u)/^ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 011 933 212 6 Conservation Resources Lig-Free® Type I E 453 .WIS Copy 1 SPEEO H HON. JAMES W. WALL, OF N. J., MISSOURI EMANCIPATION BILL, DELIVERED IN THE UNITED STxiTES SENATE, FEBRUARY 7th, 1863. WASHINGTON : M'GILL & WITHER0V7, PRINTERS. 1863. SPEECH. Mr. WALL said : Mr. President : I desire, before the vote is taken on thie bill, to give my reasons why I shall be constrained to vote in the negative. I have listened to the arguments advanced here in favor of the passage of this bill, and I have read with care the very able and eloquent speech of my friend, the Senator from Missouri, on my left; and nothing that I have heard or read has served to shake my convictions of the un- constitutionality and inexpediency of this bill before the Senate. But whatever may be my own individual convictions upon the subject, I believe, nay, sir, I know that a large majority of the people of !N"ew Jersey are opposed to the passage of this bill upon those very grounds. In fact, sir, resolutions upon the subject have already been introduced into the lower house of my Legislature by a distinguished member from Bergen county, that go a step beyond this and hint at repu- diation of a debt incurred for any such illegitimate purpose as this. My people, as I think very justly, conceive that you have as much right to appropriate the moneys belonging to the Federal Government, to purchase the slaves in the barra- coons on the African coast, as to appropriate it to pay for the slaves belonging to the slaveholders of Missouri. If the State of Missouri, in her own way, and at her own cost, choose to emancipate her slaves, the people of New Jersey would not have the slightest objection, as they would recog- nize in such action the true constitutional mode, which their fathers followed when they wished to rid themselves of an institution that, in progress of time, had become- an in- cumbrance. The bill not only provides for the emancipation of the slaves of Missouri, but proposes to put the people of the other States under the grinding harrow of taxation in order to pay for the slaves, a proposition so monstrous and abnor- mal that I wonder it does not strike Senators on the other side of the Chamber with alarm at the consequences to flow from such an act. But their sensibilities seem blunted, their minds darkened, and their judgments clouded, whenever a question arises involving the interests of the black race. Are you anxious. Senators, that the epitaph should be writ- ten over the tomb of the Republic: "Here lies a white na- tion, which lost its liberties and its name in endeavoring to give freedom to the black and inferior race?" If you are not, your conduct, day after day, is in strong correspondency with a policy that must inevitably bring this Republic to its grave, and write upon its tomb this horrid epitaph. In the midst of civil war, with men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after the terrible things the future seems to have in store, can you not find something else to occupy your legislative time than in devising and maturing schemes so monstrous and repulsive as this? Do you desire to excite revolution at the North ? For I tell you here, frank- ly and fearlessly, that, if you will only listen, your startled eat-s shall catch the muttering thunder. If you go on and persist in measures like this, and others that are soon to be before you, you will hear it nearer and nearer, louder and louder, as it rolls above your heads, and then will come the lightning flash — the crash of what remains of the Union, and, perchance, we shall be driven to accept a military despotism to escape anarchy. Can you. Senators, be willing to accept such a dread alternative, simply that you may carry out your fanatical abstractions in reference to slavery ? Is it by pass- ing such bills, as full of mischief to the Republic as the bellj of the Trojan horse to Ilium, that you are providing for the common defence and promoting the general welfare ? I represent on this floor the people of a loyal State. They have poured out their blood and their treasure without stint iu this terrible contest; and they have done so, sir, because they believed it to be a war for the Union under the Con- stitution; or, to use the more forcible and pertinent language of my colleague, expressed in a resolution ottered by him ia this body, in 1861, they believed thai the presc?ii war ivas for the Union according to the Constitution ; that its object was to save the former and enforce the latter ; icas so in the /)e(/imnn(/, is now as carried on, and should be to the last; that measures extreme and radical, disruptive in themselves, involving in a common fate as well the logal as dislogcd States, should not be resorted to, and that in crushing treason, wide-spread and baneful as it is, the Government itself cannot prove a traitor to organic law. This, sir, was the sentiment, I believe, that animated our soldiers and sent them to the field, and caused them to man- ifest a zeal, a devotion, and a courage that have seldom, if ever, been equalled, certainly never surpassed. They have ever borne the fiercest shock of the battle, and when thej fell, have fallen "With their backs to the field, and their feet to the foe." They have written the names of all the bloodiest battles of the Peninsula, at Roanoke, and in front of Washington, high upon their standards. They have won the well-de- served admiration of the country, and bravely earned the tribute that the present commander, " Fighting Joe Hooker," awarded to them — "That he found no troops that he would sooner lead into action, or who were readier to follow, than the Jersey Blues." They are still ready, as in times past, to do battle for the Constitution, and for the Union under that Constitution; but there is a growing sentiment, not only among our loyal soldiery in the field, but amongst our loyal citizens at home, that, in your emancipation schemes, you, negro brigade bills, your arbitrary arrests, and the thousand and one abnormal acts of this unprincipled Administration, 3^ou have made a wide departure from the course on which you first started. They began to believe, in the forcible lan- guage of my colleague, that the Government is proving traitor to its organic law. Mr. Ten Eyck. Will my colleague permit me to explain a moment ? Mr. Wall. Certainly, sir. Mr. Ten Eyck. I hope ray colleague does not wish to con- vey the idea that I ever said that the Government had proved traitor to its organic law. Mr. Wall. Certainly not. I understand perfectly what m}' colleague meant by the expression in his resolution. He meant to convey the idea that the Government could not violate the very law of its being, the Constitution, without committing treason. In other words, that our nationality was in our Constitution ; destroy that, and our nationality is destroyed. If the departments of the Government, or any of the departments, assume power not belonging to th» Constitution, that department or those departmenta have committed treason against the organic law. In this myself and my colleague must agree in toto ccelo, or else he has changed his views since he offered this resolution. But to come hack from this digression. The loyal sol- diers in the field, our loyal citizens at home, are beginning to doubt whether Congress and the Administration were sincere at the outset, with all their resolutions and pledges. They begin to believe that you are paltering with them in a double sense, and only keeping the word of promise to their oar to break it to ///c/r hope. You tell them, by solemn res- olution and set speech, that this war is to be waged for the purpose of maintaining the Constitution within the Union ; and yet you are continually proposing and encouraging nieasures, here and elsewhere, that not only strike at the integrity of the Constitution, but which, if carried out, will seriously endanger, if it does not overthrow, the Union it- self. You tell 3'our soldiery that they are fighting for a nationality, while you here, by your legislation, are plotting measures to overthrow the Constitution, within which the nationality can alone exist, or bear no life. One Senator, during the progress of this debate, I think the Senator from Michigan, said, with great fervor of patriotism, that, for his part, he was tired of hearing on this floor about violating the Constitution. If he could save the Government, it mattered not how many provisions of the Constitution are violated. TJliat Senator evidently belongs to the Sir Boyle Roche school of patriots, who said, in the Irish Parliament, " That he was in favor of sacrificing the whole of the Con- stitution, if he could thereby save the remainder!" When the Senator sacrifices the Constitution to save the Govern- ment, he will find little left worth saving. We want, as some one Las well expressed it, here at the North, now more especially — loyalty not to a man, or a party, but to the Constitution and the laws. "We want a public sentiment as to the duty of citizens — a stern public judgment as to that class of men, who, if ruin is before us, are the ruiners. "We want a public indignation as to the men, who, from the caucuses of the bar-room, up to the cau- cuses of Senates and Cabinets, " sit in dark council, hatch- ing the cockatrice's egg, and weaving the spider's web." The hour for loyalty to men is past; the hour for loyalty, with more devotion than ever, to the Constitution and those great eternal principles of justice that are self-evident to the mind of every honest man, has come. If we are false to such principles now among ourselves, where are we to find the strength to resist our foes from without? With disloy- alty to the Constitution and the laws animating every act in our public councils, under the insane plea of necessity, you have introduced a foe into the midst of the citadel, more ter- rible than an army with banners marching to destroy. There are no forces in the territory in revolt against you this day more dangerous and more potent for mischief, than this ter- rible foe, that the Administration, by its insane policy, has encouraged and strengthened. And "my ear is pained and soul made sick," by the iteration and reiteration of this word disloyalty, as applied to Senators on this side of the Cham- ber and the policy they consider it their duty to support. It would seem as if, with the other side, loyalty meant blind submission to insane abnormal decrees; and if the Admin- istration chooses to adopt a policy for putting down this re- bellion, no matter how unconstitutional, how detrimental to the public safety, how subversive of the integrity of our State governments, that we, on this side of the Chamber, 9 are to give it our unanimous support, or else to be branded as disloyal and in sympathy U'ith treason. It is liigli time this thing ceased. jSTo man has a right to arraign my fealty, my loyalty to the Government under v^hichllive, upon such flimsy grounds as these. I consider such a charge as equiv- alent to arraigning my veracity under oath, and will deal with any man who does it, as one who is my enemy. I am sworn, and have been many times, to support the Constitu- tion and the laws of my country, and I have been ever true to the duties and obligations such oaths impose on every* man. When I swerve from their observance, let me be ar- raigned, and those who act with me ; and not before. I be- lieve, as Junius did of the English Constitution, in reference to our own, "That the dearest interests of this country are its laws and its Constitution. Against every attack upon these, there will, I hope, be always found amongst us the firmest spirit of resistance, superior to the united efforts of faction and ambition ; for ambition, though it does not al- ways take the lead of faction, will be sure in the end to take the most fatal adv^antage of it, and draw it to its own pur- poses." This was the language of a patriotic Englishman, who ap- pealed, in such stirring words as these, to his countryme'n, when their liberties were threatened by the assaults of arbi- trary language. The noble sentiments it emljodies nuist be the sentiments of every patriotic heart; and the man and the party that responds not to them, are traitorous to the best interests of a common country. This bill, so strenuously supported by the Senator from Missouri, and the Tiepublican Senators, on this floor, I look upon as one among the most glaring of the unconstitutional measures that, with strange fatuity and singular indifference 10 to results, Republican Senators are attempting to fasten upon tbe country. You pledged in the early part of tlie war, most solemnly, that each State should be allowed to enjoy its own domestic institutions in its own way ; and here you are striking a blow at the domestic institutions of Mis- souri, by [)roposing a plan of emancipation, when you know hardly one-third of those interested in the question can be allowed to vote, and wdiere, I suppose, emancipation may be decreed to the sound of the trumpet, and at the point of the baj'onet; and, not content with that, you want to tax tbe capital and tlie labor of the other States, to the amount of millions, in order to defray the expenses of j'our new- fangled scheme. Why, Mr. President, you have no more right to interfere in this way than 3'ou would to appropriate the moneys of the Federal (Jovernment to pay for the ex- penses of divorce suits in Missouri. You can no more take those moneys to pa3' the expenses of a dissolution of the bonds of matrimony between husband and wife, than be- tween master and slave. We are old-fashioned enough to believe in jSTew Jersey that the States under the Constitution are perfecth- independent of each other, as regards their domestic concerns, and that the Federal Government has no ppwer to thrust itself, either in this way or any other, into their domestic affairs, which they should be lei t to regulate in their own way. The fact is, sir, such interference as this is dangerous, and ought to be scrupulously watched. It is only one of a series of measures to make the States moi'e subservient and dependent upon the General Govei'iiment, gradually paving the way to a grand central consolidated despotism. It does seem to me, sir, and I say it with the apprehension of a patriot, in looking over the acts of the last and present Congress, and the pronunciamentos of that 11 embodiment of the war power at the other end of the ave- nue, that there is an awful squinting that way already. We are rapidly losing sight of the ancient landmarks out fathers set up, and fast drifting, without chart or compass, into the vast whirlpool of centralization. It was a difficult problem the framers of our institutions had to solve in adjusting the balance of power between the State and Federal Governments, With a vast majority of the men of that day there was a paramount desire to guard the sovereignty of the States, and by no means to arm the hands of Federal functionaries with any pretext for inter- fering with the proper* subjects for State legislation. They solved the problem, and so adjusted the relations that there can be no excuse for men professing to be statesmen not to know where the poise is. But to listen to Senators on this floor, one would suppose that this Government of ours was some great central sovereignty, which, Colossus like, be- ■tridos the continent, and beneath which the States aro sometimes invited to seek shelter for their violated rights and insulted dignity. This was the old obnoxious Federal doctrine, 'and it has been revived in our day with accessions that even the centralizers of John Adams' day would shrink from. The men in power now w'ould sink the States to the level of mere municipal divisions of the incorporated whole, carried on by the will and pleasure of the whole, and liable to be absorl)ed by it. Push this principle to its extremity, and it does away with all the rules of construction deduced from the federative character of our institutions. It thus supplies the great desideratum of centralism — a perfect foundation for all the arguments in favor of implied, con- structive, and discretionary powers. Here, then, is the i)lace "where the wild fig-trees join the wall of Troy," and hero 12 it is, upon all such bills, and to such that are kindred to it, that those who would defend the palladium of constitutional State Rights, must meet the foe, and drive him back, if it is not even now too late. If we must perish, let us perish together, and they who survive must tight to the last, for there is no Latium for us to Hy to. But aside from the unconstitutionality of the bill, which I have not attempted to argue, for its supporters virtually give up this point by urging it upon the grounds of expe- diency and necessity, the people of New Jersey are opposed to this bill on the ground of its inexpediency. They can- not, sir, see either the wisdom or tlfe expediency, nor, per- mit me to say, the statesmanship, when the foundations of the Government are rocking as with the throes of an earth- quake, and the Government is staggering like a drunken man beneath a financial pressure that may bury us all in hopeless bankruptcy, — they cannot see, I say, the wisdom, expediency, or statemanship in lavishing twenty millions of money to gratify the whim and caprice of an abstraction, — for this emancipation policy is nothing more, nothing less. Emancipation has been tried in other countries^ and pro- nounced a failure. England tried it in her islands, and only a few years ago the London Times pronounced the whole scheme "a stupendous failure," and declared that the last state of that man, " the free black, in those islands, was worse than the first," and that freedom had inflicted more evils upon him than slavery' had ever concentrated. In Jamaica, to-day, the blacks are not only falling below the point of civilization attained daring theii" servitude, but, in many cases, returning to their native barbarism, and their worship of idols. What will be the fate of emancipated slaves is just as certain' as the fate of the North American 13 Indians, the difference being that the Indian flies from the civilization which destroys him, while the imitative and mild-tempered African clings to the civilization which as certainly destroys him. But the antagonism of races that will grow out of this scheme is much more formidable and destructive. From some of our "Western States the colored man has been entirely excluded. This is a wise provision, and a merciful one to the blacks, who come into our free States only to drag out a few years in some menial -employment, and then disiippear with their families, if they have any, leaving no traces behind. If history and experience teach us anything, it is this: that no two races, coiisituted, like the Anglo- Saxon and African, co-exist in a state of equality, which means competition. So long as the inferior race is in a dependent condition, and can claim support and protection, it remains content and happy, the great burden of the relation falling, in fact, upon the master, and not upon the slave. The moment that re- lation is changed, the negro, thrown upon his own resources and ex[)osed to the withering and blasting effects of the ine- radicable antipathy which exists towards all of African de- scent — that moment his fate is sealed. He perishes like the autumn leaves when comes a killing frost; and, in the course of a few generations, not a vestige remains to show tliat he ever existed. This is a truth which experience and obser- vation have taught us, and which could not have been taught in the mme manner to Mr. Jefferson and other founders of our Government, whose opinions are quoted in favor of the abolition of slaverv. That slavery was an evil some of them, undoubtedly asserted, but that the evil is mainly to the white, and that the black could never co-exist with his master in a 14 state of freedom, they did not know because the experiment had not been tried. Sufficient time has now elapsed to settle that question, and in a way which can leave but little doubt in a rational mind. The Almighty has established certain laws, physical and moral, upon this question, and we shall do well to acquiesce in them as being right, without attempt- ing to repeal or improve, lest unhappily we should be found to fight against God. The Senator from Iowa seems to have great faith in eman- cipation, and says he thinks it is the only pathway through which we are to reach the end of this war, and come out of the lurid tempest of strife into the cool and blessed shadow of a lasting peace. With all due deference to the honora- ble Senator, I would say to him that, in the excess of his pa- triotism, he will find that " the wish is father only to the thought." This is only one, I would tell the Senator, of the many impracticable schemes that have served to divide the North and unite the South. The Government is not only ^^ -proving traitor to the organic law" to use the language of my colleague, the law of its being, but to the law of com- mon sense, in thus adopting measures which only serve to intensify and embitter the organized opposition now in arms against the Government. No nation that history gives any record of, carried on a civil war upon the principle of weak- ening its own cause while it was striving to strengthen that of those who were in open revolt against it. There are many in the community who shrewdly surmise that these radical measures have been suggested by Wendell Phillips, whose life-long services in trying to get nineteen States out of this Union in time of peace might fit him for the task of separating, finally and irrevocably, our once great and glo- rious Union. The let-the-Union-slide policy is still upper- 15 most in his mind, and, as he was received on this floor some time since as though he was the nation's benefactor, who knows bnt what the Senators on the other side of this cham- ber are committed to his policy ? If so, by passing tliis and other like bills, they are consistent with the true principles of their faith, and are helping to advance the terrible dogma of their prophet, "that a p'^.rmanently divided Union, with slavery in part, is better than an entire Union with slavery in the whole." But if their object be, as the Senator from Iowa says, to put down the rebellion, then all I have to say is, that the supporters of this Administration, in both branches of Congress, and the Executive head of it, at the other end of the avenue, are the wildest set of impractica- bles the world has almost ever seen. I know nothing that I can compare them to except those wild designers in the Academy of Lagado, in Gulliver's Travels. One projector in that grand Academy had a plan for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers and bottling them up to let out on the Gov- ernor's gardens in inclement seasons; a second," a plan for oalcining ice from gunpowder; another, a plan for manufac- turing silk out of cobwebs. And, in my humble judgment, you can much better extract sunbeams from cucumbers, cal- cine ice from gunpowder, and make silk out of cobwebs, than you can put down this rebellion by Emancipation Bills, Confiscation Acts, Negro Brigades, and the thousand and one schemes that originate here in this, the modern Acade- my of Lagndo. The peculiar and disastrous result of all your measures gave rise to that cutting sarcasm, that " Jefierson Davis was running two Congresses, one here and the other at Rich- mond." It does really seem to us loyal men on this side of the chamber, that you come within the category still. If 16 your wish is to aid the rehellioii, do it in an open manner, and not covertly by passing measures which, ostensibly for the Union, are in reality to divide and overthrow it — the very thing sought for by the Confederates themselves. Tlie President, in his annual message, declared that him- self, and you of this Congress, "could not escape history, that history would not forget you." I don't believe it will forget this Administration, but I fear it will be in the condi- tion of Lord Thurlow. Lord Thurlow was an exceedingly profane man, and on one occasion in the British Parlia- ment, in a burst of enthusiasm, exclaimed : " If I forget my sovereign, may my God forget me." "Forget you, my Lord," said the witty Charles Townsend, "he will never forget you ; he will see you damned first." Let the men of this Congress be careful that, while history does not forget them, it may not condemn them at the same time. I shall vote, sir, against any and every part of this bill, as I believe it to be a perfect bill of abominations, and I know it to be peauliarly obnoxious to the patriotic Legislature who gent me here, and who but reiterate the universal opinion of the State. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 011 933 212 6 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 111 011 933 212 6 Conservation Resources Lig-Free® Type I Ph 8.5, Buffered LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 011 933 212 6 Conservation Resources Lig-Free® Type I Ph 8.5, Buffered