CHAPTER XLIII.

President Pierce- His Inaugural The Nebraska-Kansas Bill -General Cass' Position, Views, and Votes The Attack of Colonel Benton-General Cass repels it-His Speech-Extracts.

With the Presidential compaign of 1852, the bubbling elements of the sensitive subject of slavery subsided, for the Baltimore Convention having treated the compromise measures of 1850 as a finality, the subject was ignored. The steadfast friends of the Union, through good and through evil report, breathed freer and deeper. They reposed in the happy consciousness, that the most mighty nation on the face of the globe could now go forward in her glorious mission of republicanism, unembarrassed by domestic feuds and intestine broils, and untrammeled by the interference of distant governments.

President Pierce, in his celebrated inaugural address, on the fourth of March, 1853, distinctly and emphatically avowed his policy to be, to carry out, in good faith, the publicly announced sentiments of the convention that brought him before the people. So far as eye could penetrate, this annunciation found a lodgement in the hearts of a large and influential majority of his countrymen. Nor was this approval confined to any particular States or division of States. It permeated the whole-the north and the south, the east and the west.

The angry and agitating discussions which resounded in the federal halls of legislation, and echoed from crowded cities and lonely cabins - from the hills of New England, the prairies of the west, and the savannahs of the south-from ocean and lakeall had died away, furnishing another beautiful tribute to the priceless value of free institutions. Prosperity and good feeling -quiet and fraternity among the States-were restored; and the honest-minded patriot looked forward to many long years of tranquillity. Anxiety and alarm had passed away, and peace reigned within the walls of the American republic.

But old, and, in too many instances, true, is the maxim that a certain stillness always precedes the tempest. The thirty-third Congress came together in December, 1853. The usual standing committees had hardly been announced in the Senate, ere bills for the organization of the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas were noticed by Mr. Douglass, of Illinois-looking to the repeal of the Missouri compromise bill of 1820-and thereby again opening all the disputed points connected with the subject of congressional action upon slavery in the territory of the United States. This was the tocsin of alarm, and quick did its ominous sounds reverberate all over the country. For thirty years had it reposed under the ægis of the parallel latitude of 36° 30': above that, human bondage was never to go. The proposition now, was to demolish this barrier to the swelling torrent of slavery, and let it have free scope. Good men and true paused in wonder: the quiet were aroused from their lethargy: the sentinels who always stood guard on the battlements of human freedom, frantic with rage, gave the alarm; and the anti-slavery cohorts of all the northern United States again took the field, clad in the panoply of eternal opposition to the further extension of the peculiar institution of their southern brethren. But yesterday, the whole hemisphere was without a cloud for the most far-sighted vision to rest upon: to-day, the horizon betokened a terrific tempest. Alas for the vanity of all human expectations! and here was a most apposite and unlookedfor demonstration.

Since the violent storm of 1850, General Cass had ventured to indulge the belief, that this everlasting topic of internal controversy had been put to rest, and that, in his day, at least, it would not again disturb the repose of his country. Many days, however, had not elapsed after these new propositions had been brought forward, before the scales dropped from his eyes, and he beheld, at one glance, the length and breadth of what was to come. He was in favor of the organization of governments for the Territories under consideration, but he deprecated the repeal of the timehonored line drawn between slavery and freedom, under the solemn compact by which Missouri took her position, as a sovereign member of the confederacy, in 1820: and so he told the Senate on the twentieth of February, 1854.

"With the honorable senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Everett] I frankly avow that I was filled with doubt and alarm during the

troubles and contests which were terminated by the compromise measures of 1850, and he who was unmoved, had more apathy or apprehension than I had. But though the ominous cry of 'Woe, woe to Jerusalem!' is once more heard, I do not believe that the country is in any danger, not the least; but still I do not deny that these frequent, almost periodical, renewals and revivals of this threatening subject, must necessarily produce irritation and excitement, tending to array one section of the country against another, and thus we weaken those ties of confidence and affection so essential to the permanence and tranquillity of this mighty confederacy. Events, connected with our territorial aggrandizement, seemed, as their necessary consequence, to lead to the former agitation; but the present one has burst upon us without warning, and, as I think, from causes which might have been avoided.

"Mr. President, I have not withheld the expression of my regret elsewhere, nor shall I withhold it here, that this question of the repeal of the Missouri compromise, which opens all the disputed points connected with the subject of congressional action upon slavery in the territory of the United States, has been brought before us. I do not think the practical advantages to result from the measure will outweigh the injury which the ill-feeling, fated to accompany the discussion of this subject through the country, is sure to produce. And I was confirmed in this impression by what was said by the senator from Tennessee, [Mr. Jones,] by the senator fron Kentucky, [Mr. Dixon,] and by the senator from North Carolina, [Mr. Badger,] and also by the remarks which fell from the senator from Virginia, [Mr. Hunter,] and in which I fully concur, that the south will never derive any benefit from this measure, so far as respects the extension of slavery; for, legislate as we may, no human power can ever establish it in the regions defined by these bills.

"And such were the sentiments of two eminent patriots, to whose exertions we are greatly indebted for the satisfactory termination of the difficulties of 1850, and who have since passed from their labors we may humbly hope, to their rewards. It is excluded by a law, to borrow the words of one of them, in which the other fully acquiesced, superior to that which admits it elsewhere,-the law of nature, of physical geography, the law of the formation of the earth. That law settles forever, with a strength

beyond all terms of human enactment, that slavery can not exist there.

"Thus believing, I should have been better content had the whole subject been left as it was in the bills when first introduced by the senator from Illinois, without any provision regarding the Missouri compromise. I am aware it was reported that I intended to propose the repeal of that measure; but it was an error. My intentions were wholly misunderstood. I had no design whatever to take such a step, and thus resuscitate from its quietude a deed of conciliation which had done its work, and had done it well, and which was hallowed by patriotism, by success, and by its association with great names now transferred to history. It belonged to a past generation; and in the midst of a political tempest, which appalled the wisest and the firmest in the land, it had said to the waves of agitation, Peace, be still! and they became still. It would have been better, in my opinion, not to disturb its slumber, as all useful and practical objects could have been attained without it. But the question is here without my agency, and I am called upon to take my part in its adjustment. I shall do so frankly and fearlessly."

The bills, after debate, were referred back to the appropriate committee, and again reported with an amendment to meet the views of General Cass. That amendment declared that the people, whether in the Territories or in the States to be formed from them, were free to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States. With this arrangement of the details of the bill, as now proposed, he announced, that if called upon, he should vote for it. He was aware that the bill, in its final shape, would be unpalatable alike to many northern and southern men, but for different reasons,the southerner, because of his fear that in the settlement of the Territories free men would obtain the ascendency; and the northener, because of his repugnance to a squabble for the control. But General Cass, without fear or favor, had years before settled for himself the principles that must govern his official conduct, whenever this subject came up for action. And those principles, so far as the Territories were concerned, was the application of the doctrines of popular sovereignty. He never had intruded the subject of slavery upon the attention of Congress. He, in no instance, has brought it forward. His action and votes have,

invariably, been consequent upon the acts of others. If he could have his own way, he would not disturb the compromises of 1787, of 1820, or of 1850; but, adhering to them in good faith, let freedom and slavery work out their own destiny on this continent.

On this occasion he endeavored to show the Senate that neither extreme had occasion to complain. With reference to southern complaint, he remarked:

"It is not a little extraordinary that, after all the complaints we have heard upon this subject, Congress has not passed a single law excluding any man or property from the Mexican acquisitions; not one. New Mexico and Utah remain just as open to the admission of slavery at this hour as they were the hour they passed into the possession of the United States; and its exclusion from California is the act of the people, assembled in convention to form their own constitution, and not the act of the general government.

"Mr. Rhett, indeed, in a remarkable speech in this body, remarkable for an American citizen in an American legislature, undertook, by a peculiar process, to hold this government responsible for the measure-making it one sin the more in his long catalogue of offenses.

"Syllogistically his argument runs thus:

"You have no right to pass the Wilmot proviso. "You admitted California into the Union.

"California inserted the Wilmot proviso into her constitution. "Therefore you passed the Wilmot proviso.

"Such are the premises and the conclusions charged by Mr. Rhett upon another senator, as the doctrine of the latter, but assumed by the former as his own, when he said: 'Sir, the senator was right.'

"Sir, the senators were wrong, both of them wrong, if Mr. Rhett understood, as I doubt, the proposition intended to be advanced by the member referred to. I have put the argument in the syllogistic form, omitting its details, that the process may be the more apparent, and the conclusion the more satisfactory, or unsatisfactory, as it is approved or disapproved; a compound syllogism, I think, they called this form in the schools. But all the subtleties of verbal metaphysics, from the days of Aristotle downwards, with their major and minor terms, their copulas and predicates,