■ 'p^ /8^€> LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 016 085 225 2 KANSAS-SLAVERY— THE LECOMPTON CONSTrCUTION. SPEECH OF \y HON. SIDNEY DEAN, OF CONNECTICUT. Delivered in the House of Representatives, March 25th, 1858. Mr. Chairman, I desire to submit a few re- marks, which have been very hastily prepared. Such is the a^prressive nature of Slavery, that it was the early policy of our Government to confine it within metes and bounds. Confessed by correct jurists of every age to be a crea- ture of posiiive municipal law, in defiance of the laws of nature and of the laws of God, it was the deliberate judgment of the venerated sires of our revolutionary history, that it should sustain its existence — if existence it should have — by the statute laws of the independent States. V/hile this policy was pursued, the people of the nonsiaveholding States washed their hands in innocency of this (to them) crime against the laws of God and the rights of man. Hedged in by State sovereignty, it was as clear- ly beyond the jurisdiction of the other States, as though it were a foreign Government in some island of the sea. When the man was transformed into a chattel, a brute, a thing, by the law of force, or, what is its equivalent, a statute law embodying the power of a sovereign State, he could do no less than submit to the prisoner's chain, unless by a successful revolu- tion he emancipated himself. But when he passed the barriers of that law, then by the higher law of nature and of God his chains of servitude fell off, and he walked the earth a freeman. I understand this to have been the settled doctrine of the country until a very re- cent period. In the instrument which confederated the thir- teen States, and made them an empire of sov- ereignties, a single clause was admitted, provi- ding for the rendition of persons who should, by | flight, defraud others of labor or service which was their rightful due. Beyond this single point, tortured of late into an implied power in one man to claim another as a slave upon soil foreign to his State, the Constitution is silent, and guiltless of the barbarous and un- christian doctrine that one man can rightfully chattelize another. Like the several free-State sovereignties, it stood, with the Declaration of Independence, the embodiment of the doctrine of universal Freedom, the practical ^pounder of the great, primal, God-given, " self-evident truth, that all men were created free and equal," having an impartial endowment of rights. These were asserted to be the glorious trinity— life, liberty, and the pursuit of that happiness which is the desire of all. Such, sir, from the nature of those instru- ments, and from cotemporaaeous testimony, I understand to be the great principles which un- derlie our system of government. The people of my State, sir, hold those views to-day. Taught them by their revolutionary sires, and by that written history of the country with which almost every youth among us is as fa- miliar as is any gentleman upon this floor, they cherish them, and will abide by them. Anti- Slavery they are ; Anti-Slavery they glory in being ; unbought by the offers of political syco- phants, unsullied by the seductions of cotton and commerce, and the wealth which they impart ; uninfluenced by the crazy threats of fratricidal fanatics who proclaim disunion, or unsubdued by any fear. Sir, my constituents, and the State which I have the pride of representing in part, ask noth" ing more of their sister sovereignties, than that they abide by the terms of the original com- pact. Their history is a liie-lonc^ pledge of their fealty to it. Bnt with the crazy scheme of the Slavery-extenders of this day they have no sympathy, and to the doctrine they will grant no quarter. They have from time to time acquiesced in those compromise measures which have been adopted, with the ex pectation that each one was to be the last. When the black tide of Slavery has thrown another and still another surge far up upon the free shore of our con- federated dominion, they have protested against the sacrilege in language becoming to free- men, and demanded a cesHation of these at tacks. But when the leading spirits of the na- tion have, through expediency, proposed a mu- tual yielding, in order to give a common repose, the citizens of my State have been the Grst to acquiesce, while at the same time they changed noi, in a single iota, their views of the nature of this evil, or its true municipal position in ihie country. No single step has been taken in this agi^reesive march of Slavery towards a na'ional existence, or the founding of an empire whose b^ae should be the bowed necks and crushed souls of men whom God made a portion of the human brotherhood, which has not met the Btern, opposing judgment and conscience of my constituents. Loving Freedom at the Brsl, they broke every manacle within the State. Before yon can force them into an acknowledg- me.nt of its existence there, you mufet turn the army of a Xerxes upon them, and crush the wall of human hearts, which, flying from the cottages and palaces within its borders, will close up in solid column for the defence oi their sovereign rights. Sir, man-stealing is a crime oj, magnitude in our State. Even the making of a claim to the possession of another human body, containing a living soul, subjects the claimant to arrest and trial under our stat- ute. Such is the love of liberty and the sense of equal justice in the bosoms of our people. I esteem it one of the proudest acts of my life, that by the sufTrages of my own townsmen I was enabled, by my vote in the Legislature, to give that spirit vitality in a statute law ; and that, too, because, in common with my fellow- citizens, I believe that the rights of all men are the gift of God, and the claims of property are not to be mentioned in the same breath. Sir, when the Convention which framed our Federal Constitution had under advisement that portion of the report of the committee of detail which recommended a tax upon the im- portation of CBTiain persons, (meaning slaves,) one of the brightest lights of our State — whose legal power was second to none in the coun- try — of whose name and fame every son of Connecticut is proud, arose in his place in op position to the measure, simply upon the ground " that it implied thty -lotre properfi/." Not that it was asserted in the provision, but simply that it might thereafter be implied. Who, sir, riees up to convict the pore-hearted, clear-head- ed Roger Sherman, in th^se utterances of the sentiments of the people of our State, so long ago as 1787 ? When, in the furtherance of the mad schemes of Slavery propagandists, in 1814, the broad acres of the Louifiana purchase were devoted to chattel servitude, and when, in 1819, the peninsula of Florida was added as a slave State to our Confederation, the people of Connecticut stood in opposition. And in the exciting scenes which convulsed the country, over the admission of Missouri as a slave State, and which finally culminated in what was sup- posed to be a permanent barrier to the exten- sion of Slavery northward, the citizens of my State, were not second in their hostility to this scheme for the extension of the slave system, even though a hunker portion of their Repre- sentatives upon this floor betrayed their princi- ples. When Slavery rested temporarily from " its goings to and fro " in the country, seeking an avenue for extension, and assailed the sa- cred right of petition in these Halls, from 1835 to 1838, my constituents were no indifferent spectators of that great struggle. And when the same power, under the " gag resolutions," brought " the venerable sage of Quincy " to the bar of this House for the presentation of a petition, the slumbering spirit of even our staid conservatives was aroused. 1q 1844 you opened up the propagandist scheme afresh, and expended millions of the money of the people to take " The Lone Star Republic " into the bosom of the Confederacy; providing that from this prolific political womb should be born, at times suitable for the future emergencies which might arise in the Slavery- extending scheme, four slaveholding sovereign- ties. Did Connecticut tamely and silently ac- quiesce in this wholesale bar'er of those princi- ples enunciated by Roger Sherman and hia compeers of the Constitutional Convention ? She has a history upon that transaction, and it is written. In 1850 you enacted a man-hunting, heaven- defying law, which abrogated the Divine pre- cept, "to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the oppressed ; " turned every acre of our land into a Federal hunting ground for men ; made our citizens bloodhounds by law to reclaim captives, under the pains and penal- tiies of a forfeiture of our hard-earned property and imprisonment in a felon's cell. Did we bow and cringe and swear allegiance in the loss of our principles and manhood ? Sir, you can- not get a corporal's guard in the whole State to enforce the edict, not even of that so-called Democratic conservative portion of our citizens who swear by James Buchanan and the Le- eompton Constitution, the Federal patronage of course included. You but stirred up our yeomanry to the contemplation of how they could best preserve their sovereignty a3 a State, and their rights as individuals, against the ag- gressions of that Slavery propagandism which then, as it has since, held complete control over the general Adminia^ration. The action of the two great national Conventions, ia;norirg all discussion of a question which involved our dearest rights, and pi-omieing, by all the force of party machinery, "to crush out" discussion, buried in a sepulchre too deep for the ghost of a chance of resurrection, the old Whig party in the State, and passed the Democratic party, its opponent, through the damp vaults leading to its final sepulchre — hanging a dark and murky pall over its prospects of ever becoming a vie torious political organization there, unless by a y division of the Anti-Slavery forces upon local '•^ questions. The repeal of the Missouri restric s tion — the prolific dam of this whole brood of ^ villainies against the people of Kansas, from "-o Atchison's invasion to the confjummation of the ? scheme in the prtsentation of the Pro-S'avery ~~ Lecompton instrument, has decimated the already broken ranks of the Administration party in the State. The Died Scitt decision of the Sapreme Judicial bench of the country has shown them that even the sanctity of our highest judicial seats: has been invaded by this rabid spirit of Slavery extension, and that the robe of the judge is no proof against the parti- san madness of the day. Sir, the people of Connecticut are not slaves, nor the sons of slaves. They are not vassals of the South, nor the children of vassais. They are, as a body, legitimate in descent from the Pilgrims of Plymou'.h, aqd glory in their Puri tanic character and ancestry. Their early laws recognised, and were basied upon, those Divine precepts which th y believed and practiced. Their cede of statutory obligations, from the founding cf their first colony down to the pres- ent time, will gather fresh lustre by a compari- son with the cotemporaneous code of any other colony or country. She will blush for the weak- ness of a son of hers who, in the presence of the nation's Representatives, asserts as fact what has no foundation in her legal history, hut was the jeer of the infidel, in consequence of her Puritan character. I allude, sir, to that re- markable feature in the speech of my colleague from the fourth district, [Mt. Bishop,] assert- ing the former existence of a fabulous law, and passing in review the statutes of our State against the violations of the moral law, to ex- cite the jeers and laughter of Representatives whom it would not injure to be brought under their restraining influence. Sir, we have a " Sabbath law," a " gambling law," a law against "profanity," and a Connecticut "liquor law," with their pains and penaliies. The atmosphere of this corrupt Federal ciiy would be much purer, if those laws were a portion of the code of this District, and had Connecticut men to enforce them. We have also a law against "bearing f.ilse witness," or slander; and I much mistake the spirit of the citizens of my colleague's district, if they do not enter up the judgment of an overwhelming majority' against him in the election which is to come. Sir, a majority of the citizens of my Sfa^e occupy that happy social position whi;h is a medium between a wealthy aristocracy o.i t^-e one hand, and a poverty which is generally wedded to ignorance, upon the other. Our farmers cultivate their limited acres; cur arti- sans and mechanics, by their intelligeiice and skill, always find employment at a remuaerative compensation, unless the fountain of labor dries up ; our merchants are second to none in the commerce chambers of the country; and our "schoolmasters are always abroad." There are but; few who do not acquire a sufBciericy of wealth to educate their sons and daughters for any walk of life which they select, and to frant them sufficient assistance with which to com- mence their career. The result is, laey are virtuous; for, as a general rule, the idlera are the vicious ones of a community. They are intelligent, and thoroughly posted in all the principles, history, and present operations of our Government. They are political ihitkera from their youth. What passes in these Evilis, what is spcken in debate here, is read in their daily papers, and commented upon t.t their evening firesides. With such a people for a constituency — acknowledging the dignity and rights of labor, gcorcicg the coarse taunts ut- tered against them, and loathing the system which hcild.i a fellow labarer in the most abject vassalage, as a chattel, a thing, hurlirg buck in your teeth {.he pronunciamie?ito whica se-ka to debase and degrade them — I do not wonder that the small remnant of your alave-ex ending party in Connecticut lifts up its prayer tliat you cease the utterance of such comparisrna and such slanders, for its very existence Srtke. I counsel no such silence. No party gocd, no party existence, shall ever humiliate me enough to ask the South, or any seccion or party, to play the hypocrite in order to 3U8tain my political life. If the spirit of aristocracy ia in the South; if, in its narrow judgment, the great laboring class of the North is yokrd with the abject servitude of the slavea of the Sontb, to form "the mud-sills" of our political edifice, out with it, then, with all that openness of char- acter with which you are accredited 1 Yon will soon find these despised "mud-sills" of the North rising up your peers, and towering above you in the future history of this Government, even now being regenerated by their awakening. Sir, my colleague may speak for the party, when he beseeches his Southern allies to believe what they please, but to keep their counsel from the Northern public ear. I speak for the people, when I ask you to make a clean breast of your views and designs. As reasoners, if they caF,not answer your sophistries; as poli- ticians, if they cannot go as deep as the pro- foundeat of ycu in the science of government; as readers of our own history, if they cannot rebut and overthro-v your assumptions concern- ing the nature and extent of the powers of our federative GoTernment ; then, sir, they will, in j the spirit of a true manhood, take their eeatB at your feet as pupils. But, sir, you can nevfr blot out their hatred to Slavery, or seduce them into creditine: its morality and beneficence as a system. Born upon free soil, inhalin/^ a free air, educated in free schools, and taught a free gospel, il is beyond any earthly power to make them love the eystem of a forced servitude, much more pui^rait to the dictum cf ils n-iasters. If the wcrkiii?-men of Connecticut were the only slaves in this Confederacy, it would be annihi- lated in a few short hours by a revolution which would be decisive and iiual. Sir, it is true that we have a term of political reproach in use among^ us ^hich is eigniflcant, and utters its own meaning when pronounced. A "dou?hface" is peculiar to Northern lati- tudes. The race has flourished somewhat ex- tensively in the past, but at present'' is g'rowirg small by degrees, and beautifully leas." Our citizens may entertain great respect for a man born vpyn a Southern plantation, and reared amid tbt^ ii-fluences of the chattel system, taught in inf&i;cv,and strengthened in bis rising man- hood, iu the belief that it is the best social sys- tem for all communities ; taught to demand even iio acknowledgment as an equal to a free system. I say, our people may entertain a great respect for such a man, but none at all for his princ'ples upon that queslion. But they have small respect, and instinctively inquire for a cause. •■■ h<'n a son of their Slate, or of the North, becom^ " olastic, and susceptible of being mould- ed into 'he image and likeness of a Southern par- tisan ch;kttfcl in the political market. Such seem to take the name of "doughface," as you would take an epidemic disease — that is, " in the nat- ural way." I do not deny but some honest men, who honestly entertain opinions favorable to the expansion of the slave system — who see in " King Cotton " the pride and glory as well as the saviour of their country, may have this badge applied to !hem unjustly. But it is iheir mis- fortune, ar d they must wait until the final judg- ment expos'^s their motives, when they will cer- tainly be ricjhted. It is a compound word, of such significance in its application, that it will be hard to crowd it out of the Northern political vocabulary while a single case cf applicability remains. My colleague admits that the Democracy of Connecticut "accord to the South the right to ' move into the Territories of the United States. * «ji^A//iejrj[)ro/?cruth a bird of diCFrtrent plumage. It will be difficult for the people of ihe North to hamonizs the pitiful pettifogging of the friends of Lecompton to carry this measure, with the stern popular verdict of tea thousand majority of the sover- eigns against it. Still another reason for my opposition is found in the fict that it is not for the interest of my State to depart from the first inaugurated policy of our Government under the Cjnstitu- tion, to which I have so britfly adverted in my opening remarks. The danger to this Govern- ment lies in its strong tendency to centraliza- tion, fsderalion, or tco much ct-ntral powtr. The Federal Government is of limited powers; and I will go as far as the furthest to give the sacred instrument of its exiftenca a ttnct con- struction. Far beyond the most extensive speculations of our fathers has Executive pat- ronage even now reached, in its rapidly-ang- meniing course. It is conceded by the coun- try, that an Administration in power has the cdds of almost two to one in a popular elec- tion. There is not even a village of our broad country iu which the President has not an active politicil agent, a local manager of the political affairs of his Administration, either for his own reelection or the candidate nomi- nated by his party to succeed him. And this agent muet have an uneu lied party record, or the axe of the Executive guillotine removes his ofiicial head without even saying '' by your leave," or consulting in the least degree the will of the people. But, sir, when the central Government takes the system of chattel slavery under its especial protection; when it declares that every rood of laud in our broad territories, stretching away to the Pacific ocean, is, by the Constitution, the legal abode of the chattel system, and that the central Government will enforce that system at the point of Federal bayonets, it is time that the increasing millions of Northern freemen should investigate and decide for themselves this new interpretation. It at one blow nationalizes the chattel system, hovers it under the wing of our emblematic bird, shielding and defending it with its angry beak. At the same time, it annihilates all that makes the property valuable to Northern laborers. If a corrupt partisan Administration usurps to itself the power of treading upon new ground, no patriot is far-sighted enough to discover the final results of that first misguided step. Al- ready an alarmed North feels about the pillars and strong columns which support its independ- ent State sovereignties, to discover the solidity of their foundations. Steadily increasing in strength as a central power, you are also as steadily trenching upon State rights, and you will yet claim the right to drive your ccffled slaves through the very temples of Freedom, by the decision and with the aid of the central Government. This prophecy may be esteemed a madness; but there are children new born in the Norlh who will live to witness the attempt. When that time comes, your Republic will be- come an Empire, your central Government as Paris is to France, and your elected President an Emperor. It cannot be reached but by revolution and blood ; but both may be averted by nipping in the bud this tendency to central- ization — this encroachment upon the rights of the free States of this Union. It is not for the interest of the ITorth to ex- tend the area of Slavery, for another reason. Your chattel system conflicts with the true in- terest of our Northern laborer in almost all re- spects. We have felt the Slavery Power press- ing like an incubus upon us. You dictate the tariff policy of the nation, and, by owning your own laborers, do not hesitate to attempt to en- force a free-trade policy, which places the la- bor of our free mechanics upon a level with the pauper labor of Europe. At your will, the gov ernmental screws are unloosed, or turned until the cry of reduction of wages rings through all the manufactories and artisans' shops of the North, or else close their doora and stop the hum of industry. No hired pauper of Europe, even though his remuneration for daily labor is but a scanty pit- tance, can compete with the owners of the hu- man labor machine in the South. You can re- strict his daily allowance to the stand-point of actual necessity. You can compel him under the lash to labor for a number of hours per day, which, if forced upon the paupers of Europe, would revolutionize every nation upon the face of that continent. You do not need protection for such labor, and self-interest alone leads you to the formation of a tariff that will, with the least possible addition essential to the carrying on of our Government, place in your hands the product of their industry at the lowest possible price. But, sir, the free labor of the North will never consent to take rank either with the pau- pers of Europe or the slaves of the South. It seeks at the hands of a paternal Government protection from both. Just so fast as this slave system expands itself, in the ratio with which it fills your Congressional Halls, it diminishes the chances for that protection which American industry and capital demand. I do not wonder, sir, that Connecticut Democracy, cheek by jowl with the South in her slave propagandism, and in striking down the dignity and rights of free labor, stands up in this Hall, and begs of its Southern coadjutors to stifle the utterance of their " mud-sill " sentiments, because such ut- terances ring the death-knell of the party. But there is another and higher reason than all, which will control my vote upon this ques- tiof), because it has been, is now, and I trust always will be, a cardinal principle of my polit- ical life. I do not, cannot, will not, acknowl- edge man's right of property in man. Born and educated amid the free institution^ of the old Commonwealth of Connecticut, I was taught their justice and sanctity. The study of my later years has but strengthened and establish- ed my early convictions. No doctrine is so abhorrent to me, sir, as that so often proclaim- ed in this Hall, that one man has a social, political, moral, nay, sir, a Divine right, to hold as property the living body of his feilow-man. It saps the foundation of all rights invested in man by a high Creator. It stands between an eternal Ruler and the accountable subject. It claims the power, and txercises it, of making nugatory Divine commands. This it does by holding the marriage covenant subject to the caprices of fortune and the dictum of another's will, when the Divine Authority has declared it permanent. It claims the power, and exer- cises it, of shutting up the immortal mind in the prison-house of ignorance, and forbids the application of its God-given powers in fitting itself for the study of that Book by whose lawa it must finally be judged, and through whose pages alone it can discover the moral beauties of the world's great Redeemer. It claims and exercises the right of selling in the public shambles the child of another's loins, scatter- ing families, without their consent, to the ex- tremes of its spreading dominions. It abrogates nature's first law of self defence. In a word, it lays its iron hand upon " the image of God" in man, and by one fell legal blow makes him a chattel, a thing, a beast of burden, an article of merchandise in the markets of the coun- try. Sir, I cannot acknowledge the existence of that right thus to transform a fellow man, any- where on this vast globe of oura, much less in my own native country, the boasted " land of the free, and the home of the brave." For that reason, also, I shall vote against this Lecomp- ton Constitution. I do not hold any party, in my own State or elsewhere, responsible for the doctrine set forth in this last reason for my vote against Lecompton. It will be my high- est pleasure to co-operate with any man differ- ing witii me on this fundamental question in any effort to strangle this fraudulent attempt to impose a Constitution upon an unwilling people in Kansas. Whatever may be the re- sult of this local struggle, for myself and my constituents, I pledge you, that there will be no cessation of effort until this Government is brought back to its early practice, and a prac- tical infidelity shall give place to the broad principles of a genuine Christianity, which was the glory of its noble founders. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS i'llil 016 085 225 2 WASHINGTON, D. C. BUELL & BLANCHARD, PRINTERS. 1858.