5.7 Civil War DBQ

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? . . .
. . . Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine.

Your Coat came to me this morning for repairs. I take this method of returning it: without complying with Your request. With me Principle first. Money afterwards. Though a poor man, I crave the patronage of no Being that would volunteer his services to arrest a Fugitive Slave or that would hang 100 [negroes] for 25 cents each.

In this, the first election in the territory [of Kansas], a very large majority of the votes were cast by citizens of the State of Missouri . . . a systematic invasion, from an adjoining state, by which large numbers of illegal votes were cast . . . for the avowed purpose of extending slavery into the territory . . . was a crime of great magnitude. Its immediate effect was to further excite the people of the northern states, induce acts of retaliation, and exasperate the actual settlers against their neighbors in Missouri.

Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States. . . . We think they are not, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.

We hold as undeniable truths that . . . in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, . . . while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States. . . . For these and other reasons, . . . we the delegates of the people of Texas, in Convention assembled, have passed an ordinance dissolving all political connection with the government of the United States of America.

Let a man be absent from any part of the North twenty years, and he is struck, on his return, by what we call the “improvements” which have been made: better buildings, churches, schoolhouses, mills, railroads, etc. In New York city alone . . . two hundred millions of dollars have been reinvested . . . in labour-saving machinery, waterworks, gasworks, etc. . . . But where will the returning traveler see the accumulated cotton profits of twenty years in Mississippi? Ask the cotton-planter . . . and he will point in reply, not dwellings, libraries, churches, schoolhouses, mills, railroads . . . he will point to his negroes—to almost nothing else.

I say now, however, as I have all the while said, that on the territorial question—that is, the question of extending slavery under the national auspices [support]—I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation.