Xlv.
An angry personal debate followed, in which Mr. Butler of South Carolina, and Mr. Mason of Virginia, directed against Mr. Sumner their most violent and insulting attacks, as well as against the State he represented. His reply to Assailants, as the speech was afterwards known, was a withering satire, which could be answered only by scurrilous abuse; his facts were impregnable.I think, sir, that I am not the only person on this floor, who, in lately listening to these two self-confident champions of the peculiar fanaticism of the South, was reminded of the striking words by Jefferson, picturing [231] the influence of Slavery, where he says, ‘The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. The parent storms. The child looks on, catches the lineament of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to his worst passions, and, thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy, who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.’ Nobody who witnessed the Senator from South Carolina or the Senator from Virginia in this debate, will place either of them among the ‘prodigies’ described by Jefferson. As they spoke, the Senate Chamber must have seemed to them, in the characteristic fantasy of the moment, a plantation well-stocked with slaves, over which the lash of the overseer had free swing. Sir, it gives me no pleasure to say these things. It is not according to my nature. Bear witness, that I do it only in just self-defence against the unprecedented assaults and provocations of this debate. And, in doing it, I desire to warn certain Senators, that if they expect, by any ardor of menace or by any tyrannical frown, to shake my fixed resolve, they expect a vain thing. There was, perhaps, little that fell from these two champions, as the fit was on, which deserves reply. Certainly not the hard words they used so readily and congenially. The veteran Senator from Virginia [Mr. Mason] complained that I had characterized one of his ‘constituents’—a person who went all the way from Virginia to Boston in pursuit of a slave—as a Slave-hunter. Sir, I choose to call things by their right names. White I call white, and black I call black. And where a person degrades himself to the work of chasing a fellow-man, who, under the inspiration of Freedom and the guidance of the north star, has sought a freeman's home far away from the coffle and the chain—that person, whomsoever he may be, I call a Slave-hunter. If the Senator from Virginia, who professes nicety of speech, will give me any term which more precisely describes such an individual, I will use it. Until then, I must continue to use the language which seems to me so apt. But this very sensibility of the veteran Senator at a just term, which truly depicts an odious character, shows a shame in which I exult. It was said by one of the philosophers of antiquity, that a blush is the sign of virtue, and permit me to add, that, in this violent sensibility, I recognize a blush mantling the cheek of the honorable Senator, which even his plantation manners cannot conceal. [232] And the venerable Senator from South Carolina, too, [Mr. Butler]— he has betrayed his sensibility. Here let me say that this Senator knows well that I always listen with peculiar pleasure to his racy and exuberant speech, as it gurgles forth—sometimes tinctured by generous ideas —except when, forgetful of history, and in defiance of reason, he undertakes to defend what is obviously indefensible. This Senator was disturbed, when to his inquiry, personally, pointedly and vehemently addressed to me, whether I would join in returning a fellow-man to Slavery, I exclaimed, ‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?’ In fitful phrases, which seemed to come from the unconscious excitement so common with the Senator, he shot forth various cries about ‘dogs;’ and, among other things, asked if there was any ‘dog’ in the Constitution? The Senator did not seem to bear in mind, through the heady currents of that moment, that, by the false interpretation he has fastened upon the Constitution, he has helped to nurture there a whole kennel of Carolina bloodhounds, trained, with savage jaws and insatiable scent, for the hunt of flying bondmen. No, sir, I do not believe that there is any ‘kennel of bloodhounds,’ or even any ‘dog,’ in the Constitution of the United States. But, Mr. President, since the brief response which I made to the inquiry of the Senator, and which leaped unconsciously to my lips, has drawn upon me various attacks, all marked by grossness of language and manner; since I have been charged with openly declaring my purpose to violate the Constitution, and to break the oath which I have taken at that desk, I shall be pardoned for showing simply how a few plain words will put all this down.
