USA > Maryland > Biographical sketches of distinguished Marylanders > Part 15
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The restriction, therefore, does not prevent the estab- lishment of slavery, either with reference to persons or place; but simply inhibits the removal from place to place (the law in each being the same) of a slave or make his emancipation the consequence of that re- moval. It acts professedly merely on slavery as it exists, and thus acting restrains its present lawful effects. That slavery, like many other human institu- tions, originated in fraud or violence, may be conceded : but, however, it originated, it is established among us, and no man seeks a further establishment of it by new importations of freemen to be converted into slaves. On the contrary, all are anxious to mitigate its evils by all the means within the reach of the appropriate au- thority, the domestic legislatures of the different states.
It can be nothing to the purpose of this argument, therefore, as the gentlemen themselves have shaped it,
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to inquire what was the origin of slavery ? What is it now, and who are they that endeavor to innovate upon what it now is (the advocates of this restriction who desire change by unconstitutional means, or its oppo- nents who desire to leave the whole matter to local regulation) are the only questions worthy of attention.
Sir, if we too closely look to the rise and progress of long-sanctioned establishments and unquestioned rights, we may discover other subjects than that of slavery, with which fraud and violence may claim a fearful connection, and over which it may be our interest to throw the mantle of oblivion. What was the settlement of our ancestors in this country but an invasion of the rights of the barbarians who inhabited it? That settlement, with slight exception, was ef- fected by the slaughter of those who did no more than defend their native land against the intruders of Europe, or by unequal compacts and purchases, in which feebleness and ignorance had to deal with power and cunning. The savages who once built their huts where this proud capital, rising from its recent ashes, ex- emplifies the sovereignty of the American people, were swept away by the injustice of our fathers, and their domain usurped by force, or obtained by artifices yet more criminal. Our continent was full of those abo- riginal inhabitants. Where are they or their descend- arts ? Either " with years beyond the flood," or driven back by the swelling tide of our population from the borders of the Atlantic to the deserts of the West. You follow still the miserable remnants, and make con- tracts with them that seal their ruin. You purchase their lands, of which they know not the valne, in order that you may sell them to advantage, increase your treasure and enlarge your empire. Yet further-you pursue as they retire; and they must continue to retire,
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until the Pacific shall stay their retreat and compel them to pass away as a dream. Will you recur to those scenes of various iniquity for any other purpose than to regret and lament them ? Will you pry into them with a view to shake and impair your rights of property and dominion ? But the broad denial of the sovereign right of Missouri, if it shall become a sovereign state, to recognize slavery by its laws, is rested upon a variety of grounds, all of which I will examine.
It is an extraordinary fact that they who urge this denial with such ardent zeal, stop short of it in their conduct. There are now slaves in Missouri whom they do not insist upon delivering from their chains. Yet if it is not incompetent to sovereign power to continne slavery in Missouri, in respect of slaves who may yet be carried thither, show me the power that can continue it in respect of slaves who are there already. Missouri is out of the old limits of the Union, and beyond those limits, it is said, we can give no countenance to slavery, if we can countenance or tolerate it any where. It is plain, that there can be no slaves beyond the Mississippi at this moment, but in virtue of some power to make or keep them so. What sort of power was it that has made them so? Sovereign power it could not be, according to the honorable gentlemen from Pennsylvania and New Hampshire :* and if sovereign power is unequal to such a purpose, less than sovereign power is yet more unequal to it. The laws of Spain and France could do nothing -- the laws of the territorial government of Missouri could do nothing toward such a result, if it be a result which no laws, in other words, no sovereignty could ac- complish. The treaty of 1803 could do no more, in this view, than the laws of France, or Spain, or territorial government of Missouri. A treaty is an act of sovereign
*Mr. Roberts, Mr. Lowrie, and Mr. Morrill.
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power, taking the shape of a compact between the par- ties to it; and that which sovereign power cannot reach at all, it cannot reach by a treaty. Those who are now held in bondage, therefore, in Missouri, and their issue, are entitled to be free, if there be any truth in the doc- trine of the honorable gentlemen; and if the proposed restriction leaves all such in slavery, it thus discredits the very foundation on which it reposes. To be incon- sistent is the fate of false principles-but this inconsist- ency is the more to be remarked, since it cannot be referred to mere considerations of policy, without ad- mitting that such considerations may be preferred (without a crime) to what is deemed a paramount and indispensable duty. It is here, too, that I must be per- mitted to observe, that the honorable gentlemen have taken great pains to show that this restriction is a mere work of supererogation by the principal argument on which they rest the proof of its propriety. Missouri, it is said, can have no power to do what the restriction would prevent. It would be void, therefore, without the restriction. Why, then, I ask, is the restriction insisted upon ? Restraint implies that there is some- thing to be restrained. But the gentlemen justify the restraint by showing that there is nothing upon which it can operate ! They demonstrate the wisdom and ne- cessity of restraint, by demonstrating that with or with- out restraint, the subject is in the same predicament. This is to combat with a man of straw, and to put fet- ters upon a shadow.
The gentlemen must therefore abandon either their doctrine or their restriction, their argument or their object, for they are directly in conflict and reciprocally destroy each other. It is evident that they will not abandon their object, and of course, I must believe, that they hold their argument in as little real estimation as
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I, myself, do. The gentlemen can scarcely be sincere believers in their own principle. They have apprehen- sions, which they endeavor to conceal, that Missouri, as a state, will have power to continue slavery within its limits ; and if they will not be offended, I will venture to compare them, in this particular, with the duelist in Sheridan's comedy of the Rivals, who, affecting to have no fears whatever of his adversary, is, nevertheless, care- ful to admonish Sir Lucius to hold him fast. Let us take it for granted, however, that they are in earnest in their doctrine, and that it is very necessary to impose what they prove to be an unnecessary restraint: how do they support that doctrine ? The honorable gentleman on the other side* has told us, as a proof of his great position (that man cannot enslave his fellow-man, in which is implied that all laws upholding slavery are absolute nullities), that the nations of antiquity, as well as of modern times, have concurred in laying down that position as incontrovertible. IIe refers us, in the first place, to the Roman law, in which he finds it laid down as a maxim : Jure naturali omnes homines ab initio liberi nascebantur. From the manner in which this maxim was pressed upon us, it would not have been conjectured that the honorable gentleman who used it had borrowed it from a slaveholding empire, and still less from a book of the Institutes of Justinian, which treats of slavery, and justifies and regulates it. Had he given us the context, we should have had the modifications of which the abstract doctrine was in the judgment of the Roman law susceptible. We should have had an explanation of the competency of that law to convert, whether just- ly or unjustly, freedom into servitude, and to maintain the right of a master to the service and obedience of his slave. The honorable gentleman might also have gone
*Mr. King.
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to Greece for a similar maxim and a similar commentary, speculative and practical. He next refers us to Magna Charta. I am confident that it contains no such maxim as the honorable gentleman thinks he has discovered in it. The great charter was extorted from John, and his feeble son and successor, by haughty slaveholding barons, who thought only of themselves and the Com- mons of England (then inconsiderable), whom they wished to enlist in their efforts against the Crown. There is not in it a single word which condemns civil slavery. Freemen only are the objects of its protecting care; "Nullus liber homo," is its phraseology. The serfs who were chained to the soil-the villains regardant and in gross-were left as it found them. All England , was then full of slaves, whose posterity would, by law, remain slaves as with us, except only that the issue fol- lowed the condition of the father instead of the mother. The rule was "Partus sequitur patrem," a rule more favorable, undoubtedly, from the very precariousness of its application, to the gradual extinction of slavery, than ours, which has been drawn from the Roman law, and is of sure and unavoidable effect.
Still less has the Petition of Right, presented to Charles I. by the Long Parliament, to do with the subject of civil slavery. It looked merely, as Magna Charta had not done before it, to freedom of England-and sought only to protect them agaist royal prerogative and the encroaching spirit of the Stewarts.
As to the Bill of Rights, enacted by the Convention Parliament of 1688, it is almost a duplicate of the Peti- tion of Right, and arose out of the recollection of that political tyranny from which the nation had just escaped, and the recurrence of which it was intended to prevent. It contains no abstract principles. It deals only with the practical checks upon the power of
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the monarch, and in safeguards for institutions essen- tial to the preservation of the public liberty. That it was not designed to anathematize civil slavery may be taken for granted, since at that epoch and long after- ward the English government inundated its foreign plantations with slaves, and supplied other nations with them as merchandise, under the sanction of solemn treaties negotiated for that purpose. And here I can- not forbear to remark that we owe it to that same gov- ernment, when it stood toward us in the relation of parent to child, that involuntary servitude exists in our land, and that we are now deliberating whether the pre- rogative of correcting its evils belongs to the national or the state governments. In the early periods of our colonial history everything was done by the mother country to encourage the importation of slaves into North America, and the measures which were adopted by the colonial assemblies to prohibit it were uni- formly negatived by the Crown. It is not therefore our fault, nor the fault of our ancestors, that this calamity has been entailed upon us, and notwithstand- ing the ostentation with which the loitering abolition of the slave trade by the British Parliament has been vaunted, the principal consideration which at last recon- ciled it to that measure was, that by suitable care the slave population in their West India Islands (already fully stocked) might be kept up and even increased with- out the aid of importation. In a word, it was cold calcu- lations of interest, and not the suggestions of humanity or respect for .the philanthropie principles of Mr. Wilberforce, which produced their tardy' abandonment of that abominable traffic.
Of the Declaration of our Independence, which has also been quoted in support of the perilous doctrines now urged upon us, I need not now speak at large. I
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have shown on a former occasion how idle it is to rely upon that instrument for such a purpose, and will not fatigue you by mere repetition. The self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence are not truths at all, if taken literally ; and the practical con- clusion contained in the same passage of that Declara- tion prove that they were never designed to be so received. The Articles of Confederation contain noth- ing on the subject, whilst the actual Constitution recog- nizes the legal existence of slavery by various provisions. The power of prohibiting the slave trade is involved in that of regulating commerce, but this is coupled with an express inhibition to the exercise of it for twenty years. How then can that Constitution, which ex- pressly permits the importation of slaves, authorize the national government to set on foot a crusade against slavery ? The clause respecting fugitive slaves is affirmative and active in its effects. It is a direct sanc- tion and positive protection of the right of the master to the services of his slave as derived under the local laws of the state. The phraseology in which it is wrapped still leaves the intention clear, and the words " persons held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof " have always been interpreted to ex- tend to the case of slaves in the various acts of Con- gress which have been passed to give efficacy to the provision, and in the judicial application of those laws.
So also in the clause prescribing the ratio of repre- sentation-the phrase, "three-fifths of all other per- sons," is equivalent to slaves, or it means nothing. And yet we are told that those who are acting under a Constitution which sanctions the existence of slavery in those states which choose to tolerate it, are at liberty to hold that no law can sanction its existence! It is idle to make the rightfulness of an act the measure of sover-
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eign power. The distinction between sovereign power and the moral right to exercise it has always been recog- nized. All political power may be abused, but is it to stop where abuse may begin ? The power of declaring war is a power of vast capacity for mischief, and capable of inflicting the most wide-spread desolation but it is given to Congress without stint and without measure. Is a citizen, or are the courts of justice to inquire whether that, or any other law, is just before they obey or execute it? And are there any degrees of injustice which will withdraw from sovereign power the capacity of making a given law ? But sovereignty is said to be deputed power. Deputed-by whom ? By the people, because the power is theirs. And if it be theirs, does not the restriction take it away ? Examine the Constitution of the Union, and it will be seen that the people of the States are regarded as well as the states themselves. The Constitution was made by the people, and ratified by the people. Is it fit, then, that all the sovereignty of a state is in the government of the state? So much is there as the people grant; and the people can take it away, or give more, or new model what they have already granted. It is this right which the proposed restriction takes from Missouri. You give them an immortal constitution depending on your will, not on theirs. The people and their posterity are to be bound for ever by this restriction; and upon the same principle any other restriction may be imposed. Where then is their power to change the Constitution and to devolve new sovereignty upon the state govern- ment? You limit their sovereign capacity to do it ; and when you talk of a state, you mean the people as well as the government. The people are the source of all power-you dry up that source. They are the reser- voir-you take out of it what suits you.
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But if a republican form of government is that in which all the men have a share in the public power, the slave-holding states will not alone retire from the Union. The constitutions of some of the other states do not sanction universal suffrage, or universal eligi- bility. They require citizenship, and age, and a certain amount of property, to give a title to vote or to be voted for; and they who have not those qualifications are just as much disfranchised with regard to the government as if they were slaves. . They have civil rights indeed (and so have slaves in a less degree), but they have no share in the government. Their province is to obey the laws, not to assist in making them. All such states must therefore be forisfamiliated with Virginia and the rest, or change their systen ; for the Constitution, being absolutely silent on those subjects, will afford them no protection. The Union might thus be reduced from an union to a unit. Who does not see that such conclu- sions flow from false notions; that the true theory of a republican government is mistaken, and that in such a government rights, political and civil, may be qualified by the fundamental law upon such inducements as the freemen of the country deem sufficient? That civil rights may be qualified as well as political is proved by a thousand examples. Minors, resident aliens, who are in a course of naturalization-the other sex, whether maids, or wives, or widows, furnish sufficient practical proofs of this. Again, if we are to entertain these hopeful abstractions, and to resolve all establishments into their imaginary elements in order to recast them upon some Utopian plan, and if it be true that all the men in a republican government must help to wield its power, and be equal in rights, I beg leave to ask the honorable gentleman from New Hampshire-and why not all the women ? They too are God's creatures, and
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not only very fair but very rational creatures; and our great ancestor, if we are to give credit to Milton, ac- counted them the "wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best;" although to say the truth he had but one specimen from which to draw his conclusion, and pos- sibly if he had had more, would not have drawn it at all. They bave. moreover, acknowledged civil rights in abundance, and upon abstract principles more than their masculine rulers allow them in fact. Some mon- archies, too, do not exclude them from the throne.
We have all read of Elizabeth of England, of Catha- rine of Russia, of Semiramis and Zenobia, and a long list of royal and imperial dames, about as good as an equal list of royal and imperial lords. Why is it that their exclusion from the power of a popular government is not destructive of its republican character ? I do not address this question to the honorable gentleman's gal- lantry, but to his abstraction and his theories, and his notions of the infinite perfectibility of human institu- tions, borrowed from Godwin and the turbulent philoso- phers of France .. For my own part, sir, if I may have leave to say so much in this mixed uncommon audience, I confess I am no friend to female government, unless, indeed, it be that which reposes on gentleness, and modesty, and virtue, and feminine grace and delicacy ; and how powerful a government that is, we have all of us, as I suspect, at some time or other experienced ! But if the ultra-republican doctrines which have now been broached, should ever gain ground among us, I should not be surprised if some romantic reformer, treading in the footsteps of Mrs. Wolstoncraft, should propose to repeal our republican law salique, and claim for our wives and daughters a full participation in political power, and to add to it that domestic power which in some families, as I have heard, is as absolute and unre- publican as any power can be.
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EXTRACTS FROM A PAMPHLET WRITTEN BY MR. PINK- NEY TO THE PEOPLE OF MARYLAND, OVER THE NAME OF "PUBLIUS."
" Maryland is at all times an interesting and con- spicuous member of the Union; but her relative posi- tion is infinitely more important now than in ordinary seasons. The war is in her waters, and it is waged there with a wantonness of brutality which will not suffer the energies of her gallant population to slumber, or the watchfulness of her appointed guardians to be inter- initted. The rights for which the Nation is in arms are of high import to her as a commercial section of the Continent. They cannot be surrendered or compro- mised without affecting every vein and artery of her system; and if the towering honor of universal America should be made to bow before the sword, or should be betrayed by an inglorious peace, where will the blow be felt with a sensibility more exquisite than here in Mary- land !
"It is perfectly true that our State Government has not the prerogative of peace and war; but it is just as true that it can do much to invigorate or enfeeble the National arm for attack or defence ; that it may conspire with the legislatures of other states to blast the best hopes of peace, by embarrassing or resisting the efforts by which alone a durable peace can be achieved ; as it may forward pacific negotiation by contributing to teach the enemy that we who, when our means were small and our numbers few, rose as one man and maintained ourselves victorious against the mere theories of Eng- land, with all the terrors of English power before us, are not now prepared to crouch to less than the same power, however insolently displayed, and to receive from it in perpetuity an infamous yoke of pernicious princi- ples which had already galled us until we could bear it no longer.
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"'Nothing is more to be esteemed than peace,' (1 quote the wisdom of Polybius), 'when it leaves us in possession of our honor and rights; but when it is joined with loss of freedom, or with infamy, nothing can be more detestable and fatal.' I speak with just confidence, when I say, that no federalist can be found who desires with more sincerity the return of peace than the republican by which the war was declared. But it desires such a peace as the companion and in- structor of Scipio has praised-a peace consistent with our rights and honor, and not the deadly tranquility which may be purchased by disgrace, or taken in barter for the dearest and most essential claims of our trade and sovereignty. I appeal to you boldly: Are you pre- pared to purchase a mere cessation of arms by unquali- fied submission to the pretensions of England ? Are you prepared to sanction them by treaty, and entail them upon your posterity, with the inglorious and timid hope of escaping the wrath of those whom your fathers dis- comfited and vanquished ? Are you prepared, for the sake of present profit, which the circumstances of Europe must render paltry and precarious, to cripple the strong wing of American commerce for years to come, to take from our Flag its national effect and char- acter, and to subject our vessels on the high seas, and the brave men who navigate them, to the municipal ju- risdiction of Great Britain ? I know very well that there are those amongst us (I hope they are few) who are pre- pared for all this and more; who pule over every scratch occasioned by the war, as if it were an overwhelming calamity, and are only sorry that it is not worse: who would skulk out of a contest for the best interests of their country to save a shilling or gain a cent; who, having inherited the wealth of their ancestors without their spirit, would receive laws from London with as
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much facility as woolens from Yorkshire, or hardware from Sheffield. But I write to the great body of the people, who are sound and virtuous, and worthy of the legacy which the heroes of the Revolution have be- queathed them. For them, I undertake to answer, that the only peace which they can be made to endure is that which may twine itself round the honor of the people, and with its healthy and abundant foliage give shade and shelter to the prosperity of the empire.
"The approach of a British cruiser, in the bosom of peace, struck a terror in our seamen which it cannot now inspire, and almost every vessel returning from a foreign voyage brought affliction to an American family by reporting the impressment of a husband, a brother, or a son. The Government of the United States, by whomsoever administered, has invariably protested against this monstrous practice as cruel to the gallant men whom it oppressed, as it was injurious to the navi- gation, the commerce, and the sovereignty of the Union. Under the administration of Washington, of Adams, of Jefferson, of Madison, it was reprobated and resisted as a grievance which could not be borne; and Mr. King, who was instructed upon it, supposed at one time that the British Government were ready to abandon it by a convention which he had arranged with Lord St. Vin- cent, but which finally miscarried. You have witnessed the generous anxiety of the late and present chief Mag- istrates to put an end to a usage so pestilent and de- basing.
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