The Life of Jefferson Davis. Alfriend Frank Heath

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Mr. Douglas having concluded his speech —

      Mr. Davis arose and said:

      Mr. President: When the Senator from Illinois commenced his speech, he announced his object to be to answer to an arraignment, or, as he also termed it, an indictment, which he said I had made against him. He therefore caused extracts to be read from my remarks to the Senate. Those extracts announce that I have been the uniform opponent of what is called squatter sovereignty, and that, having opposed it heretofore, I was now, least of all, disposed to give it quarter. At a subsequent period, the fact was stated that the Senator from Illinois and myself had been opposed to each other, on those questions which I considered as most distinctly involving Southern interests in 1850. He has not answered to the allegation. He has not attempted to show that he did not stand in that position. It is true he has associated himself with Mr. Clay, and, before closing, I will show that the association does not belong to him; that upon those test questions they did not vote together. He then, somewhat vauntingly, reminded me that he was with the victorious party, asserted that the Democracy of the country then sustained his doctrine, and that I was thus outside of that organization. With Mr. Clay! If he had been with him, he would have been in good company; but the old Jackson Democracy will be a little surprised to learn that Clay was the leader of our party, and that a man proves his allegiance to it by showing how closely he followed in the footsteps of Henry Clay.

      When the Senator opened his argument, by declaring his purpose to be fair and courteous, I little supposed that an explanation made by me in favor of the Secretary of State, and which could not at all disturb the line of his argument, would have been followed by the rude announcement that he could not permit interruption thereafter. A Senator has the right to claim exemption from interruption if he will follow the thread of his argument, direct his discourse to the question at issue, and confine himself to it; but if he makes up a medley of arraignments of the men who have been in public life for ten years past, and addressing individuals in his presence, he should permit an interruption to be made for correction as often as he misrepresents their position. It would have devolved on me more than once, if I had been responsible for his frequent references to me, to correct him and show that he misstated facts; but as he would not permit himself to be interrupted, I am not responsible for any thing he has imputed to me.

      The Senator commenced with a disclaimer of any purpose to follow what he considered a bad practice of arraigning Senators here on matters for which they stood responsible to their constituents; but straightway proceeded to make a general arraignment of the present and the absent. I believe I constitute the only exception to whom he granted consistency, and that at the expense of party association, and, he would have it, at the expense of sound judgment. He not only arraigned individuals, but even States – Florida, Alabama, and Georgia – were brought to answer at the bar of the Senate for the resolutions they had passed; Virginia was held responsible for her policy; Mississippi received his critical notice. Pray, sir, what had all this to do with the question? Especially, what had all this to do with what he styled an indictment against him? It is a mere resort to a species of declamation which has not been heard to-day for the first time; a pretext to put himself in the attitude of a persecuted man, and, like the satyr’s guest, blowing hot and cold in the same breath, in the midst of his complaint of persecution, vaunts his supreme power. If his opponents be the very small minority which he describes, what fear has he of persecution or proscription?

      Can he not draw a distinction between one who says: “I give no quarter to an idea,” and one who proclaims the policy of putting the advocates of that idea to the sword? Such was his figurative language. That figure of the sword, however, it seemed, as he progressed in his development, referred to the one thought always floating through his brain – exclusion from the spoils of office, for, at last, it seemed to narrow down to the supposition that no man who agreed with him was, with our consent, to be either a Cabinet officer or a collector. Who has advanced any such doctrine? Have I, at this or any other period of my acquaintance with him, done any thing to justify him in attributing that opinion to me? I pause for his answer.

      Mr. Douglas. I do not exactly understand the Senator. I have no complaint to make of the Senator from Mississippi of ever having been unkind or ungenerous towards me, if that is what he means to say.

      Mr. Davis. Have I ever promulgated a doctrine which indicated that if my friends were in power, I would sacrifice every other wing of the Democratic party?

      Mr. Douglas. I understood the making of a test on this issue against me would reach every other man that held my opinions; and, therefore, if I was not sound enough to hold office, no man agreeing with me would be; and hence, every man of my opinions would be excluded.

      Mr. Davis. Ah, Mr. President; I believe I now have caught the clue to the argument; it was not before apprehended. I was among those who thought the Senator, with his opinions, ought not to be chairman of the Committee on Territories. This, I suppose, then, is the whole imposition. But have I not said to the Senator, at least once, that I had no disposition to question his Democracy; that I did not wish to withhold from him any tribute which was due to his talent and his worth? Did I not offer to resign the only chairmanship of a committee I had if the Senate would confer it upon him? Then, where is this spirit of proscription, the complaint of which has constituted some hours of his speech? If others have manifested it, I do not know it; and as the single expression of “no quarter to the doctrine of squatter sovereignty” was the basis of his whole allegation, I took it for granted his reference to a purpose to do him and his friends such wrong must have been intended for me.

      The fact that the Senator criticised the idea of the States prescribing the terms on which they will act in a party convention recognized to be representative, is suggestive of an extreme misconception of relative position; and the presumption with which the Senator censured what he was pleased to term “the seceders,” suggested to me a representation of the air of the great monarch of France when, feeling royalty and power all concentrated in his own person, he used the familiar yet remarkable expression, “the State, that’s me.” Does the Senator consider it a modest thing in him to announce to the Democratic Convention on what terms he will accept the nomination; but presumptuous in a State to declare the principle on which she will give him her vote? It is an advance on Louis Quatorze.

      Nothing but the most egregious vanity, something far surpassing even the bursting condition of swollen pride, could have induced the Senator to believe that I could not speak of squatter sovereignty without meaning him.

      Towards the Senator, personally, I have never manifested hostility – indeed, could not, because I have ever felt kindly. Many years of association, very frequent coöperation, manly support from him in times of trial, are all remembered by me gratefully. The Senator, therefore, had no right to assume that I was making war upon him. I addressed myself to a doctrine of which he was not the founder, though he was one of the early disciples; but he proved an unprofitable follower, for he became rebellious, and ruined the logic of the doctrine. It was logical in Mr. Cass’s mind; he claimed the power to be inherent in the people who settled a new Territory, and by this inherent power he held that they might proceed to form government and to exercise its functions. There was logic in that – logic up to the point of sovereignty. Not so with the Senator. He says the inhabitants of the Territories derive their power to form a government from the consent of Congress; that when we decide that there are enough of them to constitute a government, and enact an organic law, then they have power to legislate according to their will. This power being derived from an act of Congress – a limited agency tied down to the narrow sphere of the constitutional grant – is made, by that supposition, the bestower of sovereignty on its creature.

      I had occasion the other day to refer to the higher law as it made its first appearance on earth – the occasion when the tempter entered the garden of Eden. There is another phase of it. Whoever attempts to interpose between the supreme law of the Creator and the creature, whether it be in the regions of morals or politics, proclaims a theory that wars upon every principle of government. When Congress, the agent СКАЧАТЬ