336 



CONGKESS, U. S. 



of those States ; but to defend and maintain the suprem- 

 acy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance 

 thereof, and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, 

 equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired ; 

 that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war 

 ought to cease. 



" Now, sir, here is my position : if you in- 

 tended to make and did make that pledge in 

 good faith, you have no right now to enlarge 

 the purposes of the war." 



Mr. Clark : " Does the Senator understand 

 this to be a purpose of war that we are now 

 about?" 



Mr. Davis : " Yes, sir ; this is a purpose of 

 war now. It is an entering wedge. You want 

 to get the head in, and then you intend to push 

 the monster through. That is what you are 

 after. If there was to be no other movement 

 upon slavery, we never should have heard of 

 this bill to abolish slavery in the District of 

 Columbia. It is extreme men that bring par- 

 ties and nations to ruin. Men in a body will 

 violate pledges that they would never dream 

 of violating as single individuals. Here are 

 your pledges, as strong and as emphatic as they 

 can be made, defining the purpose for which 

 you intended to wage the war. I say that you 

 cannot with a due regard to your pledged word, 

 to your faith, to your honor as men and as pa- 

 triots, enlarge materially the purposes of the 

 war. The object of such enlargement is not to 

 limit and to spend the force of your action 

 upon this downtrodden and oppressed District, 

 but it is to extend your usurpations into the 

 States. This is but a preliminary operation. 

 You are endeavoring to experiment now how 

 far you can go, and how far the moderate men 

 of your party will go with you." 



Mr. Wilson, after stating the position of the 

 slave in the District and the laws regulating 

 his conduct, said: "Have not the American 

 people the constitutional right to relieve them- 

 selves from the guilt and shame of upholding 

 slavery in their national capital ? Would not 

 the exercise of that right be sanctioned by jus- 

 tice, humanity, and religion ? Does the Sena- 

 tor suppose that we, the representatives of 

 American freemen, will cowardly shrink from 

 the performance of the duties of the hour be- 

 fore these dogmatic avowals of what the men 

 and the women of the slaveholding States will 

 do ? Sir, I tell the Senator from Kentucky that 

 the day has passed by in the Senate of the 

 United States for intimidation, threat, or men- 

 ace, from the champions of slavery." 



Mr. Kennedy, of Maryland, followed in op- 

 position to the bill. He said : " I shall content 

 myself with the simple purpose, in a very few 

 words, of entering the most solemn protest, in 

 the name of my State, against the adoption of 

 this measure which I have ever yet made as 

 one of the representatives of her sovereignty 

 on this floor. The State of Maryland is most 

 deeply interested in the result of this unhappy 

 and unnatural war. All of her prosperity, 

 present and to come ; all of her historical re- 

 nown in the past, connected with her bloody 



struggles for this Union ; all of her dignity as 

 a State, is involved in the policy by which this 

 contest is to be conducted and finally settled. 



" I earnestly hope I may be mistaken in the 

 purposes and power of the majority to pass this 

 measure ; but if otherwise, then, sir, it no longer 

 remains to her, either by argument or protest, 

 to obtain her rights as a sovereign State, or just 

 consideration for her dignity or interests as an 

 equal in this Union under the Constitution. To 

 show that the faith of this Government has 

 long been pledged to the States of Maryland 

 and Virginia not to interfere with slavery in 

 this District, I will take the liberty of present- 

 ing to the Senate the views of an able commit- 

 tee of the House of Eepresentatives presented 

 in 1836, a committee composed of distinguished . 

 gentlemen from every section of the country." 



From this report he read the following and 

 other extracts : 



Your committee must go further, and express their 

 full conviction that any interference by Congress with 

 the private interests or rights of the citizens of this 

 District, without their consent, would be a breach of 

 the faith reposed in the Federal Government by the 

 States that made the cession, and as violent an in- 

 fraction of private rights as it would have been if those 

 States themselves, supposing their jurisdiction had re- 

 mained unimpaired over their territory, had abolished 

 slavery within thos_e portions of their respective limits, 

 and had continued its existence upon its present basis 

 in every other portion of them. And surely there is 

 no citizen in any quarter of the country, who has the 

 smallest regard for our laws and institutions, State a"nd 

 national, or for equal justice, and an equality of rights 

 and privileges among citizens entitled to it, who would 

 attempt to justify such an outrage on the part of those 

 States. The question then is, are the citizens of the 

 District desirous of a change themselves? Has any 

 request or movement been made by them that would 

 justify an interference with their private rights on the 

 part of Congress ? None, whatever ! 



He also said: "In further support of these 

 views, I beg to refer to the resolutions of Mr. 

 Clay, which were adopted by the Senate in 

 1838: 



Resolved, That when the District of Columbia was 

 ceded by the States of Virginia and Maryland to the 

 United States, domestic slavery existed in both of those 

 States, including the ceded territory, and that, as it still 

 continues in both of them, it could not be abolished 

 within the District without a violation of that good faith 

 which was implied in the cession, and in the acceptance 

 of the territory, nor, unless compensation were made 

 to the proprietors of slaves, without a manifest in- 

 fringement of an amendment to the Constitution of the 

 United States, nor without exciting a degree of just 

 alarm and apprehension in the States recognizing sla- 

 very, far transcending in mischievous tendency any pos- 

 sible benefit which could be accomplished by the abo- 

 lition. 



Resolved, therefore, That it is the deliberate judg- 

 ment of the Senate, that the institution of domestic 

 slavery ought not to be abolished within the District 

 of Columbia ; and it earnestly hopes that all sincere 

 friends of the Union and of harmony and general tran- 

 quillity, will cease to agitate this disturbing question. 



Mr. Saulsbury, of Delaware, offered the fol- 

 lowing amendment : 



And be it further enacted, That the said persons lib- 

 erated under this act shall, within thirty days after the 

 passage of the same, be removed at the expense of the 

 Federal Government into the States of Maine, New 



