Today was published
in St Louis papers (copied from the New York Tribune) a recent letter of mine
to the Whig Committee of New York, in answer to their call upon me for my views
and opinions on the politics of the country, and the signs of the times.1
St.
Louis, Feb. 24, 1859.
To
Messrs. J. PHILIPS PHOENIX, WILLIS BLACKSTONE, H. M. BININGER, DAVID J. LILET
AND H. R. SMITH, Committee, New York.
Sirs: A short time ago I was favored
with your note of the 7th inst., covering a resolution of the Committee, to the
effect that it is inexpedient at this time further to discuss or agitate the
Negro question, but rather to turn the attention of the people to other topics
— "topics of general importance, such as our Foreign Relations, including
the Extension of Territory; the building of Railroads for National purposes;
the improvement of our Harbors, the navigation of our Rivers to facilitate
Internal Commerce; the subject of Currency, and a Tariff of Duties, and other
means of developing our own internal resources, our home wealth, and binding
together by ties of national and fraternal feelings, the various parts and
sections of our widely extended Republic."
Your letter, gentlemen, opens a very wide
field, in asking for my "opinion upon the subject, and my views as to the
signs of the times." Books have been written upon these matters, and
speeches delivered by the thousand ; and yet the argument seems as far from
being exhausted as it was at the beginning ; and I take it for certain that you
do not expect or desire me to discuss at large, all or any of these
interminable quarrels. That I have opinions upon all or most of them, is true —
not the opinions of this or that party, ready to be abandoned or modified to
suit this or that platform, but my own opinions — perhaps the more fixed and
harder to be changed because deliberately formed in the retirement of private
life, free from the exigencies of official responsibility and from the
perturbations of party policy. They are my own opinions, right or wrong.
As to the Negro question — I have
always thought, and often declared in speech and in print, that it is a
pestilent question, the agitation of which has never done good to any party,
section or class, and never can do good, unless it be accounted good to stir up
the angry passions of men, and exasperate the unreasoning jealousy of sections,
and by those bad means foist some unfit men into office, and keep some fit men
out. It is a sensitive question into whose dangerous vortex it is quite
possible for good men to be drawn unawares. But when I see a man, at the South
or the North, of mature age and some experience, persist in urging the
question, after the sorrowful experience of the last few years, I can attribute
his conduct to no higher motive than personal ambition or sectional prejudice.
As to the power of the General
Government to protect the persons and properties, and advance the interests of
the people, by laying taxes, raising armies and navies, building forts and
arsenals, light houses, moles, and breakwaters, surveying the coasts and
adjacent seas, improving rivers, lakes, and harbors, and making roads — I
should be very sorry to doubt the existence of the power, or the duty to
exercise it, whenever the constituted authorities have the means in their
hands, and are convinced that its exercise is necessary to protect the country
and advance the prosperity of the people.
In my own opinion, a government that
has no power to protect the harbors of its country against winds and waves and
human enemies, nor its rivers against snags, sands and rocks, nor to build
roads for the transportation of its armies and its mails and the commerce of
its people, is a poor, impotent government, and not at all such a government as
our fathers thought they had made when they produced the Constitution which was
greeted by intelligent men everywhere with admiration and gratitude as a
government free enough for all the ends of legal liberty and strong enough for
all the purposes of national and individual protection. A free people, if it be
wise, will make a good constitution; but a constitution, however good in
itself, did never make a free people. The people do not derive their rights
from the government, but the government derives its powers from the people; and
those powers are granted for the main, if not the only, purpose of protecting
the rights of the people. Protection, then, if not the sole, is the chief end
of government.
And it is for the governing power to judge,
in every instance, what kind and what degree of protection is needful — whether
a Navy to guard our commerce all around the world, or an Army to defend the
country against armed invasion from without, or domestic insurrection from
within; or a Tariff, to protect our home industry against the dangerous
obtrusion of foreign labor and capital.
Of the existence of the power and duty
of the Government to protect the People in their persons, their property, their
industry and their locomotion, I have no doubt; but the time, the mode and the
measure of protection, being always questions of policy and prudence, must of
necessity be left to the wisdom and patriotism of those whose duty it is to
make laws for the good government of the country. And with them I freely leave
it, as the safest, and indeed the only, constitutional depository of the power.
As to our Foreign Policy generally, I
have but little to say. I am not much of a progressive, and am content to leave
it where Washington [Jefferson] placed it, upon that wise, virtuous, safe maxim
— "Peace [. . .] with all nations; entangling alliance[s] with none."
The greedy and indiscriminate appetite for foreign acquisition, which makes us
covet our neighbor's lands, and devise cunning schemes to get them, has little
of my sympathy. I view it as a sort of political gluttony, as dangerous to our
body politic as gluttony is to the natural man — producing disease certainly,
hastening death, probably. Those of our politicians who are afflicted with this
morbid appetite are wont to cite the purchase of Louisiana and Florida, as
giving countenance to their inordinate desires. But the cases are wholly unlike
in almost every particular. Louisiana was indispensable to our full and safe
enjoyment of an immense region which was already owned, and its acquisition
gave us the unquestioned control of that noble system of Mississippi waters,
which nature seems to have made to be one and indivisible, and rounded off the
map of the nation into one uniform and compacted whole. Nothing remained to mar
and disfigure our national plat, but Florida, and that was desirable, less for
its intrinsic value, than because it would form a dangerous means of annoyance,
in case of war with a Maritime Power, surrounded as it is, on three sides by the
ocean, and touching three of our present States, with no barrier between. The
population of Louisiana and Florida, when acquired, was very small compared
with the largeness of the territory; and, lying in contact with the States, was
easily and quickly absorbed into and assimilated with the mass of our people.
Those countries were acquired, moreover, in the most peaceful and friendly
manner, and for a satisfactory consideration.
Now, without any right or any
necessity, it is hard to tell what we do not claim in all the continent south
of us, and the adjacent islands. Cuba is to be the first fruit of our grasping
enterprise, and that is to be gotten at all hazards, by peaceful purchase if we
can, by war and conquest if we must.2 But Cuba is only an outpost to
the Empire of Islands and continental countries that are to follow. A leading
Senator3 has lately declared (in debate on the Thirty Million bill4)
that we must not only have Cuba, but all the islands from Cape Florida to the
Spanish Main, so as to surround the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, and make
them our "mare clausum" like the Mediterranean, in old times, when
the Roman Emperor ruled both its shores, from the pillars of Hercules to the
Hellespont.5 This claim of mare nostrum implies, of course, that we
must own the continent that bounds our sea on the west, as well as the string
of islands that inclose it on the east — that is, Mexico, Central America, and
all South America, so far south at least as the Orinoco.6 In that
wide compass of sea and land there are a good many native governments, and
provinces belonging to the strongest maritime powers, and a narrow continental
isthmus which we ourselves, as well as England and France, are wont to call the
highway of nations. To fulfill the grand conception, and perfect our tropical
empire, we must buy or conquer all these torrid countries, and their mongrel
populations. As to buying them, it strikes me that we had better waite [sic]
awhile, at least until the Government has ceased to borrow money to pay its
current expenses. And as to conquering them, perhaps it would be prudent to
pause and make some estimate of costs and contingencies, before we rush into
war with all maritime Europe and half America.
I am not one of those who believe that
the United States is not an independent and safe nation, because Cuba is not a
part of it. On the contrary, I believe that we are quite capable of self-defense,
even if the "Queen of the Antilles" were a province of England,
France or Russia; and surely, while it remains an appendage of a comparatively
feeble nation, Cuba has much more cause to fear us than we have to fear Cuba.
In fact, gentlemen, I cannot help doubting the honesty of the cowardly argument
by which we are urged to rob poor old Spain of this last remnant of her Western
empire, for fear that she might use it to rob us.
But suppose we could get, honestly and
peaceably, the whole of the country — continental and insular — from the Rio
Grande to the Orinoco, and from Trinidad to Cuba, and thus establish our mare
clausum, and shut the gate of the world across the Isthmus, can we govern them
wisely and well? For the last few years, in the attempt to govern our home
Territories of Kansas and Utah, we have not very well maintained the dignity
and justice of the nation, nor secured the peace and prosperity of the subject
people.7 Can we hope to do better with the various mixed races of
Mexico, Central and South America, and the West India Islands? Some of those
countries have been trying for fifty years to establish republican governments
on our model, but in every instance have miserably failed; and yet, there was
no obstacle to complete success but their own inaptitude.
For my part, I should be grieved to see
my country become, like Rome, a conquering and dominant nation; for I think
there are few or no examples in history, of Governments whose chief objects
were glory and power, which did ever secure the happiness and prosperity of
their own people. Such Governments may grow great and famous, and advance a few
of their citizens to wealth and nobility; but the price of their grandeur is
the personal independence and individual freedom of their people. Still less am
I inclined to see absorbed into our system, "on an equal footing with the
original States," the various and mixed races (amounting to I know not how
many millions) which inhabit the continent and islands south of our present
border. I am not willing to inoculate our body politic with the virus of their
diseases, political and social — diseases which, with them, are chronic and
hereditary, and with us could hardly fail to produce corruption in the head and
weakness in the members.
Our own country, as it is, in position,
form and size, is a wonder which proclaims a wisdom above the wit of man. Large
enough for our posterity, for centuries to come: All in the temperate zone, and
therefore capable of a homogeneous population, yet so diversified in climates
and soils, as to produce everything that is necessary to the comfort and wealth
of a great people: Bounded east and west by great oceans, and bisected in the
middle by a mighty river, which drains and fructifies the continent, and binds
together the most southern and northern portions of our land by a bond stronger
than iron. Beside all this, it is new and growing — the strongest on the
continent, with no neighbor whose power it fears, or of whose ambition it has
cause to be jealous. Surely such a country is great enough and good enough for
all the ends of honest ambition and virtuous power.
It seems to me that an efficient
home-loving Government, moderate and economical in its administration, peaceful
in its objects, and just to all nations, need have no fear of invasion at home,
or serious aggression abroad. The nations of Europe have to stand continually
in defense of their existence; but the conquest of our county by a foreign
power is simply impossible, and no nation is so absurd as to entertain the
thought. We may conquer ourselves by local strifes and sectional animosities;
and when, by our folly and wickedness, we have accomplished that great
calamity, there will be none to pity us for the consequences of so great a
crime.
If our Government would devote all its
energies to the promotion of peace and friendship with all foreign countries,
the advancement of Commerce, the increase of Agriculture, the growth and
stability of Manufactures, and the cheapening, quickening and securing the
internal trade and travel of our country ; in short, if it would devote itself
in earnest to the establishment of a wise and steady policy of internal
government, I think we should witness a growth and consolidation of wealth and
comfort and power for good, which cannot be reasonably hoped for from a
fluctuating policy, always watching for the turns of good fortune, or from a
grasping ambition to seize new territories, which are hard to get and harder to
govern.
The present position of the
Administration is a sorrowful commentary upon the broad democracy of its
professions. In theory, the people have the right and ability to do anything;
in practice, we are verging rapidly to the One-Man power.
The President, the ostensible head of
the National Democrats, is eagerly striving to concentrate power in his own
hands, and thus to set aside both the People and their Representatives in the
actual affairs of government. Having emptied the Treasury, which he found full,
and living precariously upon borrowed money, he now demands of Congress to
entrust to his unchecked discretion the War power, the Purse and the Sword.
First, he asks Congress to authorize him, by statute, to use the Army to take
military possession of the Northern Mexico, and hold it under his protectorate,
and as a security for debts due to our citizens8 — civil possession
would not answer, for that might expose him, as in the case of Kansas, to be
annoyed by a factious Congress and a rebellious Territorial Legislature.
Secondly: Not content with this, he
demands the discretionary power to use the Army and Navy in the South, also in
blockading the coast and marching his troops into the interior of Mexico and
New Granada, to protect our citizens against all evil-doers along the transit
routes of Tehuantepec and Panama.9 And he and his supporters in
Congress claim this enormous power upon the ground that, in this particular at
least, he ought to be the equal of the greatest monarch of Europe. They forget
that our fathers limited the power of the President by design, and for the
reason that they had found out by sad experience that the monarchs of Europe
were too strong for freedom.
Third: In strict pursuance of this
doctrine, first publicly announced from Ostend,10 he demands of
Congress to hand over to him thirty millions of dollars to be used at his
discretion, to facilitate his acquisition of Cuba.11 Facilitate how
? Perhaps it might be imprudent to tell.
Add to all this, the fact (as yet
unexplained) that one of the largest naval armaments which ever sailed from our
coast is now operating in South America, ostensibly against a poor little
republic far up the Plate River,12 to settle some little quarrel
between the two Presidents.13 If Congress had been polite enough to
grant the President's demand of the sword and the purse against Mexico, Central
America and Cuba, this navy, its duty done at the south, might be made, on its
way home, to arrive in the Gulf very opportunely, to aid the "
Commander-in-Chief " in the acquisition of some very valuable territory.
I allude to these facts with no malice
against Mr. Buchanan, but as evidences of the dangerous change which is now obviously
sought to be made in the practical working of the Government — the
concentration of power in the hands of the President, and the dangerous policy,
now almost established, of looking abroad for temporary glory and
aggrandizement, instead of looking at home, for all the purposes of good
government — peaceable, moderate, economical, protecting all interests alike,
and by a fixed policy, calling into safe exercise all the talents and industry
of our people, and thus steadily advancing our country in everything which can
make a nation great, happy, and permanent.
The rapid increase of the Public
Expenditures (and that, too, under the management of statesmen professing to be
peculiarly economical) is an alarming sign of corruption and decay.
That increase bears no fair proportion
to the growth and expansion of the country, but looks rather like wanton waste
or criminal negligence. The ordinary objects of great expense are not
materially augmented — the Army and Navy remain on a low peace establishment— the
military defenses are little, if at all, enlarged — the improvement of Harbors,
Lakes and Rivers is abandoned, and the Pacific Railroad is not only not begun
but its very location is scrambled for by angry sections, which succeed in
nothing but mutual defeat. In short, the money to an enormous amount (I am told
at the rate of $80,000,000 to $100,000,000 a year) is gone, and we have little
or nothing to show for it. In profound peace with foreign nations, and
surrounded with the proofs of National growth and individual prosperity, the
Treasury, by less than two years of mismanagement, is made bankrupt, and the
Government itself is living from hand to mouth, on bills of credit and borrowed
money!
This humiliating state of things could
hardly happen if men in power were both honest and wise. The Democratic
economists in Congress confess that they have recklessly wasted the Public
Revenue; they confess it by refusing to raise the Tariff to meet the present
exigency, and by insisting that they can replenish the exhausted Treasury and
support the Government, in credit and efficiency, by simply striking off their
former extravagances.
An illustrious predecessor of the
President is reported to have declared "that those who live on borrowed
money ought to break." I do not concur in that harsh saying; yet I am
clearly of opinion that the Government, in common prudence (to say nothing of
pride and dignity), ought to reserve its credit for great transactions and
unforeseen emergencies. In common times of peace, it ought always to have an
established revenue, equal, at least, to its current expenses. And that revenue
ought to be so levied as to foster and protect the Industry of the country
employed in our most necessary and important manufactures.
Gentlemen, I cannot touch upon all the
topics alluded to in your letter and resolution. I ought rather to beg your
pardon for the prolixity of this answer. I speak for no party, because the only
party I ever belonged to has ceased to exist as an organized and militant body.
And I speak for no man but myself.
I am fully aware that my opinions and
views of public policy are of no importance to anybody but me, and there is
good reason to fear that some of them are so antiquated and out of fashion as
to make it very improbable that they will ever again be put to the test of
actual practice.
Most
respectfully,
EDWARD
BATES.
The Republican
publishes the letter to gratify the curiosity of my numerous friends throughout
the country, but gives no opinion, neither praise nor censure.
The Evening News is
rapturous in its applause, and glorifies me without measure or moderation.
The New York City
papers eagerly published the letter, with few editorial comments, for the most
part with moderate praise — I have seen only the Tribune (Greel[e]y's14)
The Times (Raymond's15) the Express (Brooks'16) and the
Herald (Bennett's17)[.]
I expected a sour
reception from the Republican papers — Especially the Tribune and Times — on
account of my openly opposing the further agitation of the Negro question. The
Tribune,18 tho' well pleased with the rest of the letter, is clearly
not well pleased with that part, but makes a distinction in my favor, between
the two kinds of opposition to aggitation [sic] — one (with which he charges
Hiram Ketchum19) he characterises as subserviency to the 'Slave
power' and a tacit aid to their efforts to propagate and extend slavery. The
other (which he supposes may be my position) a desire to stop the slavery
aggitation [sic], with a view to more national questions, but with a readiness
to resist the efforts of the Southern propagandists in their efforts to spread
slavery where we do not find it.
The letter I think,
is well written and effective. But some of my friends, I am sure, think me
imprudent, in coming out so plainly upon the subjects treated of. I am not so
timid, perhaps not so prudent as they — Upon the whole, the letter has been
most favorably received in St Louis.
_______________
1 This present version of the letter is that
of the New York Tribune of April 16, 1859.
2 This was the substance of the Ostend
Manifesto which Buchanan as Minister to Great Britain had joined Ministers John
Y. Mason and Pierre Soulé in promulgating. As Secretary of State under
President Polk, Buchanan had tried to buy Cuba. In his second, third, and
fourth annual messages he urged Congress to cooperate with him in securing it
by negotiation.
3 Robert Toombs of Georgia: Whig state
legislator, 1837-1840, 1841-1844 ; states' rights Democratic congressman,
1845-1853 ; U. S. senator, 1853-1861. He was later a leader in the Georgia
Secession Convention, and congressman, brigadier-general, and secretary of
State under the Confederacy.
4 January, 1859, Senate Reports, 35 Cong., 2
Sess., ser. no. 994, doc. no. 351. The bill purposed to appropriate $30,000,000
"to facilitate the acquisition of Cuba by negotiation." Senator
Slidell (infra, Nov. 24, 1859, note 89) introduced it on January 10. 1859
(Cong. Globe, 35 Cong., 2 Sess., 277) ; it was reported favorably by the
Committee on Foreign Relations of which he was chairman, on January 24, 1859
(ibid., 35 Cong., 2 Sess., 538) ; it was debated at great length on January 24,
February 9-10, February 15—17, February 21, and February 25 (ibid., 35 Cong., 2
Sess., 538-544, 904-909, 934-940, 960968, 1038, Appendix [155-169], 1058-1063,
1079-1087, 1179-1192, 1326-1363) ; but because of opposition, it was withdrawn
on February 26 (ibid., 35 Cong., 2 Sess., 13S51387). At the next session, on
December 8, 1859, Senator Slidell reintroduced this bill (ibid., 36 Cong., 1
Sess., 53), had it referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations on December
21 (ibid., 36 Cong., 1 Sess., 199), reported it out favorably to the Senate on
May 30, 1860, but because of opposition did not push it (ibid., 36 Cong., 1
Sess., 2456). He promised to call it up again at the next session, but when
that time arrived was too busy seceding to bother about Cuba.
5 On January 24, Toombs had said, "Cuba
has fine ports, and with her acquisition, we can make first the Gulf of Mexico,
and then the Caribbean Sea, a mare clausum. Probably younger men than you or I
will live to see the day when no flag shall float there except by permission of
the United States of America . . . that development, that progress throughout
the tropics [is] the true, fixed unalterable policy of the nation." Ibid.,
35 Cong., 2 Sess., 543.
6 I. e., as far as Venezuela.
7 Bitterness over the slavery question had
reached the point of armed conflict, raids, and murder in Kansas in 1855-1856,
and Utah was at this time subject to frequent Indian raids. It was in 1859,
too, that the Republicans tried to prohibit polygamy in Utah and the Democrats
succeeded, probably with slavery in other territories in mind, in preventing
Congressional legislation on the subject.
8 Dec. 6, 1858, James D. Richardson, Messages
and Papers of the Presidents, V, 514. See infra, Feb. 15, 1860.
9 J. D. Richardson, op. cit., V, 516_517.
10 Supra, April 20, 1859, note 2.
11 J. D. Richardson, op. cit., V, 508-511.
12 Rio de La Plata in South America.
13 An expedition of some 19 ships, 200 guns,
and 2.500 men which was sent against Paraguay because a vessel of that nation
had fired upon the United States steamer Water Witch. A mere show of force
sufficed to secure both an apology and an indemnity on February 10, 1859. The
President of Argentina was so interested and so pleased that he presented the
commander with a sword.
14 Infra, Feb. 2, 1860, note 47.
15 Infra, Feb. 4, 1860, note 61.
16 Infra, Sept. 20, 1860, note 12.
17 James Gordon Bennett: journalist in Boston,
New York, and Charleston; then Washington correspondent; next editor of the New
York Courier and Enquirer, 1829-1832, and of the Pennsylvanian, 1832-1833 ; and
finally editor-owner of the New York Herald, 18351867. He made the Herald one
of the most enterprising and spectacular of papers and kept it independent. He
had supported Taylor (Whig) in 1848, Pierce (Democrat) in 1852, Fr6mont
(Republican) in 1856, and was to support Douglas against Lincoln in 1860 and
Lincoln against McClellan in 1864, Johnson against the Radicals in 1865-1866
and the Radicals against Johnson in 1866-1867. At the outbreak of the Civil
War, Bennett wished to let the Southern States go in peace, but when war came
he supported it.
18 For editorial comment see the New York
Tribune, April 16, 1859.
19 Chairman of the Whig General Committee of
New York City. Bates originally sent his letter to Ketchum in February, but it
disappeared and he had to recopy it out of his letter-book and resend it for
publication. Ibid., April 16, 1859. Ketchum represented moderate anti-Seward
opinion in New York, was a delegate to the National Union Convention in
Baltimore, but opposed the formation of a third party. He promised to support
Mr. Bates if he were nominated by the Republicans.
SOURCE: Howard K.
Beale, Editor, Annual Report of The American
Historical Association For The Year 1930, Vol. 4, The Diary Of Edward Bates,
pp. 1-10
