They affirm that all the States and all the citizens
of the States ought to have equal rights in the Territories.
Undoubtedly. But the difficulty is that they cannot. The slaveholder
moves into a new Territory with his _institution_, and from that
moment the free white settler is virtually excluded. _His_
institutions he cannot take with him; they refuse to root themselves
in soil that is cultivated by slave-labor. Speech is no longer free;
the post-office is Austrianized; the mere fact of Northern birth may
be enough to hang him. Even now in Texas, settlers from the Free
States are being driven out and murdered for pretended complicity in a
plot the evidence for the existence of which has been obtained by
means without a parallel since the trial of the Salem witches, and the
stories about which are as absurd and contradictory as the confessions
of Goodwife Corey. Kansas was saved, it is true; but it was the
experience of Kansas that disgusted the South with Mr. Douglas's
panacea of "Squatter Sovereignty."
The claim of _equal_ rights in the Territories is a specious fallacy.
Concede the demand of the slavery-extensionists, and you give up every
inch of territory to slavery, to the absolute exclusion of freedom.
For what they ask (however they may disguise it) is simply this,--that
their _local law_ be made the law of the land, and coextensive with
the limits of the General Government. The Constitution acknowledges no
unqualified or interminable right of property in the labor of another;
and the plausible assertion, that "that is property which the law
makes property," (confounding a law existing anywhere with the law
which is binding everywhere,) can deceive only those who have either
never read the Constitution or are ignorant of the opinions and
intentions of those who framed it.
Pages:
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299