7 ■unoffending citizens treated thus. She remonstrated, but to no purpose, except to draw down fresh insult. She could not, nor did she desire, to escape the responsibility of adopting all means in her power- for their protection. She sent one of her most respected citizens, a man of admirable wisdom, discretion, dignity, and purity of character, simply to try the question of tlie validity of those provisions which South Carolina persisted in affirming to be law, though that one of her own eminent sons, who had had cognizance of it on the supreme tribunal of the nation, had said, “on the unconstitutionality of the law, it is not too much to say, that it will not bear argument.”* * Opinion of Judge Johnson, August 7, 1823, in the case of Henry Eikison vs. Francis Deliesseline, sheriff of Charleston district. A new Political Aspect of the Slave Question was now disclosed. The slave question had closed the doors of the Federal courts, to which it belonged to extend the security the Federal Constitution had assured. The Massachusetts lawyer could not reach the bench before which he would have pleaded for the liberty and rights of Massachusetts freemen. Nor only so. The slave question had yet further aspects for himself. He was expelled, and sent home with indignity, if it were possible for indignity to reach such a man. And laws, so called, were forthwith enacted, making it highly penal henceforward to seek legal redress,in that region, under, .such circumstances, for the extremest outrages offered tc a New England freeman. Mr. Chairman, we have no present remedy. We cannot raise a regiment, nor fit out a ship, for the maintenance of the rights of those to whom the State owes protection, as much as they owe allegiance to the State. We are disarmed by those compromises of the Constitution, which Massachusetts respects. I shudder while I refer to such expedients; but in other times they would have been resorted to. It may be we shall see hereafter that these dismal transactions are not merely to be deplored. It is such extravagances that attract attention,. arouse indolence, and excite to action. It is a method of Providence, to provide for the ultimate overthrow of great evils, by the practical development of their enormity. The excess of an abuse conducts it to its fate. I said to Mr. Hoar, when I welcomed him back, that I could not wholly regret the annoyances he had endured, for they seemed to belong to that blackest darkness that just precedes the day. I believe it was so; and that while the pen of History was recording that shameful chapter, the pen of Destiny was writing, the certain and not distant downfal of the oppressive and insolent institution. Then came, for the strengthening and perpetuation, of slavery, the disastrous measure of the annexation of Texas, with its long train of political aspects of the slave question, long enough already, and still stretching far away into the unknown and threatening future. The first fruit of that proceeding was the repeal of the tariff act of 1842; a measure which took the bread from the mouths of thousands of the working men of the free States, and a measure carried by two votes cast at the other end of this building, by men who had no more constitutional right to come in and act upon our affairs, than any two who might have been brought over from England, or France, or Algiers. The next blossoming of the tree was in the pending wTar with Mexico. Gentlemen please themselves with making distinctions between the occasion and the cause of that war. But nobody, I take it, doubts that, if Texas had not been annexed, ymr •would not have taken place. Mr. Calhoun, whose sagacity all the newspapers extol, thought he could set fire to a barrel of gunpowder, and extinguish it when half consumed. He has lived to rue the failure of the hopeful experiment. We have spent an hundred millions of dollars, and are going on spending. No matter for the money, if it had only been buried in the deep blue sea, “deeper than did ever plummet sound,” instead of being used to purchase so much disgrace and mischief. But it has been made to carry widowhood and
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM4ODY=