of disobedience to the Constitution, wherever manifested; and that we earnestly recommend the repeal of all nullification laws; and that it is the duty of the President of the United States to protect and defend the property of the United States."

The Yeas were 124; the Nays none-most of the Southern members refusing to vote.

Mr. Isaac N. Morris (Democrat) of Illinois, next moved

"That we have seen nothing in the past, nor do we see anything in the present, either in the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, or otherwise, to justify a dissolution of the Union," etc., etc.

On this, the Yeas were 115; Nays 44. Two of the Nays were Northern Democrats."

On the same day, a resolve, by Mr. Lazarus W. Powell, of Kentucky, proposing a Committee of Thirteen on the absorbing topic, came up in the Senate, and Mr. Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio, uttered some weighty words on the general subject. Having shown that the Government had hitherto been under the control of the Slave Power-that the personal rights and safety of Northern men of anti-Slavery views were habitually violated in the South-that the present pointed antagonism between the Free and the Slave States had been caused by a great change of opinion, not at the North, but at the South, he continued:

"The Republican party holds the same opinion, so far as I know, with regard to your peculiar institution' that is held by every civilized nation on the globe. We do not differ in public sentiment from England, France, Germany, and Italy, on the subject of Slavery.

"I tell you frankly that we did lay down the principle in our platform, that we would prohibit, if we had the power, Slavery from invading another inch of the free soil of this Government. I stand to that principle today. I have argued it to half a million of

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people, and they stand by it-they have commissioned me to stand by it; and, so help me God, I will! I say to you, while we hold this doctrine to the end, there is no Republican, or Convention of Republicans, or Republican paper, that pretends to have your peculiar and local institutions. On the any right in your States to interfere with other hand, our platform repudiates the idea that we have any right, or harbor any ultimate intention, to invade or interfere with

your institution in your own States. ***

"I have disowned any intention, on the part of the Republican party, to harm a hair of your heads. We hold to no doctrine that can possibly work you any inconvenienceany wrong-any disaster. We have been, and shall remain, faithful to all the lawsstudiously so. It is not, by your own confessions, that Mr. Lincoln is expected to commit any overt act by which you may be injured. You will not even wait for any, you say; but, by anticipating that the Government may do you an injury, you will put an end to it-which means, simply and squarely, that you intend to rule or ruin this Government. ***

"As to compromises, I supposed that we had agreed that the day of compromises was at an end. The most solemn we have made have been violated, and are no more. Since I have had a seat in the Senate, one of considerable antiquity was swept from our statute-book; and when, in the minority, I stood up here, and asked you to withhold your hands-that it was a solemn, sacred compact between nations-what was the reply? That it was nothing but an act of Congress, and could be swept away by the same majority which enacted it. That was the weakness of compromises. *** true in fact, and true in law; and it showed

"We beat you on the plainest and most palpable issue ever presented to the Ameriderstood; and now, when we come to the can people, and one which every man uncapital, we tell you that our candidates must and shall be inaugurated-must and shall administer this Government precisely as the Constitution prescribes. It would not only be humiliating, but highly dishonorable to us, if we listened to any compromise by which we should set aside the honest verdict of the people. When it comes to that, you have no government, but anarchy intervenes, and civil war may follow; and all the evils that human imagination can raise may be consequent on such a course as that. The American people would lose the sheet-anchor of their liberties whenever it is denied on this floor that a majority, fairly given, shall rule. I know not what others may do; but

"ART. 4. Congress shall have no power to prohibit or hinder the transportation of slaves from one State to another, or to a territory in which slaves are, by law, permitted to be held, whether that transportation be by land, navigable rivers, or by the sea.

"ART. 5. That, in addition to the provisions of the third paragraph of the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution of the United States, Congress shall have power to provide by law, and it shall be its duty to provide, that the United States shall pay to the owner who shall apply for it, the full value of his fugitive slaves in all cases where the marshal, or other officer whose duty it was to arrest said fugitive, was prevented from so doing by violence or intimidation, or where, after arrest, said fugitive was rescued by force, and the owner thereby prevented and obstructed in the pursuit of his remedy for the recovery of his fugitive slave under the said clause of the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof. And in all such cases, when the United States shall pay for such fugitive, they shall have the right, in their own name, to sue the county in which said violence, intimidation, or rescue, was committed, and recover from it, with interest and damages, the amount paid by them for said fugitive slave. And the said county, after it has paid said amount to the United States, may, for its indemnity, sue and recover from the wrong-doers or rescuers by whom the owner was prevented from the recovery of his fugitive slave, in like manner as the owner himself might have sued and recovered.

"ART. 6. No future amendment of the Constitution shall affect the five preceding articles; nor the third paragraph of the second section of the first article of the Constitution; nor the third paragraph of the second section of the fourth article of said Constitution; and no amendment shall be made to the Constitution which shall authorize or give to Congress any power to abolish or interfere with Slavery in any of the States by whose laws it is, or may be, allowed or permitted.

"And whereas, also, besides those causes of dissension embraced in the foregoing amendments proposed to the Constitution of the United States, there are others which come within the jurisdiction of Congress, and may be remedied by its legislative power; And whereas, it is the desire of Congress, as far as its power will extend, to remove all just cause for the popular discontent and agitation which now disturb the peace of the country and threaten the stability of its institutions: Therefore,

"Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled, That

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the laws now in force for the recovery of fugitive slaves are in strict pursuance of the plain and mandatory provisions of the Constitution, and have been sanctioned as valid and constitutional by the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States; that the slaveholding States are entitled to the faithful observance and execution of those laws; and that they ought not to be repealed, or so modified or changed as to impair their efficiency; and that laws ought to be made for the punishment of those who attempt, by rescue of the slave, or other illegal means, to hinder or defeat the due execution of said laws.

"2. That all State laws which conflict with the fugitive slave acts of Congress, or any other Constitutional acts of Congress, or which, in their operation, impede, hinder, or delay, the free course and due execution of any of said acts, are null and void by the plain provisions of the Constitution of the United States; yet those State laws, void as they are, have given color to practices, and led to consequences, which have obstructed the due administration and execution of acts of Congress, and especially the acts for the delivery of fugitive slaves; and have thereby contributed much to the discord and commotion now prevailing. Congress, therefore, in the present perilous juncture, does not deem it improper, respectfully and earnestly, to recommend the repeal of those laws to the several States which have enacted them, or such legislative corrections or explanations of them as may prevent their being used or perverted to such mischievous purposes.

"3. That the act of the 18th of September, 1850, commonly called the Fugitive Slave law, ought to be so amended as to make the fee of the Commissioner, mentioned in the eighth section of the act, equal in amount in the cases decided by him, whether his decision be in favor of or against the claimant. And, to avoid misconstruction, the last clause of the fifth section of said act, which authorizes the person holding a warrant for the arrest or detention of a fugitive slave to summon to his aid the posse comitatus, and which declares it to be the duty of all good citizens to assist him in its execution, ought to be so amended as to expressly limit the authority and duty to cases in which there shall be resistance, or danger of resistance or rescue.

"4. That the laws for the suppression of the African Slave-Trade, and especially those prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States, ought to be more effectual, and ought to be thoroughly executed; and all further enactments necessary to those ends ought to be promptly made."

A white man and an Indian, says the legend, once went hunting in went hunting in partnership; and the net product of their joint efforts was a turkey and an owl, which were to be divided between them. "I will take the turkey," said the white man, "and you may have the owl; or you may have the owl, and I'll take the turkey." "Ah, but," demurred the Indian, "you don't say 'turkey' once to me."

I. For a generation, the Free North had been struggling against a series of important measures, forming a system of public policy, whereof the purpose and necessary effect were the diffusion and aggrandizement of Slavery. Mr. Crittenden, by coöperating therein, to a certain extent, had clearly affirmed, to that extent, the right and justice of this resistance. He had earnestly opposed the violation of our public faith solemnly plighted to the Creek and Cherokee Indians; he had struggled manfully against the annexation of Texas. True, he had not openly condemned and resisted the repudiation of the Missouri Compact; but his studied silence on that topic, in view of the Southern furor in favor of the Nebraska Bill, proves clearly his tacit concurrence in the Northern repugnance to that measure. So also with regard to the projected purchase or seizure of Cuba. Yet this struggle of the North, its importance and its justice, are utterly ignored in this plan of adjustment' and 'conciliation;' while the South is proffered guarantees of the perpetuity of Slavery in the District of Columbia as well as in the Slave States, with the utmost facilities and aids to slavehunting ever known in any country.

The show of concession, in the foregoing project, to Northern convictions, relates to the 'mint, anise and cummin' of the great controversy; it proffers to the Free States no guarantee on a single point ever deemed by them essential. Then as to the territories: Mr. Crittenden's proposition, in substance, is, that the North shall not merely permit, but establish and guarantee, Slavery in all present and future territories of the Union south of 36° 30'. The direct incitement herein proffered, the strong temptation held out, to fillibustering raids upon Mexico, Central America, Cuba, Hayti, etc., could never be ignored. The Slave Power would have claimed this as a vital element of the new compromise that she had surrendered her just claim to all territory north of 36° 30' for the conceded right to acquire and enjoy new territory south of that line, and would have insisted on her 'pound of flesh'

a rigorous fulfillment of the compact. Her Sam Houstons, William Walkers and Bickleys would have plotted at home and plundered abroad, in the character of apostles, laboring to reädjust the disturbed equilibrium of the Union by acquiring for the South that to which she was entitled by the Crittenden Compromise.

II. The essence and substance of Mr. Crittenden's 'adjustment' inhere in his proposition that, of the vast territories acquired by us from Mexico, with all that may be acquired here after, so much as lies south of the parallel 36° 30', shall be absolutely surrendered and guaranteed to Slavery. But this very proposition was made, on behalf of the South, by Gen. Burt, of S. C., in 1847, and was then defeated by the decisive vote of

114 to 82—not one Whig, and but four Democrats, from the Free States, sustaining it." It was defeated again in the next Congress, when proposed by Mr. Douglas, in 1848: Yeas 82; Nays 121; only three Democrats and no Whig from Free States sustaining it." The Republican party was now required, in the year 1861, to assent to a partition of the territories, and an establishment of Slavery therein, which both the Whig and the Democratic parties of the Free States had repeatedly, and all but unanimously, rejected before there was any Republican party. Thus the North, under the lead of the Republicans, was required to make, on pain of civil war, concessions to Slavery which it had utterly refused when divided only between the 'conservative' parties of fifteen or twenty years ago.

III. The vital principle of this, as of all compromises or projects of conciliation proposed from the South to the North, was this: You shall regard Slavery as we do, and agree with us that it is beneficent and right. We will concede that it is not desirable nor profitable in your harsh climate, on your rugged soil; and you must concur with us in affirming that it is the very thing for our fervid suns and fertile vales. Then we will go forward, conquering, annexing, settling, planting, and filling the markets of the world with our great staples, while you shall be amply enriched by our commerce and by our constantly expanding markets for your food and manufactures.' In other words, Slavery was henceforth to be regarded, on all hands, as the basis at once of our National industry and our National policy.

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IV. As a part of this compact, the North was to silence her lecturers, muzzle her press, chloroform her pulpits, and bully her people into a silence respecting Slavery, which should be broken only by the utterance of vindications and panegyrics. Already the great publishing houses of our Northern cities had been very generally induced to mutilate the works they from time to time issued, by expunging from them every passage or sentiment obnoxious to the fastidious, exacting taste of the slaveholders. Some of our authors-Mr. James K. Paulding conspicuous among them— had revised their own works, and issued new editions, wherein their oldtime utterances adverse to Slavery had been supplanted by fulsome adulations of the system or vehement abuse of its opponents. Our Missionary, Tract, and other religious organizations, had very generally been induced to expurgate their publications and their efforts of all anti-Slavery ideas. Our great popular churches had either bent to the storm or been broken by it. And now, the work was to be completed by a new and comprehensive adjustment,' taking the place and, in part, the name of that 'Compromise' which the Slave Power had first forced upon the North and then coolly repudiated; an adjustment which was to bind the Free States over to perpetual complicity in slaveholding, and perpetual stifling of all exposure of, or remonstrance against, the existence, the domination, and the diffusion of Slavery.

These strictures are neither impelled nor colored by any unkindly feeling toward Mr. Crittenden, whose