CONGRESS, U. S. 



295 





conservatives. The first class now proceed to 

 triumph in this session of Congress. 



In the Senate on the 19th of December, Mr. 

 Willey, of Virginia, offered the following reso- 

 lution : 



Resolved, That the existing war, forced upon the 

 country by the instigators of the rebellion without 

 justifiable cause or provocation, was, and is, designed 

 by them to destroy the Union and the Constitution ; 

 and their purpose, "moreover, was at first, and is now, 

 to disavow and repudiate the fundamental principles 

 of republican government on which our fathers estab- 

 lished the Union and the Constitution. 



Mr. Willey proceeded to address the Senate, 

 and to show that there had been at the South 

 no just cause of dissatisfaction with the Gov- 

 ernment. It had most successfully accomplish- 

 ed the end of its institution in securing "life, 

 liberty, and the pursuit of happiness " for the 

 citizen, and in " promoting the general wel- 

 fare." The policy of the Government had 

 always been controlled by the South, and at the 

 time of the outbreak the administration of 

 the Government was completely within the 

 power of the South and its friends. Slavery 

 and the rights of slaveholders were secure 

 from any successful aggression by the Republi- 

 can party or the General Government. No 

 dread of the Abolitionists precipitated secession. 

 He then presented his view of the primary in- 

 citing cause of secession. He said : 



" But what was the primary inciting cause of 

 this rebellion? I answer dissatisfaction with 

 the principles and operation of democratic gov- 

 ernment. It was hostility to the simplicity and 

 equality of republican institutions. We may 

 not find any direct and unequivocal avowal of 

 this fact on the part of the conspirators. It 

 would be strange if we should. Satan ever ap- 

 proaches his victims as an angel of light. Lib- 

 erty has always been destroyed in the name of 

 liberty. Despotism is strategetic. It fights 

 with masked batteries. All history will attest 

 that encroachments on human rights have gen- 

 erally been made in the guise of freedom and 

 friendship. 



' Mr. President, I am not before you either 

 as the defender or the denouncer of slavery. 

 Its friends, however, claim that it is necessary 

 to the perfection of any high degree of civiliza- 

 tion; that, by exempting those who possess 

 slaves from those menial and servile offices in- 

 separably incident to the economy of any con- 

 dition of society, it affords leisure and means 

 for superior mental and social improvement, 

 and imparts a dignity of character and polish 

 of manners unattainable where slavery does 

 not exist. If this assumption be confined in its 

 application to the slaveholder, it may, to some 

 extent, be true ; but how small a proportion of 

 the people of the South own slaves ! 



" Sir, I dare not say, with George Mason, of 

 Virginia, that ' every master of a slave is born 

 a petty tyrant,' for I am a slaveholder. I de- 

 spise the vituperation so indiscriminately heaped 

 upon slaveholders by the madness of fanatic 



abolitionists. They are the worst enemies of 

 the slave in the world. They have already in- 

 jured him much ; and if their policy were car- 

 ried out it would degrade the slave still below 

 his present position, and entail miseries upon 

 him exceeding the horrors of the slave ship. 

 It would beggar both master and slave, and de- 

 moralize the whole country. Let us leave 

 slavery where the Constitution and laws have 

 placed it, and await the progressive influences 

 of that blessed Christianity, which, in God's 

 own time, shall redeem and regenerate the hu- 

 man race. 



"But, sir, it may nevertheless be so that 

 slavery does tend to foster in the feelings and 

 mind of the slaveholder sentiments averse to 

 the perfect level of natural and political equal- 

 ity upon which the system of American repub- 

 lican institutions is based. Labor is not so rep- 

 utable in slaveholding as it is in non-slavehold- 

 ing communities ; and although the laws do not 

 create or tolerate any distinctions predicated 

 upon this fact, we find them existing with a 

 power and influence as inexorable as if they 

 were a part of the Constitution. I remember 

 the startling effect of a passage in the speech 

 which the eloquent Preston, sent as a commis- 

 sioner from South Carolina to the late Virginia 

 convention at Richmond, made before that 

 body. Said he : 



Southern civilization cannot exist without slavery. 

 None but an equal race can labor at the South. De- 

 stroy involuntary labor, and the Anglo-Saxon civiliza- 

 tion must be remitted to the latitudes from which it 

 sprung. 



" Sir, how I did wish that these remarkable 

 sentences could have reached the ears of the 

 five million laboring inhabitants in the South 

 who own no slaves! Whatever may be the 

 cause of this aristocratic sentiment in the South, 

 and especially in the Gulf States, I Shall leave 

 the further discussion of it to philosophers and 

 statesmen. It is the fact that I am at present 

 considering ; and that the fact exists is, I think, 

 indisputable. It will not be denied that Judge 

 Pratt, of South Carolina, is an eminently able 

 man, and may justly claim to be considered an 

 authoritative exponent of the views of a large 

 portion of the people of his section. In a late 

 eleborate article animadverting upon the tem- 

 porizing measures of the confederate States, 

 he says: 



The contest is not between the Xorth and South as 

 geographical sections, for between such sections mere- 

 ly there can be no contest ; nor between the people of 

 the North and the people of the South, for our relations 

 have been pleasant, and on neutral grounds there is 

 still nothing to estrange us. We eat together, trade 

 together, and practise, yet, in intercourse, with great 

 respect, the courtesies of common life. But the real 

 contest is between the two forms of society which have 

 become established the one at the North and the other 

 at the South. Society is essentially different from gov- 

 ernment as different as is the nut from the bur, or 

 the nervous body of the shell fish from the bony struc- 

 ture which surrounds it ; and within this Government 

 two societies had become developed as variant in struc- 

 ture and distinct in form as any two beings in animated 

 nature. The one is a society composed of one race, the 



