USA > Vermont > Addison County > Cornwall > History of the town of Cornwall, Vermont > Part 21
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Something has been said, "in the progress of this debate, of the chivalry of the South ; something has been said of the valor of the West. I choose rather to say, of all the people of this nation- whether they reside in the East or the West, whether their lot be cast upon the sunny savannahs of the South, or among the 'old gray mountains' of the North - that in such a crisis, they will all be generous and patriotic.
While other gentlemen have been so eloquent in the vindication and. praises of their own constituents, and the people of their own sections and States, I trust I may be pardoned the indulgence of a passing reference to those whom I have the honor, in part, to rep- resent here. I am one of but four members upon this floor, from a
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small, unpretending border State ; a State, which, in some respects, occupies but a subordinate position in the Federal Union ; a State, nevertheless, which holds within its borders a people, whose habits of industry, whose general intelligence, whose indomitable chergy of character, whose devetion to the Union and the constitution, and whose attachment to the principles of civil and religious freedom, are unsurpassed by those of any other State or nation. They may be less forward than others in sounding their own praises, or in vhunting their own patriotism, yet the sons of the American Swit- zerland will never be deaf nor backward to their country's call in any and every emergency. Much as they love the peace and quiet of their mountain homes, when the day of trial and of conflict shall come, I pledge you, upon the authority of one whose days have all been passed among them, and who knows full well their spirit and their valor, that they will be there, the first and foremost in the contest, with "their backs to the field, and their feet to the foe." They who inherit the blood and the spirit of the heroes of Benning- ton and Ticonderoga, will be there. Other Allens, and Starkes, and Lees, and Warners, will be there, to cheer and to lead her gal- lant sons to the rescue ; and in the face of danger and of death, "upon the green graves of their sires," will testify to the world how much there yet remains of that daring that knows not fear ; of that patriotism that knows not section or party ; of that spirit which knows no servitude, and submits to no wrong. The people of Vermont, and I am proud to say it, are the descendants of the pilgrim stock. Our fathers sleep upon many a battle-field of the revolution. We claim kindred with those who fought and fell at Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill. And if my honorable friends here from Massachusetts will allow me to assert a participa- tion of the honor, we claim kindred with those whose mighty voices first awoke the echoes of freedom within the ancient walls of Faneuil Hall; with those who bore no subordinate part in laying deep and strong the foundations of this Republic. Ask me not where such a people will be found in the day of their country's need."
To the Mexican war, Mr. Foot was opposed from principle, re- garding it as unnecessary and, consequently, as indefensible ; and in a speech delivered in the House of Representatives July 16, 1846, with a directness and fearlessness which won the admiration of his constituents, and of the friends of political fairness and justice throughout the country, he exposed the machinations of those who were concerned in its inception, and the subterfuges by which its
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advocates attempted to justify and sustain it. Upon the President himself, Mr. Foot charges the chief responsible agency in orig- inating this war, ordering, by a stretch of arbitrary power, a de- tachment of the army to invade territory of which Mexico had ever been in undisputed possession. The declaration of the President after collision had been effected, that "war exists with Mexico, not- withstanding all our efforts to avoid it," Mr. Foot declares "would have been more correct if he had said that war exists by my acts, and in consequence of my successful efforts to provoke it." From the peroration of Mr. Foot's speech on the Origin and Causes of the Mexican War, I cite a few impressive remarks.
" War, Mr. Chairman, with all its train of evils-war with Mex- ico, or with England, or with all the powers of the earth besides, is not so much to be feared by the American people, as an Execu- tive war upon the great Charter of our Liberties. If the liber- ties of this country are destined ever to be overthrown, it will be by the arm of no foreign foe. That work of desecration is in re- serve for the ruthless hand of some domestic despot. Guard well this bulwark of freedom from domestic invasion and violence; when once it falls, it falls to be raised no more. These massive walls, and these solid columns which surround us, may crumble to the ground, but the hand of art may replace them. The devouring fire may lay in ashes your stately cities and your beautiful towns, but the energies of a free and mighty people may rebuild them. The Siroe's blast may sweep over this land, leaving its broad surface a blank and desolate waste, but another returning season with its showers and its sunshine, may revive its fruits and flowers. But when some ambitious leader, some "eyeless giant," starting from the "stagnant pool of despotism," shall find a guide to place his hand upon the pillars of your Constitution, and bring down to the dust this proudest and noblest fabric of human wisdom the world has ever seen, who shall again restore it in its fair proportions of beauty and of grandeur ?"
On a subsequent occasion, February 10th, 1847, in another speech in the House of Representatives, on the Character and Ob- jects of the Mexican war, Mr. Foot took occasion indignantly to rebuke the flagrant intimation of President Polk, that those mem- bers of Congress who presumed to disapprove and censure the measures of the Administration in relation to the War, were guilty
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fof constructive treason, as affording aid and comfort to the enemy. In the exordium of this speech, which is devoted particularly to this charge of the President, Mr. Foot remarked :
" It is my fortune to be of the number of those who maintain that the war in which the country is now engaged with Mexico, might and ought to have been avoided : and that, if wise and con- siderate counsels had prevailed in the Executive department of our Government, it would have been avoided. I hold that it was un- necessary for the redress of any wrongs we may have suffered, or for the assertion of any rights which may have been infringed .--- Most of all was it unnecessary for the vindication of our national honor. I believe that all our differences with Mexico, whether in relation to the question of boundary, or in relation to the question of indemnity for spoliations, might have been satisfactorily and honorably settled without a resort to arms. I assert, moreover, and challenge investigation of the truth of the assertion, that this war resulted, not from the act of Mexico, but from the unauthorized and unconstitutional acts of our own Executive Government. These are my own deliberate and settled opinions, the irresistable convic- tions of my own judgment, after the most careful and thorough examination of the subject, and therefore I hesitate not to declare them. I do not forget that the expression of sentiments or opinions like these has been charged in high quarters and in low quarters, as treason to the country, couched in the equivalent language of the Constitution, as giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy. I remem- ber that an honorable gentleman from New York, who addressed the House yesterday, assumed to administer a rebuke to those on this side of the Hall, who choose to take exception to the accusa- tion, and to admonish us that we should show a better spirit than to indulge in what he is pleased to call an "abuse of the President," by repelling and denouncing the charge. I admire the honorable member's kind dispositions, but I must reject his counsels, because they inculcate a spirit of servility utterly abhorrent to all my sen- timents of personal independence.
The Constitution of the United States has made it the duty of the President to lay before Congress an expose of the state and condition of public affairs, foreign and domestic, and to recommend such action as in his judgment shall best advance the public weal. But, where is it made his duty, in his official communications with the national legislature, to impugn the motives of those who may chance to entertain and express views counter to his own, upon a great national question which concerns and agitates the country ? Where does he find authority or precedent for sending into these
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legislative halls a bulletin of denunciation against any portion of the American people, or their representatives, who may have formed and expressed opinions not in conformity with such as he professes to entertain, in relation to the origin, the justice, or the necessity of the war in which the country is involved, and whose life-blood is flowing in its prosecution ?
When the Chief Magistrate of this Republic shall become so far unmindful of the dignity and proprieties of his station, when he shall so far disregard the ordinary courtesies and decorum which belong to the official intercourse of one department of the Govern- ment with another, as to assume the character of a volunteer accu- ser of any portion of his fellow-citizens with a hostile intent against their own Government, and with aiding and abetting the public enemy, and for no other cause than that they have intelli- gence to form, and independence to speak, their opinions upon a momentous and vital question of public interest, how shall the au- dacious insult be met ?. How ought it to be treated ? Shall it be received with silent and trembling submission ? Shall it be received with acquiescence, or even with gracious words of remonstrance ? Or shall it not rather be met with that prompt and bold rebuke, with that scornful defiance which alone becomes the action and the character of freeborn men, determined yet to be free ?
When the spirit of dictation, or of despotism, shall become arro- gant and bold enough to lift its frowning form in these Halls, con- secrated to liberty and free debate, and to demand submissive obe- dience to the high behests of power upon the peril of Executive wrath, even though it utter its denunciations with forked and fiery tongue. if freemen would not basely surrender all that is worth living for, and all that is worth dying for, they must meet the monster at the threshhold; and, without stopping to calculate the dangers of the conflict, they must cast out the unwelcome and in- solent intruder at once and forever from their presence. It has been said, that "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom."' I will superadd, that eternal resistance to the incipient and insidious en- croachments of power is the only guaranty of public liberty.
It is the first time, and I trust it may be the last time, that the President of the United States shall deem it in the line of his offi- cial duty, or among his official prerogatives, to charge, either di- rectly or by implication, the crime of treason against their country, upon any portion of his constituency, for the exercise of a privilege guarantied to every American citizen by the Constitution under which we live. Such a charge, emanating from some humbler source, coming from some irresponsible libeller, from some common reviler, from some hireling minion of the court, from some pot-house.
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blackguard, might be passed by unnoticed. The lowness of its origin would shield its author from the notice of contempt. But, originating in the source it did, and coming in the form and manner it has come, disseminated as it has been through the length and the breadth of the country, and reiterated as it has been, and now is, through all the organs of detraction and calumny, from the highest to the lowest, it rises to the importance, at least, of claiming from all independent and honorable men a united response of universal and unqualified reprobation. The obvious purpose of the charge has been signally defeated, and he who made it mistook the char- acter and temper of the American people.
Sir, this is nothing less than an authoritative attempt, on the part of your President, to awe the people into silence where they cannot approve the acts of the Administration in relation to the war in which they have involved the country. But, the attempt has been most signally reproved by its most signal failure. It will not
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Presidential message. It has not stifled the freedom of debate. It has not silenced the voice of a free press, nor yet the voice of a free people. It has not suppressed the deep-toned mutterings of popular complaint and indignation against the conduct of your Ad- ministration. You might as well attempt to hush the thunders of Niagara's roar. You might as well whisper to the troubled ocean " be still," when lashed to fury by the storm. The popular judg- ment is against the Administration, and against its whole system of policy, and he is a poor reader of the "signs of the times," who does not so interpret them. The sentence of public condemnation has been pronounced upon it, more decisive and more emphatic, in- deed, than has ever before been. visited upon any administration of this Government thus early in its career. Its doom is already sealed. It is written out in characters of glaring light, no less palpable, and no less portentous, than the "mene tekel upharsin," upon the palace wall of the Babylonian monarch. "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall."
In the course of his argument, Mr. Foot makes it too apparent to be doubted, despite the crafty pretences of the Administration, that the primary and sole object of the war, involving the sacrifice of national treasure and blood and honor, was the acquisition of territory, which has proved, as it was foreseen it would, and is likely to prove, the course of protracted, perhaps endless, contention and discord.
"Mr. Chairman, my opposition to taking any territory from Mex-
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ico arises, not more from the consideration of its injustice to her, than because I believe it would prove a curse, and not a blessing to our own country. And this, after all, is the paramount and all- important consideration growing out of the whole question of the Mexican war. However just you may claim the war with her to be, and however just that in any peaceful arrangement she should indemnify us for its expenses, in whole or in part, it would be infinitely better for us to yield it all, than to receive as an indemnity that which in reality would prove to be a bane to us. What idiotic madness, then is it to wage a war for the conquest of possessions which, if granted to us peacefully and gratuitously, would forever rest upon the heart of this nation like the incubus of death. The acquisition of terri- tory from Mexico, upon whatever terms, of peace or of war, would forever be a source of contention and strife with us, if not, sooner or later, fatal to the integrity of the Union itself. This Hall has already witnessed the forebodings of those evils, which are sure to come of the accession of new territory, in the excited discussion and wrangling which has arisen in relation to the division of the expected acquisitions. You are despoiling a neighboring Republic of its possessions, and yet, before the prize is in your grasp, while you are yet in hot pursuit, and panting in the chase, you are war- ring among yourselves about the ultimate condition upon which your anticipated conquests shall be incorporated into this Government, and the pledge upon either side is nothing less than a dissolution of the Union. You are rushing headlong and blindfold upon appalling dangers, before which the stout heart shrinks, and brave men turn pale. You are rekindling the slumbering fires of a volcano, which, whenever they shall burst forth, will consume all the plain. Heaven forefend, that the happiness and the hopes of twenty mil- lions of freemen shall be made the sport and the sacrifice of a mis- erable ambition for territorial aggrandizement. The only guaranty of our safety and salvation is, to keep the ship of state from the rock upon which our unskilful pilots are fast driving it. Take no territory from Mexico, cither by treaty or by conquest, and you will have no strife about the conditions of its annexation.
Sir, I am opposed to taking one foot of territory from Mexico, either by force or by consent; or upon any condition, whether bond or free, with slavery or without slavery. And let me warn the people of the North not to deceive themselves, nor be deceived, with the idea that the territory we may acquire from Mexico will remain free territory. And let me tell them, in all frankness, that, let us attach what conditions we may to its acquisition, incorporate into these preliminary acts as many " Wilmot provisoes " as we please, they will be of no practical avail in the end, and will not be re-
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garded or treated as of any binding obligation upon future legisla- tive or treaty action upon the subject. And let me tell them. fur- thermore, that, with the Texas lesson before them, the only guar- antee upon which they can rely against the indefinite extension of slave territory is to take none at all.
March 4, 1851, Mr. Foot took his seat as a member of the Uni- ted States Senate, to which place he was elected by the General Assembly of Vermont, at their session the previous October. As in the House of Representatives, so in the Senate, he has ever ap- peared the advocate of humanity and justice, whether in relation to the people of our own land, or to foreign nations. At an early period in his senatorial career, he advocated, with much zeal, an appropriation of public lands for the benefit of the indigent Insane of the country, and when under his stirring appeals a bill to this effect had passed both Houses of Congress, and been vetoed by Pres. Pierce, on the ground of unconstitutionality, Mr. Foot, May 3d, and again May 31st, 1854, delivered speeches, in which he passed under scathing review, not only the logic of the President, but the general policy of the existing administration. After an elaborate and able defence of the bill, and refutation of the reasons assigned for the veto, Mr. Foot expressed his expectation that the veto would be sustained by the party then in power. " Millions," said he, " for speculation and monopoly,-not a dollar for benevolence and humanity, is the practical maxim which rules in the high places of power in this our day."' On this subject Mr. Foot has exhibited himself before his native State, and before the country, as a statesman of enlarged Christian sentiments, who would ameliorate the sufferings of the unfortunate, as well as augment the wealth and power of the nation.
Mr. Foot opposed the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution, on the ground of the monstrous injustice of attempt- ing to force upon an oppressed people, a constitution, laws and rulers, all the objects of their abhorrence. Says one who listened to his speech on this subject :
" Mr. Foot, of Vermont, who aims at effect and popularity as little as any man in Congress, and yet produces the one and wins
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the other whenever he chooses to throw his power and resources in- to a discussion, signalized himself by a speech which is destined to be read with interest and impression wherever manly sentimento and the vindication of truth and justice are respected. IIe did not attempt to reiterate exhausted details, or to reconstruct threadbare arguments of constitutional doctrine, but, generalizing the whole question upon the basis of established facts, to present it to public intelligence and fairness, in such lights that every strong point stood out like the foreground coloring of a massive picture. His cham- pionship of the persecuted freemon in Kansas, who had been pur- sued almost with that bloodhound seent which had tracked the In- dians on their native everglades, and were stigmatized as rebels for daring to assert their rights, produced a thrill of delight through the chamber. So, said he, were the men of the Revolution de- nounced, and so will others be who resist tyranny in any form, or despotism under the name of Democracy. For his part, he gloried in such rebellion, and gave his hearty God-speed to those who were engaged in the work of breaking the bondage which an odious Ad- ministration had sought to impose. In reviewing that part of the President's Message which claimed to vindicate the Lecompton Constitution on the pretense that the question of slavery had been submitted to the people, he held up the deception in such terms and with such striking clearness as to carry the deepest conviction to every impartial mind. Altogether, it was a grand speech, deliv- ered with the impressive utterance and manner and dignity which so much distinguish this Senator, and with a proud port, too, that made Senators on the other side feel the force of his searching exposures."
Of his advocacy of justice for its own sake, we have interesting illustrations in his able speeches in support of the " Florida Claims bill," in 1860, and more recently in defence of Mr. Welles, Sec- retary of the Navy, against the aspersions cast upon him in conse- quence of his measures for the increase of the U. S. navy. Though the Secretary might not have been infallible under the unprece - dented pressure thrown upon him by the state of the country, Mr. Foot demanded for him the confidence of the nation as a man of honest intentions, and as a faithful public officer.
In 1857, as Chairman of a Committee to prepare a memorial respecting the life and character of the late Samuel Prentiss, Judge of the U. S. District Court for this State, Mr. Foot reported sev- eral resolutions which he followed with impressive remarks, setting
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forth the high qualities of the man as a Magistrate, a statesman, a popular representative in the State and national Legislatures, as & citizen and a member of the domestic circle.
To an invitation to a public meeting in Philadelphia, June 15, 1858, " for the promotion of American productions and American labor," Mr. Foot responded in a speech of great pertinency and power. He closed by saying :
" This question of protection to " American products and to American labor," must and will, henceforth, constitute a large plank in your political platforms. And this may be done without at all detracting from, or lessening the consideration and importance of, other great and vital questions. Upon this plank we can all stand, whether Republicans, or Americans, or independent Demo- crats. No man can in truth say there is anything narrow or local or sectional in it. It is as broad, and as comprehensive, as the Re- public itself, and embraces all interests and all sections. Upon this question honest and patriotic men of all parties and from all sec- tions can unite. Upon this question, Vermont and Kentucky can stand side by side, as in days gone by, when we stood shoulder to shoulder, doing battle for this American doctrine under the lead of "gallant old Harry Clay." Upon this question Pennsylvania and Maryland can strike hands and stand united as in 1840 and in 1848, doing valiant battle for the cause of American labor and of Amer- ican enterprise and of American genius. Go on then fellow-citizens of Pennsylvania in this great movement which you have so aus- piciously begun ; and feel assured that brighter days and brighter hopes shall break upon the hearts of the great American masses Who earn their daily bread by their daily toil. Go on with this great movement ; and when the nation shall have gathered its strength for the mighty conflict in behalf of "home productions and home labor," and when the battles shall have been fought, vic- tory will sit proudly upon your banner : your hearts and your hopes shall be cheered by the dawning of a brighter day ; and American legislation shall once more respond to the demands of American labor."
In 1859, Mr. Foot entered, with a degree of interest which con- trasted favorably with the manœuvring or indifference of many Senators, into the subject of the capture of William Walker and his piratical companions in Nicaragua. In a special message in relation to this transaction, President Buchanan had declared that Capt. Paulding had exceeded his instructions and powers, though
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deserving the credit of honest and patriotic intentions. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had reported resolutions embody- ing the views of the President, for which our Senator presented a substitute. as follows :
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