C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

Xxxix.

Fellow-citizens, I have said enough to stir you; but this humiliating tale is not yet finished. An Oligarchy seeking to maintain an outrage like Slavery, and drawing its inspirations from this fountain of wickedness, is naturally base, false and heedless of justice. It is vain to expect that men who have screwed themselves to become the propagandists of this enormity, will be constrained by any compromise, compact, bargain or plighted faith. As the less is contained in the greater, so [212] there is no vileness of dishonesty, no denial of human rights, that is not plainly involved in the support of an enormity which begins by changing man, created in the image of God, into a chattel, and sweeps little children away to the auction-block. A power which Heaven never gave, can be maintained only by means which Heaven can never sanction. And this conclusion of reason is confirmed by late experience; and here I approach the special question under which the country now shakes from side to side. The protracted struggle of 1820, known as the Missouri Question, ended with the admission of Missouri as a slaveholding State, and the prohibition of Slavery in all the remaining territory West of the Mississippi and North of 36° 30′. Here was a solemn act of legislation, called at the time a compromise, a covenant, a compact, first brought forward by the Slave Oligarchy—vindicated by it in debate—finally sanctioned by its votes, also upheld at the time by a slave-holding President, James Monroe, and his cabinet—of whom a majority were slaveholders, including Mr. Calhoun himself—and made the condition of the admission of Missouri—without which that State could not have been received into the Union. Suddenly, during the last year—without any notice in the public press or the prayer of a single petition—after an acquiescence of thirty-three years, and the irreclaimable possession by the Slave Oligarchy of its special share in the provisions of this Compromise—in violation of every obligation of honor, compact and good neighborhood—and in contemptuous disregard of the out-gushing sentiments of an aroused North, this timehonored Prohibition, in itself a Landmark of Freedom, was overturned, and the vast region, now known as Kansas and Nebraska, was opened to Slavery; and this was done under the disgraceful lead of Northern politicians, and with the undisguised complicity of a Northern President, forgetful of Freedom, forgetful also of his reiterated pledges, that during his administration the repose of the country should receive no shock. And all this was perpetrated under pretences of popular rights. Freedom was betrayed by a kiss. In defiance of an uninterrupted prescription down to our day—early sustained at the South as well as the North—leaning at once on Jefferson and Washington—sanctioned by all the authoritative names of our history, and beginning with the great Ordinance by which Slavery was prohibited in the North-West— it was pretended that the people of the United States, who are the proprietors of the national domain, and who, according to the Constitution, may ‘make all needful rules and regulations’ for its government, [213] nevertheless were not its sovereigns—that they had no power to interdict Slavery there; but that this eminent dominion resided in the few settlers, called squatters, whom chance, or a desire to better their fortunes, first hurried into these places. To this precarious handful, sprinkled over immense spaces, it was left, without any constraint from Congress, to decide, whether into these vast, unsettled lands, as into the veins of an infant, should be poured the festering poison of Slavery, destined, as time advances, to show itself in cancers and leprous disease, or whether they should be filled with all the glowing life of Freedom. And this great power, transferred from Congress to these few settlers, was hailed by the new-fangled name of Squatter Sovereignty.

It was fit that the original outrage perpetrated under such pretences, should be followed by other outrages perpetrated in defiance of these pretences. In the race of emigration, the freedom-loving freemen of the North promised to obtain the ascendency, and in the exercise of the conceded sovereignty of the settlers, to prohibit Slavery. The Slave Oligarchy was aroused to other efforts. Of course it stuck at nothing. On the day of election when this vaunted popular sovereignty was first invoked, hirelings from Missouri, having no home in the territory, entered it in bands of fifties and hundreds, and assuming an electoral franchise to which they had no claim, trampled under foot the Constitution and laws. Violently, ruthlessly, the polls were possessed by these invaders. The same Northern President, who did not shrink from unblushing complicity in the original outrage, now assumed another complicity. Though prompt to lavish the Treasury, the Army and the Navy of the Republic in hunting a single slave through the streets of Boston, he could see the Constitution and laws, which he was sworn to protect, and those popular rights which he had affected to promote, all struck down in Kansas, and then give new scope to these invaders by the removal of the faithful Governor,—who had become obnoxious to the Slave Oligarchy because he would not become its tool,—and the substitution of another, who vindicated the dishonest choice by making haste, on his first arrival there, to embrace the partisans of Slavery. The legislature, which was constituted by the overthrow of the electoral franchise, proceeded to overthrow every safeguard of Freedom. At one swoop it adopted all the legislation of Missouri, including its Slave Code; by another act it imposed unprecedented conditions upon the exercise of the electoral franchise, and by still another act it denounced the punishment of death no less than five times against as many different [214] forms of interference with the alleged property in human flesh, while all who only write or speak against Slavery are adjudged to be felons. Yes, fellow-citizens, should any person there presume to print or circulate the speech in which I now express my abhorrence of Slavery, and deny its constitutional existence anywhere within the national jurisdiction, he would become liable under this act as a felon. And this overthrow of all popular rights is done in the name of Popular Sovereignty. Surely its authors follow well the example of the earliest Squatter Sovereign——none other than Satan—who, stealing into Eden, was there discovered, by the celestial angels, just beginning his work; as Milton tells us,

——him there they found
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve.

Would you know the secret of this unprecedented endeavor, beginning with the repeal of the Prohibition of Slavery down to the latest atrocity? The answer is at hand. It is not merely to provide new markets for Slaves, or even to guard Slavery in Missouri, but to build another Slave State, and thus, by the presence of two additional slaveholding Senators, to give increased preponderance to the Slave Oligarchy in the National Government. As men are murdered for the sake of their money, so is this territory blasted in peace and prosperity, in order to wrest its political influence to the side of Slavery.