No united nation that resolves to be free can be conquered. And has it come to this? Are we so humbled, so low, so debased, that we dare not express our sympathy for suffering Greece; that we dare not articulate our detestation of the brutal excesses of which she has been the bleeding victim, lest we might offend some one or more of their imperial and royal majesties? If gentlemen are afraid to act rashly on such a subject, suppose, Mr. Chairman, that we unite in an humble petition, addressed to their majesties, beseeching them that, of their gracious condescension, they would allow us to express our feelings and our sympathies. How shall it run? "We, the representatives of the free people of the United States of America, humbly approach the thrones of your imperial and royal majesties, and supplicate that, of your imperial and royal clemency" I cannot go through the disgusting recital; my lips have not yet learned to pronounce the sycophantic language of a degraded slave! Are we so mean, so base, so despicable, that we may not attempt to express our horror, utter our indignation at the most brutal and atrocious war that ever stained earth or shocked high heaven? at the ferocious deeds of a savage and infuriated soldiery, stimulated and urged on by the clergy of a fanatical and inimical religion, and rioting in all the excesses of blood and butchery, at the mere details of which the heart sickens and recoils?

If the great body of Christendom can look on calmly and coolly whilst all this is perpetrated on a Christian people, in its own immediate vicinity, in its very presence, let us at least evince that one of its remote extremities is susceptible of sensibility to Christian wrongs, and capable of sympathy for Christian sufferings; that in this remote quarter of the world there are hearts not yet closed against compassion for human woes, that can pour out their indignant feelings at the oppression of a people endeared to us by every ancient recollection and every modern tie.

But, sir, it is not for Greece alone that I desire to see this measure adopted. It will give to her but little support, and that purely of a moral kind. It is principally for America, for the credit

and character of our common country, for our own unsullied name, that I hope to see it pass. Mr. Chairman, what appearance on the page of history would a record like this exhibit? "In the month of January, in the year of our Lord and Savior, 1824, while all European Christendom beheld, with cold and unfeeling indifference, the unexampled wrongs and inexpressible misery of Christian Greece, a proposition was made in the Congress of the United States, almost the sole, the last, the greatest depository of human hope and human freedom, to send a messenger to Greece to inquire into her state and condition, with a kind expression of our good wishes and our sympathies . . . and it was rejected!" Go home, if you can; go home, if you dare, to your constituents and tell them that you voted it down; meet, if you can, the appalling countenances of those who sent you here and tell them that you shrank from the declaration of your own sentiments; that you cannot tell how, but that some unknown dread, some indescribable apprehension, some indefinable danger, drove you from your purpose; that the specters of scimitars, and crowns, and crescents gleamed before you and alarmed you; and that you suppressed all the noble feelings prompted by religion, by liberty, by national independence, and by humanity. I cannot bring myself to believe that such will be the feeling of a majority of the committee. But, for myself, though every friend of the cause should desert it, and I be left to stand alone with the gentleman from Massachusetts, I will give to his resolution the poor sanction of my unqualified approbation.

SIXTY YEARS OF SECTIONALISM

This speech was delivered in the United States Senate in support of the Compromise of 1850, on February 6 of that year.

I. DISSOLUTION AND WAR INSEPARABLE

Mr. Clay calls attention in the beginning to the prosperous career of the nation from its inception. He declares that it has grown to such greatness as to command the respect of the world; that new territorial acquisitions have been made from time to time, which have conduced to the interests of both sections. Then he appeals to the South to know "if it is right to press matters to the disastrous consequences that have been intimated."

Mr. President, we are told now, and it is rung throughout this entire country, that the Union is threatened with subversion and destruction. Well, the first question which naturally arises is, supposing the Union to be dissolved, having all the causes of grievance which are complained of,- How far will a dissolution furnish a remedy for those grievances? If the Union is to be dissolved for any existing causes, it will be dissolved because slavery is interdicted or not allowed to be introduced into the ceded territories; because slavery is threatened to be abolished in the District of Columbia, and because fugitive slaves are not returned, as in my opinion they ought to be, and restored to their masters. These, I believe, will be the causes, if there be any causes, which can lead to the direful event to which I have referred.

Well, now, let us suppose that the Union has been dissolved. What remedy does it furnish for the grievances complained of in its united condition? Will you be able to push slavery into the ceded territories? How are you to do it, supposing the North all the states north of the Potomac, and which are opposed to it — in possession of the navy and army of the United States? Can you expect, if there is a dissolution of the Union, that you can carry slavery into California and New Mexico? You cannot dream of such a purpose. If it were abolished in the District of Columbia, and the Union were dissolved, would the dissolution of the Union

restore slavery in the District of Columbia? Are you safer in the recovery of your fugitive slaves, in a state of dissolution or of severance of the Union, than you are in the Union itself? Why, what is the state of the fact in the Union? You lose some slaves. You recover some others. Let me advert to a fact which I ought to have introduced before, because it is highly creditable to the courts and juries of the free states. In every case, so far as my information extends, where an appeal has been made to the courts of justice for the recovery of fugitives, or for the recovery of penalties inflicted upon persons who have assisted in decoying slaves from their masters and aiding them in escaping from their masters as far as I am informed, the courts have asserted the rights of the owner, and the juries have promptly returned adequate verdicts in favor of the owner. Well, this is some remedy. What would you have if the Union were dissevered? Why, sir, then the severed parts would be independent of each other foreign countries! Slaves taken from the one into the other would be then like slaves now escaping from the United States into Canada. There would be no right of extradition; no right to demand your slaves; no right to appeal to the courts of justice to demand your slaves which escape, or the penalties for decoying them. Where one slave escapes now, by running away from his owner, hundreds and thousands would escape if the Union were severed in parts — I care not where nor how you run the line, if independent sovereignties were established.

Well, finally, will you, in a state of dissolution of the Union, be safer with your slaves within the bosom of the states than you are now? Mr. President, that they will escape much more frequently from the border states, no one will doubt.

But I must take the occasion to say that, in my opinion, there is no right on the part of one or more of the states to secede from the Union. War and the dissolution of the Union are identical and inseparable. There can be no dissolution of the Union except by consent or by war. No one can expect, in the existing state of things, that that consent would be given, and war is the only

alternative by which a dissolution could be accomplished. And, Mr. President, if consent were given if possibly we were to separate by mutual agreement and by a given line, in less than sixty days after such an agreement had been executed war would break out between the free and slaveholding portions of this Union – between the two independent portions into which it would be erected in virtue of the act of separation. Yes, sir, sixty days -in less than sixty days, I believe, our slaves from Kentucky would be fleeing over in numbers to the other side of the river, would be pursued by their owners, and the excitable and ardent spirits who would engage in the pursuit would be restrained by no sense of the rights which appertain to the independence of the other side of the river, supposing it, then, to be the line of separation. They would pursue their slaves; they would be repelled, and war would break out. In less than sixty days war would be blazing forth in every part of this now happy and peaceful land.

But how are you going to separate them? In my humble opinion, Mr. President, we should begin at least with three confederacics the Confederacy of the North, the Confederacy of the Atlantic Southern States (the slaveholding states), and the Confederacy of the Valley of the Mississippi. My life upon it, sir, that vast population that has already concentrated, and will concentrate, upon the headwaters and tributaries of the Mississippi will never consent that the mouth of that river shall be held subject to the power of any foreign state whatever. Such, I believe, would be the consequences of a dissolution of the Union. But other confederacies would spring up from time to time, and dissatisfaction and discontent be disseminated over the country. There would be the Confederacy of the Lakes - perhaps the Confederacy of New England and of the Middle States.

But, sir, the veil which covers these sad and disastrous events that lie beyond a possible rupture of this Union is too thick to be penetrated or lifted by any mortal eye or hand.