Congressman Horace Mann, January 7, 1850

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7, 1850.

Mr. A. has infinitely slender cause to praise Mr. Cobb for putting Mr. Giddings on the Committee on Territories, and Mr. Allen on the District Committee, and Mr. King on the Judiciary; for he has so buried them up with Southern Democrats, that they cannot get their heads high up enough to breathe. With such a committee as Mr. Winthrop would have appointed, we should have met with no obstacles in getting our measures before the country and the House. Now we shall encounter the most serious of obstacles at every step; and, if it is possible for skill or power to bar out all antislavery measures, it will be done.

There is no end to the perversions of partisans. A partisan cannot be an honest man, whether he be a political or a religious partisan. How necessary it is to cultivate the seeds of truth in the young! Nothing can be, or can approach to be, a substitute for it. So of the great principle, that it is for the interest of every man to be a true man, and that by no possibility can perversion or error be useful. How the world needs to be educated!

Does H. get exact and complete ideas of things? Can he reproduce what you teach him? This is an all-important part of teaching. Has a lesson been so learned that the pupil can restate it in words, or exemplify it in act, or draw it on blackboards, &c.? This is the test to which learners should be early subjected. I am very glad about the music. We pity Laura Bridgeman for the privation of her physical powers; but how many of us need to be pitied for the privation of faculties whose absence deforms just as much as a loss of the senses! One of these is music.

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 285

Congressman Horace Mann, January 11, 1850

We have been going the same rounds, in attempting to choose a Clerk, which occupied us three weeks before we chose a Speaker. It is most irksome business, and cuts away all the ties that bind me to office.

We have just this minute elected a Clerk from Tennessee. He is a Southerner, but as unobjectionable as any Southerner can be. He does not hold slaves; but he was once a member of Congress, and voted with the slave-party through and through. I have not voted for him at all, though he is a Whig. We had an exciting time at the close of the voting, and before the vote was declared. The Southern Democrats, seeing how near he was to being elected, came over to him one after another, and at last gave him just enough. That is the way. They are always more true to slavery than to Democracy. It is a good result; but I am rejoiced that I did not help to bring it about. During the whole voting, the Northern Whigs came round me, and some of our Massachusetts men too, and urged and besought me to change my vote. At one moment, when only one more vote was wanted, forty men turned bescechingly to my seat. I shook my head at them all; and at that moment a Southern man on the other side of the House jumped up, and changed his vote. This settled it.

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 286-7

Henry R. Jackson* to Howell Cobb, June 21, 1848

Savannah [ga.], 21st June, 1848.

My Dear Cousin, Since the reception of your last letter I have been so constantly occupied with some vexatious law business which has kept me on the run in Savannah and taken me up into the country, that I have actually been unable to find the letter to reply to it. I have not said so much in opposition to the Calhoun clique as was my disposition, because I did not think it altogether a prudent course. With reference to those papers of the Dem. party in Georgia that had advocated the Florida and Alabama resolution, I have not sought a collision, either with the Constitutionalist or the Telegraph, because I thought the probabilities strong that both of these papers, if let alone, would eventually come out warmly for Cass, should he be the nominee of the Convention. I did not think that angry collision would operate beneficially for the party. Therefore I contented myself with simply expressing my own views fully and firmly. As events have proved, both the Constitutionalist and Telegraph are out for Cass, and are consequently thrown into opposition themselves to the Calhoun, Yancey and Charleston Mercury clique. I think it better that this should be so than that they should have been excited into animosity by a general onslaught upon them on the part of the other presses of the State.

But in the name of all that is rational, what induced the Georgia delegates in the national convention to vote for that resolution of Yancey's¹ After having voted for the nomination of Cass, how could they vote for the resolution (a pack of nonsense in itself) with the interpretation put upon it by Yancey himself? Did they not perceive that it would operate prejudicially to us in Georgia? And how could they at any rate vote for such outrageous nonsense?

My views always have coincided with yours upon this subject. I am as clear as daylight in my ideas upon it. Gen. Cass is right throughout. He has suggested the only ground upon which a Southern man can stand, and I am convinced that reflection will bring all Southern Democrats (not disposed to quit the party at any rate) to his zealous support . . .

_______________

* A lawyer, editor, and Democratic politician of Savannah, Ga., judge of the superior court of Georgia (eastern circuit), 1849-1853, brigadier-general in the Confederate army.

¹ Yancey had offered the following as an amendment to the report of the committee on resolutions at the Baltimore convention: “Resolved, That the doctrine of non-interference with the rights of property of any portion of this confederation, be it In the States or in the Territories, by any other than the parties interested In them. is the true republican doctrine recognized by this body.” This resolution was defeated, 246 to 38.

SOURCE: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Editor, The Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1911, Volume 2: The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, p. 110-1