration, and buried out of sight of home, friends, and justice ? The list would be a long one, and would start teare afresh around a thousand firesides. This task, however, must be assigned to the impartial pen of history. A book will some day take its place upon the shelves of ■our libraries commemorating the \^'ounds which liberty has received in this enlightened age, in the wrongs and out- rages inflicted on American citizens. I am to-day dealing with the principle which is involved, and a few instances of the licentious abuse of power will illustrate the bold at- tempt which has been made to subvert the liberties of this _government. Xo age, no sex, no condition in life, has been exempt from invasion, unlawful arrest, and imprisonment. I speak simply what every man in the hearing of my voice knows to be true. I have seen the ministers of the gospel of a peaceful Savior on their way to prison, leaving wife, children, and congregation a thousand miles behind, for preaching peace on earth and good will toward men. One, the Rev. Mr. Bundy, as I am informed by my friend from Illinois [Mr. Allen], living in his district, was dragged away from the open grave of his child, over whose re- mains the burial services had not yet been closed; de- nied the privilege of returning to his house to take a final leave of another member of his family then dying, and hurried, like an atrocious and dangerous criminal, to the safe-keeping of a cell. I have seen the upright and conscientious lawyer seized by the loathsome instru- ments of oppression ; forbidden to c(nis(jlc a sick wife, the mother of his children, with a single word at parting, and conveyed by furtive and rapid movements to a distant and arbitrary military tribunal, because he had dared, as be- came a freeman, to declare what he conceived the law ta 90 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOOEHEBS. be. I have seen men who had been trusted and honored in public life by those who had known them most inti- mately in every relation, arrested in my own State for nO' offenses known to any law, and without warrant, without commitment, made to eat "the bread which captives' tears have watered" in evei-y age of despotism. In the month of October last, I met three friends, distinguished citizens of Indiana, who six years ago served as senators together in her legislature. I met them, sir, serving together in the same prison a term of imprisonment which had no other duration or limit, no other beginning or end, no other cause or conclusion, no other condition or circumstance to- support it, than the mere arbitrary, unlawful, unenlight- ened, and audacious will of one man here in Washington City. Sir, as I stood in their guarded room, listened to th& story of their wrongs, and looked out upon the sunshine and the air — and the flag of the white man's freedom float- ing in the distance — strange thoughts possessed my mind, and strange visions arose before me. A new sensation pene- trated my heart. I seemed to dwell for awhile beneath the shadow of the Bastile, and hear the cries and groans which, finally rent its walls. The dungeons of Austria opened around me, and the prayers of their victims for liberty seemed to fill all space and all time. The damp vaults of Venice and the fearful caverns of the Spanish Inquisition yielded up their horrible secrets. The Tower of London — that melancholy tomb of genius and of beauty — the impe- rious form of Henry VIII., the headsman's ax, the reeking^ block, all became distinct to my view ; and 1 looked, as it were, face to face, into the frightful, appalling countenance of tyranny. I studied its ferocious and revolting features in the light of historical associations. But when I came to reflect on all this, and reason from cause to effect, I found that precisely the same terrible principle of oppres- sion whicli has disgraced the past, and filled other coun- tries with tears and blood, was triumphing in my very presence. I turned away, and took my " appeal from tyr- anny to God." But, sir, the people of this whole country and of the THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEX. 91 civilized world liavc boliold woi'sc seonos tluiii even these enacted iu our midst. This Uouso has boon invaded. The principle of popular reprosoutatiou, on wliicli the theory of this government is based, has been assailed in the ille- gal and brutal arrest of two members of the Amerieati Congress. The honorable gentleman from Maryland [Mr. May] early fell a victim to the spirit of executive usurpa- tion, which has since spread like an evil shadow over the entire land. He had dared, in an hour of envenomed pop- ular frenzy, to raise his voice in this hall, and assert, in no suppliant tones, his rights as a representative. He had dared to assert that the constitution of the country was binding in all its provisions, in time of peace as well as in time of war, and that his allegiance was due to it, and not to the party which had ascended into power by trampling it under their feet. In the exercise of his undoubted pre- rogative as a legislator, and in accordance with his sense of duty as a citizen, he had brought forward measures here looking to a sf)eedy and peaceful solution of that unnatural strife which has turned our rivers to blood and lined our once fraternal borders with a thousand miles of grave- yards — not the sweet resting-places of those who lie down to sleep together in peace at the close of happy lives, but where hostile specters will forever haunt the dismal scenes and vex the air with shrieks of undying hate. For these acts of duty as a representative, and these acts alone, sir, the honorable gentleman from Maryland was arrested and made to feel the iron of hel[)le8s captivity enter his soul. The sanctuary of his home was invaded at midnight, that fit hour for the assassination of liberty, by an unknown band of armed men, who searched every privacy of domes- tic life, and then tore him with violence from a young and delicate family, with that total indifference to agony and d'ispair which so well becomes the callous agents of crime. He was thrust into prison, and became the recijiient of all those odious indignities which it is the trade and calling of jailers and turnkeys to inflict on noble minds and ex- alted natures. He languished inside of the bars of iron and the bayonets of sentinels until the caprice of the ex- 92 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHBES. ectitive threw open the doors of Ms cell and told him to go. As he was arrested without charge, guilty of uo offense, imprisoned without authority of law, punished without trial, so he was released from confinement without an ex- planation and without a hearing under the constitution. ■ This case, in a few brief sentences, comprises the ultimate point of a wanton and reckless despotism. And what I ■have said of it applies in principle with the same force to the case of the honorable gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Allen]. Both are representatives of the people on this floor, and both have been subjected to punishment due ..alone to criminals by the arbitrary and lawless edict of one man for the exercise of their opinions. Sir, do we live in a republic or an absolute monarchy ? Is this an American Congress or a Roman Senate in the most abject days of the Eoman empire ? Is this an assembly of freemen or a French assembly in the days of Louis XIY. ? How much more are we expected to bear ? "What deeper degradation is to be inflicted on us ? If one member of this body can be ar- rested for his opinions, and made to feed on the damp va- pors of a living tomb during the pleasure of the executive, so can all the rest of us who do not, with bated breath and words of whispered humbleness, bow ourselves with east- ern adulation at the footstool of power. If •'these things are to be borne, the hour for a Cromwell has arrived, and these walls will never again resound with the voice of lib- erty. Let the lictors advance and bind us with cords and scourge us in the open market-places as the unworthy suc- cessors of a nobler and prouder race. Let the pilgrim of future times visit not this dishonored hall, but go and linger in the old and deserted one, and draw inspiration from the glorious memories which hover over it. The voices of the mighty dead, in behalf of freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the supremacy of the constitution, yet seem to echo from its venerable walls; and its place in the history of the progress of liberty is as secure as the battle-field of Bunker Hill. Sir, am I to be told that there was cause for the arrest .and imprisonment of these gentlemen ? Who dares to say THE LIBERTY OF TlIK OITIZKN. 93- 60? Why were thoy not tried for their offenses, and, if guilty, punished ? Who will assert that the thousands %\ho have been imprisoned without authority of law, and dis- charged without trial, were criminals ? If they were, a double infamy awaits the executive and the agents of his usurpations, for libei-ating upon soeiety unprosecuted and unpunished offenders against the laws. If they are the dangerous criminals whieh they are daily described to be, then this administration has corruptly compounded with felony, and made itself a party to treason, by refusing to bring them to justice, even when the criminals themselves protested against being liberated without a trial. But, sir, I deny their guilt in every instance ; and, in doing so, I plant myself on the plain precepts of the laws of God and man. I have but little indulgence for this constant assump- tion of guilt against citizens who have courted trials, and ■whom you have not dared to try. The presumptions are all in favor of innocence where just laws prevail. They are in favor of guilt before trial only in the minds of tyrants. But, whether guilty or innocent, not one single provision of the constitution has at any time or place been complied with in the treatment of citizens arrested by gov- ernment officials. In violation of the constitution, American citizens have been arrested for using the freedom of speech. In violation of the constitution, their houses have been forcibly entered. In violation of the constitution, their papers have been searched. In violation of the constitution, their persons have been seized with armed violence. In violation of the constitution, they have been deprived, of liberty without due process of law. In violation of the constitution, they have been held to answer infamous accusations without presentment or indict- ment of a grand jury. In violation of the constitution, they have been denied the right to a speedy and public trial by an imi)artial jury. In violation of the constitution, they have been carried' '94 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEBS. out of the State and district in which their offenses, if any, were committed. In violation of the constitution, they have been kept in ignorance of the nature and cause of the accusations against them. In violation of the constitution, they have not been con- fronted with the witnesses against them. And, in most supreme and wicked violation of the con- stitution, they have been denied counsel for their defense, and informed, in all the insolence of a fanatical disregard of every principle of humanity as well as law — " That the general government will not recognize any one as an attorney for political prisoners, and will look with distrust upon all applications for release through such channel, and that such applications will be regarded as additional reasons for declining to release such persons." Sir, I challenge the worst age.s of the most profligate and corrupt despots for a more intolerable picture of personal outrage than is here presented. In. prisons, in dungeons, in cells, in solitude, and desolation of heai't, citizens of this free country are threatened with increased punishment if they resort to the only possible mode of approaching those in power to obtain information or trial with a view to lib- erty. Many new offenses, unknown to the constitution and the laws, have been created by the jtroclamation of the executive, and to these it must be added that it is a crime for an innocent man, overpowered by unlawful force, and wearing away his life in prison, to employ counsel to se- cure for him the benefit of the laws of the land. Sir, posterity will hold in remembrance the authors of these outrages — the President and his Cabinet — in order to exe- crate the prostitution which they have made of their high offices to the overthrow of the constitution,. When they retire from their exalted positions, and descend to the quiet walks of private life, where the voice of partisan applause and interested flattery will no longer reach their ears and shut out truth from their consciences, let them spend the evening of their days in pondering over the wretchedness they have so needlessly and wantonly caused. Let them THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 95 recall the tears of bitter grief, bereavi'inent, and shame, •which they have caused delicate and tender women to weep, as they implored their jailers in vain for relief against outrages which the jien blushes to reeord. Let them visit the madhouse, and listen to the shrieks and cries of their inmates, as they pour forth their w ailiiio-s from the shat- tered dome of thought, and in that saddest sight which earth can present — a mind in ruins — behold a portion of their handiwork, which will accompany their names into history. And if dreams come to them in their slumbers, let them dream of the poor suicide, who communed in solitude with his sad heart until his room became filled with shadows and impalpable forms, which mocked his agony and despair, and who, to escape from his unlawful imprisonment, launched his naked soul into the mysterious realms of the infinite, and appeared for trial before a com- passionate God. Let them awaken to hear the heart-broken sobs of the widow, and the pitiful lamentations of the fath- erless. Let them make some atonement for the grief they have inflicted by looking into all the detailed horrors which their system of infernal outrage has brought on unoffend- ing men and women. I speak not in malice ; I wish evil to no man on earth. I feel pain to know that I inflict it., But if I could forbear to speak with indignant emphasis on this sulyeet, I would feel that the bond of sympathy which binds me to my suffering fellow-men had been broken asunder. I would feel that my heart was an outlaw from the sacred precepts of the divine Nazarene who pronounced the merciful blessed because they showed mercy. But it is said that this system' of open disregard for the constitution, and the arrests which have been made under it, have been necessary to the stability and existence of the government. All the world knows that this is false. Neither insurrections nor invasions have taken place in the loyal States of the Union. The courts of justice have never for a moment been disturbed in the discharge of their duties by any of the circumstances attending this civil war. Every function in the machinery of government has been free to act. Does this administration distrust the entire judiciary 96 SPEECHES OF HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. of the country, the clerks, the sheriffs, and the juries ? And in what way has the whole body of the jDeople shown that the safety of the Eepublic requires that they should have- a master ? Sir, I scorn to pursue this thought. I spurn from me, at once and forever, this base, false, and danger- ous plea of necessity. What is there to Americans worth preserving, if the principles of liberty, the doctrines of th& constitution, shall perish ? We hear much stormy declama- tion about the life of the nation being in peril. It is true it is sadly imperiled on all sides. But does mere land and water, mere extent of soil, constitute the life of this nation ? Ko, sir; immortal liberty is its life — the soul which ani- mates the body — and without wdiich the mere form of our government will be a cold and lifeless corpse. "We are- asked to make war on this vital principle, and submit to- its destruction, in order to preserve the Union. You might as well ask me to drive the dagger into my own heart in order to preserve my life. I recognize no such monstrous folly? The constitution is my country, and I have no country outside of its provisions. When you require me to destroy it, or consent to its destruction, in order to save my country, you require a paradox which is the natural offspring of that unreasoning fanaticism which shares so- largely in the origin of our melancholy national disasters. I will stop here to denounce this argument of necessity as the uniform plea of tyrants who have sought to destroy liberty in all ages of the world. The children in our schools- are familiar with this truth. It has passed into a proverb, and has the sanction of universal human experience. But in close connection with this familiar -household word of Star Chamber oppression, another and kindred maxim of unlimited monarchy has been thrust upon the country by the supporters of the administration now in power. Loyalty has received a new definition. The doctrine of the Tudors and the Stuarts has been revived, and now once more struts forth in the habiliments of royalty on the stage of men. A prominent citi-zen of my own State, occupying- temporarily a high ofiacial position, has announced that loyalty to the government no longer consists in obedience THE LIBEKTV OF TUK CITIZEN. 97 to the laws in support of the constitution, iind in devotion to the flag, but in a blind, abject, unquestioning, and un- reasoning obedience to the measures of those who are in power. He fails to perceive how an Anierioau citizen can be faithful to his allegiance unless he concedes the princi- ple that the king can do no wrong. He has studied this heresy, doubtless, in European courts, and desires to trans- plant it to these shores. And if it should bloom here, it would be as the deadly upas-tree, under whose blighting shadow every green and beautiful thing dies. All civil rights would perish. The courts would stand adjpurned to meet no more. The scales of justice would be broken and thrown away. The temple of Janus would stand wide open, and war, the sport of kings and the ruin of the peo- ple, would waste the country forever. The sovereign voice of the masses would be silent and stifled in their throats. It would be dangerous to think ; and children would no longer be educated to enlighten their minds, but simply to develop their muscles, with which, as slaves, to work for the tax-gatherer, or as gladiators to enter the arena of am- bitious wars. The prison-houses would ovei-flow with all wha dared to remember that they were once free, and death, in its most appalling aspects, would hold high carnival on the gibbet. And over all, and supreme above all check, re- straint, or responsibility would reign the , sovereignty of one man. Sir, need I a.^k whether the public mind of this country ia ready to receive calmly and submit to the plain and in- evitable consequences of such astounding principles ? Are American citizens ready to surrender all, all, absolutely all that renders life a blessing and redeems their citizenship from being a by-word and a reproach ? I will not insult the proud ancestry from which we sprung ; I will not mock the memory of the dead who have died for liberty on both hemispheres ; I will not impeach the purity of the blood which flows in American veins by reiterating this question. It has been answered more than a thousand times already in council and in the field, by the great i-ace to which we belong, and the American people are ready to 98 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOORHEES. answer it again. Our remote ancestors beat down the walls of Rome and humbled the pride of the world's mistress into the dust. They broke the Roman yoke which Csesar placed on their necks, and turned and trampled to death the nation which had penetrated their misty regions, and awakened them to a sense of their power and their destiny. Their descendants for two thousand years, in all the won- derful vicissitudes of history, have chafed under and re- sented and resisted the insolent spirit of encroachment, in- vasion, and usurpation against their civil and their relig- ious liberties. They have met the degrading demands of executive tyranny at their thresholds, in whatever forms they have been advanced. Sir, this is the race of liberty. I solemnly and earnestly commend the study of its glorious and exalted history to those who are this day trifling with the majestic principles of personal independence, which it has secured to the world by its wisdom and its blood. It lias stood as the iron-mailed champion of constitutional government; it has borne the banners of the cross and planted Christian civilization on every shore and beneath every sky ; it has poured the beams of the useful sciences into the dark and waste places of the earth; it has carried the refinements of the arts to the savage forests, and caused the wilderness to be transformed into the abode of learn- ing and genius; it has thronged every ocean with com- merce ; it has spoken the great emporiums of trade into existence ; it has defied every barrier of nature to resist its adventurous spirit; it has played with the fiery elements of the physical world, and used them. as obedient servants in the grand march of its gigantic progress ; and in the midst of all this, and under all circumstances, it has waited •on the fortunes and espoused the cause of liberty with the unmeasured devotion of a knight-errant of chivalry and the undaunted courage of the Lion Heart. Such a race ■ will take no step backward. It will submit to no diminu- tion of its glory. It will surrender none of its high pre- rogatives. Revolutions and changes may retard its progress for a brief season, but they can no more defeat its ultimate success in all that is great in conception and sublime in THE LIBERTY OF THE CITIZEN. 99 •execution, than the storm which lashes the wavos into fuiy Mr. Chairman, I am amazed, utterly amazed, when I contrast the present with the past on this subject. All is changed, at least so far as Congress is concerned. Pledge ■ upon pledge has been made by every department of the government in the opening stages of this conflict. The national faith has been plighted at home and abroad in the most binding and obligatory manner, that the domestic laws and customs of the seceded States were not to be vio- lated, that slavery was not to be abolished, that savages were not to be let loose. . . . '• An army, however, of six hundred thousand men now stands banded together under the stern control of military discipline. In that, I suppose, the object of conservative- pledges is accomplished, and the time has arrived for the fulfillment of the purposes of this war, according to the view of abolitionists. They demand now that all these pledges shall be broken." . . . Mr. Speaker, one by one all these fatal demands of ex- treme, unconstitutional abolitionism, have been granted by this administration. Every conservative pledge by which a mighty army was obtained, has been broken — every one. The people who rallied under your pledges solemnly given, and filled the ranks of your army, have been deliberately deceived. They trusted you once, and you have been false to them. This is the reason why a new army can not be raised from a willing people. This is the reason why you seek to establish a despotism by this bill, in order to fill the ranks of the army by force. This is the reason why Republican members themselves admit that, loyal as are the- people of the country, you can not get another volunteer. A confiding people believed, when they drew tlicir swords, . that it was to uphold the principles of the constitution ; they believed they were following the ark of the living'. 110 SPEECHES OP HON. DANIEL W. VOOBHEES. •