The Life of Jefferson Davis. Alfriend Frank Heath

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СКАЧАТЬ forms, as it were, a territorial constitution by its organic act, he who steps in and proclaims to the settlers in that Territory that they have the right to overturn the Government, to usurp to themselves powers not delegated, is preaching the higher law in the domain of politics, which is only less mischievous than its other form, because the other involves both politics and morals in one ruinous confusion.

      The Senator spoke of the denial of Democratic fellowship to him. After what has been said and acknowledged by the Senator, it is not to be supposed that it could have any application to me. It may be proper to add, I know of no such denial on the part of other Democratic Senators. Far be it from me to vaunt the fact of being in a majority, and to hold him to the hard rule he prescribes to us, of surrendering an opinion where we may happen to have been in a minority. Were I to return now to him the measure with which he metes to us, when he assumes that a majority in the Charleston Convention has a right to prescribe what shall be our tenets, I might, in reply to him, say, as a sincere adherent of the Democratic party, how can you oppose the resolutions pending before the Senate? If twenty-seven majority in a body of three hundred and three constituent members had, as he assumes, the power to lay down a binding law, what is to be said of him who, with a single adherent, stands up against the whole of his Democratic associates? He must be outside of the party, according to his enunciation; he must be wandering in the dark regions to which he consigns the followers of Mr. Yancey.

      The Senator said he had no taste for references to things which were personal, and then proceeded to discuss that of which he showed himself profoundly ignorant – the condition of things in Mississippi. It is disagreeable for me to bring before the Senate matters which belong to my constituents and myself, and I should not do so but for the fact of their introduction into the Senator’s elaborate speech, which is no doubt to be spread over all parts of the country. The Senator, by some means or other, has the name of very many citizens of Mississippi, and as there is nothing in our condition to attract his special attention, his speech is probably to be sent over a wide field of correspondence; and it is, therefore, the more incumbent on me to notice his attempt to give a history of affairs that were transacted in Mississippi. He first announces that Mississippi rebuked the idea of intervention asserted in 1850; then that Mississippi rejected my appeal; that Mississippi voted on the issue made up by the compromise measure of 1850, and vaunts it as an approval of that legislation of which he was the advocate and I the opponent. Now, Mississippi did none of these things. Mississippi instructed her Senators, and I obeyed her instructions. I introduced into this body the resolutions which directed my course. On that occasion I vindicated Mississippi, and especially the Southern rights men, from the falsehood of that day, and reiterated now, of a purpose to dissolve the Union. I vindicated her by extracts from the proceedings as well of her convention as of her primary assemblies; and my remarks on that occasion, as fully as the events to which he referred in terms of undeserved compliment, justified the Senator in saying to-day that he knew I had always been faithful to the Government of which I was a part.

      Acting under the instructions from Mississippi – not merely voting and yielding reluctant compliance; but, according to my ideas of the obligation of a Senator, laboring industriously and zealously to carry out the instructions which my State gave me, I took and maintained the position I held in relation to the measures of 1850. As it was with me a cordial service, I went home to vindicate the position which was hers, as well as my own. Shortly after that a canvass was opened, in which a distinguished gentlemen of our party, who had not been a member of Congress, was nominated for Governor. Questions other than the compromise measures of 1850 arose in that canvass; they were discussed in a great degree to the exclusion of a consideration of the merits of the action of Congress in 1850; and, at the election in September, for delegates to a convention, we had fallen from a party majority of some eight thousand to a minority of nearly the same number. It was after the decision of the question involved in calling a convention – after our party was defeated – after the candidate for Governor had retired, that the Democracy of Mississippi called upon me to bear their standard. It was esteemed a forlorn hope, therefore an obligation of honor not to decline the invitation. But so far as the action in the Senate in 1850 was concerned, if it had any effect, it must have been the reverse of that assumed, as, in the subsequent election for State officers on the first Monday in November, this majority of nearly eight thousand against us was reduced to about one thousand.

      But when this convention assembled, though a large majority of the members belonged to the party which the Senator has been pleased to term the “Submissionists” – a name which they always rejected – this convention of the party most adverse to me, when they came to act on the subject said, after citing the “compromise” measures of the Congress of 1850:

      “And connected with them, the rejection of the proposition to exclude slavery from the Territories of the United States, and to abolish it in the District of Columbia; and, while they do not entirely approve, will abide by it as a permanent adjustment of this sectional controversy, so long as the same, in all its features, shall be faithfully adhered to and enforced.”

      Then they go on to recite six different causes, for which they will resort to the most extreme remedies which we had supposed ever could be necessary. The case only requires that I should say that the party to which I belonged did not then, nor at any previous time, propose to go out of the Union, but to have a Southern convention for consultation as to future contingencies, threatened and anticipated. It was at last narrowed down to the question, whether we should meet South Carolina and consult with her. Honoring that gallant State for the magnanimity she had manifested in the first efforts for the creation of the Government, in the preliminaries to the struggle for independence, when she, a favored colony, feeling no oppression, nursed by the mother country, cherished in every method, yet agreed with Massachusetts, then oppressed, to assert the great principle of community independence, and to carry it to the extent of war – honoring her for her unvarying defense of the Constitution throughout her whole course – believing that she was true to her faith, and would redeem all her pledges – feeling that a friendly hand might restrain, while, if left to herself, her pride might precipitate her on the trial of separation, I did desire to meet South Carolina in convention, though nobody but ourselves should be there to join her.

      But, to close the matter, this convention, in its seventh resolution, after stating all those questions on which it would resist, declared:

      “That, as the people of Mississippi, in the opinion of this convention, desire all further agitation of the slavery question to cease, and have acted upon and decided the foregoing questions, thereby making it the duty of this convention to pass no act in the perview and spirit of the law under which it is called, this convention deems it unnecessary to refer to the people, for approval or disapproval, at the ballot-box, its action in the premises.”

      So that when the Senator appealed to this as evidence of what the people of Mississippi had done, he was ignorant of the fact that the delegates of the people of Mississippi did not agree with him; that their resolutions did not sustain the view which he took, and that the people of Mississippi never acted on them. If, then, there had been good taste in the intervention of this local question, there was certainly very bad judgment in hazarding his statements on a subject of which he was so little informed.

      The Senator here, as in relation to our friends at Charleston, takes kind care of us – supposes we do not know what we are about, but that he, with his superior discrimination, sees what must necessarily result from what we are doing; he says that, at Charleston, they – innocent people – did not intend to destroy the Government; but he warns them that, if they do what they propose, they will destroy it; and so he says we of Mississippi, not desiring to break up the Union, nevertheless pursued a course which would have had that result if it had not been checked. Where does he get all this information? I have been in every State of the Union except two – three now, since Oregon has been admitted – but I have never seen a man who had as much personal knowledge. It is equally surprising that his facts should be so contrary to the record.

      We believed then, as I believe now, that this Union, as a compact entered СКАЧАТЬ