The Winning Man—Abraham Lincoln.

In presenting ABRAHAM LINCOLN to the National Republican Convention, as a candidate for the Presidency, were are actuated not by our great love and esteem for the man, by any open or secret hostility to any other of the eminent gentlemen named for that high office, nor by a feeling of State pride or Western sectionalism, but by a profound and well matured conviction that his unexceptionable record, his position between the extremes of opinion in the party, his spotless character as a citizen and his acknowledge ability as a statesman, will, in the approaching canvass, give him an advantage before the people which no other candidate can claim. We are not disposed to deny that Mr. SEWARD, is the question of availability being set aside, the first choice of perhaps a majority of the rank and file of the party; that Gen. CAMERON has claims upon Pennsylvania which his friends will not willingly have overlooked; that the statesman like qualities, inflexible honesty and marked executive ability of SALMON P. CHASE entitle him to a high place in Republican esteem; that Mr. BATES’ pure life and noble aims justly command the confidence of troops of friends; that the chivalric WADE has extorted the admiration of the North and West; that FESSENDEN, for his gallant service but be gratefully remembers; and that JOHN McLEAN, whose life is without a stain and whose love of country has never been challenged, must be remembered as a strong and unexceptional man. But Illinois claims that Mr. LINCOLN, though without the ripe experience of SEWARD, the age and maturity of BATES and McLEAN, or the fire of FESSENDEN and WADE, has the rare and happy combination of qualities which, as a candidate, enables him to outrank either.

I. By his own motion, he is not a candidate. He has never sought, directly or indirectly, for the first or second place on the ticket. The movement in his favor is spontaneous. It has sprung up suddenly and with great strength, its roots being in the conviction that he is the man to reconcile all difference in our ranks, to conciliate all the now jarring elements, and to lead forward to certain victory. Having never entered into the field, he has put forth no personal effort for success, and he has never made, even by implication, a pledge of any sort by which his action, if he is President, will be influenced for any man, any measure, any policy. He will enter upon the contest with no clogs, no embarrassment; and this fact is a guaranty of a glorious triumph.

II. In all the fundamentals of Republicanism, he is radical up to the limit to which the party, with due respect for the rights of the South, proposes to go. But nature has given him that wise conservatism which has made his action and his expressed opinions so conform to the most mature sentiment of the country on the question of slavery, that no living man can put his finger on one of his speeches or any one of his public acts as a State legislator or as a member of Congress, to which valid objection can be raised. His avoidance of extremes has not been the result of ambition which measures words or regulates acts but the natural consequence of an equable nature and in mental constitution that is never off its balance. While no one doubts the strength of his attachments to the Republican cause, or doubts that he is a representative man, all who know him see that he occupies the happy mean between that alleged radicalism which binds the older Anti-Slavery men to Mr. Seward, and that conservatism which dictates the support of Judge Bates. Seward men, Bates men, Cameron men and Chase men can all accept him as their second choice, and be sure that in him they have the nearest approach to what they most admire in their respective favorites, which any possible compromise will enable them to obtain.

III. Mr. LINCOLN has no new record to make. Originally a Whig, though early a recruit of the great Republican party, he has nothing to explain for the satisfaction of New Jersey, Pennsylvania or the West. His opinions and votes on the Tariff will be acceptable to all sections except the extreme South, where Republicanism expects no support. Committed within proper limitations set up by economy and constitutional obligation to the improvement of rivers and harbors, to that most beneficent measure, the Homestead bill, and to the speedy construction of the Pacific Railroad, he need write no letters to soften down old asperities, growing out of these questions which must inevitably play their part in the canvas before us. He is all that Pennsylvania and the West have a right to demand.

IV. He is a Southern man by birth and education, who has never departed from the principles which he learned from the statesmen of the period in which he first saw the light. A Kentuckian, animated by the hopes that bring the Kentucky delegation here, a Western man, to whom sectionalism is unknown, he is that candidate around whom all opponents of the extension of Human Slavery, North and South, can rally.

V. Mr. LINCOLN is a man of the people. For his position, he is not indebted to family influence, the partiality of friends or the arts of the politician. All his early life a laborer in the field, in the saw-mill, as a boatman on the Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi, as a farmer in Illinois, he has that sympathy with the men who toil and vote that will make him strong. Later a valiant soldier in the Black Hawk war, a student in a law office, bonding his great powers to overcome the defects of early training; then a legislator, and at last a brilliant advocate, in the highest courts, and a popular leader in the great movement of the age, there is enough of romance and poetry in life to fill all the land with shouting and song. Honest Old Abe! Himself an outgrowth of free institutions, he would die in the effort to preserve to others, unimpaired, the inestimable blessings by which he has been made a man.

VI. Without a stain of Know-Nothingism on his skirts, he is acceptable to the mass of the American party who, this year, will be compelled to choose between the candidate of Chicago and the nominee of Baltimore. The experience of two years has proved their error and his wisdom. They want the chance to retrieve the blunders of the past. Endeared by his manly defence of the principles of the Declaration of Independence to the citizen of foreign birth, he could command the warm support of every one of them from whom, in any contingency, a Republican vote can be expected.

VII. Mr. LINCOLN is an honest man. We know that the adage “Praise overmuch is censure in disguise” is true; and we know, too, that it is the disgrace of the age that in the popular mind, politics and chicane, office and faithlessness go hand in hand. We run great risk then in saying of Mr. Lincoln what truth inexorably demands,—that in his life of 51 years, there is no act of a public or private character, of which his most malignant enemy can say “this is dishonest,” “this is mean.” With his record, partizanship [sic] has done its worst and the result we have stated. His escutcheon is without a blemish.

VIII. After saying so much, we need not add that Mr. LINCOLN can be elected, if placed before the people with the approbation of the Convention to meet tomorrow. In New England, where Republicanism pure and simple is demanded, and where he has lately electrified the people by his eloquence, his name would be a tower of strength. New York who clings with an ardent embrace to that great statesman, her first choice, would not refuse to adopt Mr. LINCOLN as a standard bearer worthy of the holy cause. Pennsylvania, satisfied with his views in regard to the present necessity of fostering domestic interests, and the constitutional moderation of his opinions upon slavery, would come heartily into his support.

The West is the child of the East, and aside from her local pride in one of the noblest of her sons, she would not fail by her plaudits to exalt and intensify the enthusiasm which the nomination of Honest Old Abe would be sure to excite. The West has no rivalry with the East except in the patriotic endeavor to do the most for the Republican cause. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin desire no triumph in which the East does not share—no victory over which the East may not honestly exult. In a contest for Lincoln, they will fight with zeal and hope that has never before animated the Republican hosts.

We present our candidate, then, not as the rival of this man or that, not because the West has claims which she must urge; not because of a distinctive policy which she would see enforced; not because he is the first choice of a majority; but because he is that honest man, that representative Republican, that people’s candidate, whose life, position, record, are so many guarantys [sic] of success—because he is that patriot in whose hands the interests of the government may be safely confided. Nominated, he would, we believe, be triumphantly elected; but if another, in the wisdom of the Convention, is preferred we can pledge him to labor, as an honest and effective as any that he ever done for himself, for the man of the Convention’s choice.

SOURCE: “President Making,” The Press and Tribune, Chicago, Illinois, Tuesday, May 15, 1860, p. 2, col. 1-2

No Union With Slaveholders!

KISSING THE CHAIN!

Shall Massachusetts stand erect no longer,

But stoop in chains upon her downward way,

Thicker to gather on her limbs, and stronger,

Day after day?’

In our last number, we gave a brief account of the ridiculous, spasmodic and inconsistent action of the House of Representatives of this State on the presentation of petitions, asking for a Convention of the People to devise measures for a peaceable secession of Massachusetts from the Union, for the intolerable grievances there in set forth; first, how those petitions were precipitately laid on the table by an overwhelming majority, and thus denied the courtesy of a reference; and how, the Whigs taking the alarm on seeing Mr. BOUTWELL (the ostensible leader of the Democratic party in the House) rise on his seat to object to such a course of action as a virtual denial of the right of petition, that vote was almost instantaneously reconsidered, and the petitions were referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. What has since transpired, up to the time our paper goes to press, we proceed to inform our readers.

On Friday last, the Committee with hot haste (forty-eight hours after receiving the petitions) reported that the petitioners have leave to withdraw. Thus no time was afforded for the presentation of a large number of similar petitions still circulating for signatures, and no opportunity was given the petitioners to be heard in behalf of the object prayed for. Hitherto, for several years past, petitions of this nature have been regularly sent to the Legislature, and in every instance received without hesitancy, duly referred, deliberately considered, and repeatedly supported by counsel before the Committee, even the hall of the House of Representatives being granted on several occasions for a hearing. By the rules of the House, the report of the present Committee was laid over for that day; but, as if anxious to make a special display of ‘patriotism,’ and to exonerate the Free Soil movement from every suspicion of ‘fanaticism,’ Mr. Wilson, of Natick, the proprietor of the Boston Republican, moved that the rules be suspended, and that the vote on the report of the Committee be taken by yeas and nays, that no time be lost to signify to the country and the world where Massachusetts stands in regard to this ‘glorious Union’!! The motion prevailed, and the report was accepted—Yeas, ALL except 1—Mr. TOLMAN, (Free Soiler,) of Worcester. In common with a multitude of others, we are astonished and indignant at the conduct of Mr. WILSON in this matter—of one who has displayed, on so many occasions in the House, both as a Whig and as a Free Soiler, a manly front on the subject of slavery, and at all times received at the hands of the abolitionists his full share of the credit. What his motive was for thus precipitating action, we leave him to explain. If it was with any hope of personal or party advantage, he will assuredly find that he has ‘reckoned without his host.’ If, in his conscience, he really believes that an active and willing support of the Union involves nothing of criminality—if he believes that the Union is promotive of liberty and equality, instead of chains and slavery—why then we could not reasonably expect that he would sanction a movement for its dissolution. Nevertheless, it is none the less extraordinary—especially in view of all he has said and done respecting the aggressions of the Slave Power—that he should be eager to outstrip both Whig and Democrat in his zeal to do an act which he knew would give special pleasure to the Southern brokers in the trade of blood, and gain nothing for Massachusetts but there fresh contempt for her disgusting servility.

One man—only one man of the two hundred and fifty who voted—was found willing or able to stand erect in the HOUSE on a question of justice, to say nothing of liberty; and while a single member retains his manhood, we will not despair of the old Bay State! Mr. TOLMAN, by his solitary vote, had displayed an independence as rare as it is commendable, and a fearlessness of consequences which indicates the man of integrity immeasurably above the party politician. Let the time-serving sneer at him, and the vile and malignant abuse him; it shall only place in stronger contrast his worth and their baseness. Of course, we are not commending him as a disunionist—for he is not, otherwise he would not be found in the Legislature; but only for his sense of justice, and of what constitutes fair treatment. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he objected to its hasty report as equally unwise and unnecessary,—the subject presented for their consideration being one of the gravest character and greatest solemnity, justifying a patient hearing in its elucidation. He dissented not from the conclusion of the report, that the petitioners have to withdraw their petitions, but only from the haste with which intentionally made, so to give no opportunity to their signers to vindicate their course. This is all he meant to imply in giving his negative in the House; and for this he deserves the approbation of all decent, fair-minded, honorable men. He is no trading politician, but a working-man, a mechanic, of great integrity of character and lively conscientiousness, and must respected by those who know him. As a proof of his moral firmness, it deserves to be stated to his credit, in this connection, that he refused some profitable offers to furnish government wagons to be used in the Mexican war, regarding that war as he did as most wicked and inexcusable. It is so rare a thing for conscience to be stronger than the love of gain, that every instance like this is an oasis in the desert. It is evident that Mr. Tolman is not a man to be sneered or frowned down. In the House, he stood actually in the majority, for he was in the right and the right is with God, who is more than multitudinous.

Mr. BOUTWELL, in contending for a reference of the petitions, as due to a just regard for the right of petition, pursued a course for which we intended to accord him our thanks and all due credit; but his subsequent behavior has vitiated an otherwise meritorious act. On Tuesday, as one of the committee, we requested him to present to the House sundry petitions from Boston and other places, numerously and respectably signed, on the subject of disunion, similar to those already presented; and also a remonstrance signed by FRANCIS JACKSON and others against the precipitate action of the Committee and the House on the petitions, and asking for a hearing as a matter of Justice. Much to our surprise, but more to his own discredit, Mr. BOUTWELL positively declined complying with the request! On the question of the Union he was eminently patriotic—very conscientious; he could never think, for one moment, of presenting such petitions. ‘But is it a matter of conscience, or a rule of action with you,’ we asked, ‘never to present a petition, except you can give it your sanction?’ He could not say it was. ‘Why, then, the present refusal? Do you believe there is any one, either in this Commonwealth or out of it, who would suppose that you were in favor of a dissolution of the Union merely from the fact of your presenting these petitions?’ He did not suppose there was. ‘you can make as many disclaimers as you may think proper; to these we do not object; these we are prepared to expect; but we still desire these petitions and this remonstrance to be laid before the House.’ He should prefer that some other person would present them. ‘But the same excuse that you make might be made by every other member; and where then would be the right of petition? If a memorial relating to the liberty of the people of Massachusetts, and to the millions in this country who are groaning in bondage, couched in respectful and solemn phraseology, is to be denied a presentation, so may all others of an inferior nature if the petitions are in error as to the form or substance of their request, is it not obviously the true way to allay popular agitation for the Legislature to show wherein they err?’ He had no doubt that the dissolution of the Union would be the abolition of slavery; but he went for the Union as the lesser of two evils! Humane man—upright moralist—profound logician! To cease ‘striking hands with thieves and consenting with adulterers’—to refuse any longer to join in the enslavement of three millions of the people of this country—would certainly give liberty to the oppressed, and put an end to all the woes and horrors of the slave system, but it would be injurious to ourselves!! How disinterested the action, how exact the calculation! See what folly it is to obey God by remembering them that are in bonds as bound with them, and loving our neighbors as ourselves! See how safe, profitable and. expedient it is to commit sin, perpetrate robbery, and exercise tyranny, on a gigantic sale! ‘The end sanctifies the means—I am for doing evil that good may come’—is the moral philosophy of this leader of the Democratic party.

Mr. BOUTWELL may reconcile—if he can—the consistency of his acts in refusing to present a disunion petition to the House; and then, after its presentation by other hands, protesting against its being summarily laid upon the table as a virtual denial of the right of petition, and advocating its reference to the Judiciary Committee. We are unable to reconcile discrepancies so glaring.

We admonished him—as we would admonish all politicians—that this great and solemn question is not to be dodged, crowded down, or shuffled out of sight, with impunity—that those who are pressing it are not lacking in intelligence or spirit, neither are they to be discouraged by defeat or intimidated by censure—that it is the religious element, it its purest and most disinterested manifestation, by which they are impelled—a dread of sin, a hatred of tyranny, a sacred love of liberty, and a sentiment of obedience to God, overriding all party ties and all constitutional requirements—and therefore not to be trifled with.

On Wednesday forenoon, Mr. TOLMAN presented the remonstrance of Francis Jackson and others, against the action of the House on Friday last, as follows:

To the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

The undersigned, petitioners ‘for a Convention of the People of this Commonwealth to devise measures for a peaceful Secession of Massachusetts from the Union,’ respectfully ask for a reconsideration of the vote of the House, on Friday last, by which those petitioners had leave to withdraw their petition—basing their request and their remonstrance against the action of the house on the following grounds:—

1. That the petitioners had no opportunity to be heard before your Committee in support of the object prayed for; the action both of the Committee and the House manifesting, in the judgment of the undersigned, precipitancy, and being without any good precedent.

2. That if a patient hearing is cheerfully conceded to petitions touching matters of the smallest pecuniary interest, much more does the same, of right, belong to questions involving the welfare, honor and liberty of millions.

3. That while your petitioners are subjected, by the Constitution and laws of the United States, and therefore of this Commonwealth, to heavy fines for obeying the law of God, and refusing to deliver up the fugitive slave, or giving him aid and protection, they feel that they have a right to be heard in asking to be relieved from such immoral obligations.

4. That while citizens of this Commonwealth, on visiting Southern States, are seized, thrust into privation, condemned to work with felons in the chain-gain, and frequently sold on the auction block as slaves;—and while the governments both of the United States and of the Southern States have refused, or made it penal, to attempt a remedy—and while this Commonwealth has given up all effort to vindicate the rights of its citizens as hopeless and impracticable, under the present Union—it is manifestly the duty of the Commonwealth, as a Sovereign State, to devise some other measure for the redress and prevention of so grievous a wrong, which your petitioners are profoundly convinced can be reached only by a secession from the present union.

5. That while the matter touched on in said petitions has attracted so much attention, and awakened so deep an interest in all parts of the country, it is clearly the duty of the legislature, in the opinion of the undersigned, either to hear the reasons on which the petitioners found their request, or, at least, to make a plain statement of the petitioners’ mistake as to the form or substance of the remedy prayed for.

6. That on a subject so momentous, the precipitate rejection of a petition, without reason given therefore, or opportunity offered to the petitioners to support their request, is a virtual denial of the right of petition.

FRANCIS JACKSON,

WM. LLOYD GARRISON,

EDMUND QUINCY,

WENDELL PHILLIPS,

WM. I. BOWDITCH,

JOHN ROGERS,

EDMUND JACKSON,

CHARLES F. HOVEY,

CHARLES K. WHIPPLE,

SAMUEL MAY, JR.,

JOHN M. SPEAR,

ROBERT F. WOLLCUT,

BOURNE SPOONER.

Mr. Tolman made a few sensible remarks, defining his own position, and expressing his conviction that the petitioners had not been fairly treated. He therefore moved that the remonstrance he referred to the Committee of the Judiciary.

Mr. Codman, of Boston, moved that the remonstrants have leave to withdraw their remonstrance; and on this the yeas and nays were ordered—41 to 125.

Mr. Earle, of Worcester, moved to refer the remonstrance to the Special committee on Slavery, and supported his motion in some earnest and forcible remarks. A long debate ensued—Messrs. Earle and Tolman, Griswold of Greenfield, Branning of Tyringham, and Wilson of Natick, supporting the commitment, and Messrs. Codman, Schouler and Kimball of Boston, Hoar of Concord, and Smith of Enfield, (the last named an orthodox deacon, in appearance ‘a sleek oily man of God,’) opposing it.

Mr. Williams, of Taunton, demanded the previous question, which was ordered, thus cutting off the motion to commit.

The yeas and nays were then taken on Mr. Codman’s motion to give the remonstrants leave to withdraw, and the motion was carried—yeas 192, nays 63—Mr. Boutwell, of Groton, voting in the affirmative.

It is due to Mr. Wilson of Natick, to say that his course on this occasion was manly, explicit and commendable. In explanation of his vote on Friday, he said he was not aware that the petitioners desired a hearing: if he had been, he would not have voted that they should have leave to withdraw their petitions until they had been fully and fairly heard. We accept the explanation, and so would mitigate the severity of our censure; at the same time wondering that he should have supposed that he should have been the first to hasten the action of the House on this subject. Well, this is our defence—

‘Though we break our fathers’ promise, we have nobler duties first:

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst!

Man is more than Constitutions—better rot beneath the sod,

Than be true to Church and state while we are doubly false to God!’

SOURCE: “No Union With Slaveholders!” The Liberator, Boston, Massachusetts, Friday, February 22, 1850, p. 2, cols. 5-6

Congressman Horace Mann to George Combe, January 6, 1851

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6, 1851.

MY DEAR MR. COMBE, — . . . I have nothing to write on political subjects that can afford any gratification to a humanity-loving man. In 1848, there was a great inflowing of the sentiment of liberty, both in Europe and in this country. You have already experienced the ebbing of that tide in Europe, and it has receded as much relatively in this hemisphere as in yours. Notwithstanding the inherent and radical wickedness of some of the compromise measures, as they were called, yet the most strenuous efforts are making by the Administration to force the Whig party to their adoption and support. It is a concerted movement between those who are ready to sacrifice liberty for office and those who are ready to make the same sacrifice for money. From the day of Mr. Webster's open treachery and apostasy (if indeed he had political virtue enough to be an apostate), he has been urging the idea upon New England Whigs, that, if they could give up freedom, they might have a tariff. This has wrought numberless conversions among those who think it a sin not to be rich. They say in their hearts, "The South wants cotton to sell, and must have negroes to produce it; we want cotton to manufacture, and so we must have negroes to raise it: slavery is equally indispensable to us both." So both are combining to uphold it. Before Texas was annexed, the whole Democratic party at the North denounced it. As soon as that was done, they wheeled round like a company of well-drilled soldiers at the word of command, and supported it. I fear the great body of the Whig party will do no better as regards these infamous proslavery measures. Party allegiance here has very much the effect of loyalty with you. It has the power to change the nature of right and wrong. I profess to belong to none of the parties. I have given in my adherence to certain great principles; and by them I stand, not only in independence, but in defiance of parties. I should like to send you a copy of my letters. I will do so as soon as I can find an opportunity. . . .

SOURCE: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 346

Senator Henry Clay to James Harlan, January 26, 1849

NEW ORLEANS, January 26, 1849.

MY DEAR SIR,—I met with an accidental but violent fall a week ago, in carelessly descending a flight of stairs, to receive a gentleman who bore me a letter of introduction, and I got terribly bruised. I broke no bones, but it disabled me, for the present, from walking without assistance, and almost from writing.

I received yesterday your favor of the 12th, and to-day that of the 14th. I regret extremely that the use of my name, in connection with the office of Senator, should have created any division among the Whigs, or excited any dissatisfaction with any one. God knows that I have no personal desire to return to that body, nor any private or ambitious purposes to promote by resuming a seat in it. I expressed to you and to other friends, at the period of my departure from home, the exact state of my feelings, when I declared that I could not reconcile it to my feelings to become a formal or an avowed candidate; and that if the General Assembly had any other person in view, I did not wish to interfere with him. I added that, if, nevertheless, the Legislature thought proper to require my services in the Senate, deference to their will, a sense of public duty, and the hope of doing some good, would prompt me to accept the office.

These views are unchanged. According to them, it follows that I have no desire to have my name pressed upon the General Assembly, and I hope that it will not be presented, unless it is manifestly the free and voluntary wish of a majority of that body. It would be a great mortification to me to be thought to be solicitous for that office, and to be supposed to be seeking it from the reluctant grant of the Legislature. I hope that my friends will act in consonance with the state of my feelings, and not suffer my name to be used but on the conditions which I have stated.

SOURCE: Calvin Colton, Editor, The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay, p. 583-4

Senator Henry Clay to Thomas B. Stevenson, January 31, 1849

NEW ORLEANS, January 31, 1849.

MY DEAR SIR,—The breaking out of the cholera here prevented my meeting General Taylor in this city, as had been expected. I met him at Baton Rouge, but only long enough to exchange friendly salutations, without any opportunity to converse on public affairs.

About a fortnight ago I met with a terrible accidental fall, which, although fortunately I broke no bones, has for the present confined me to my lodgings, disabled me from walking, and almost from writing. To that cause is owing my not having earlier acknowledged the receipt of your friendly letter of the 25th ultimo.

I suppose that I shall be elected to the Senate by the General Assembly of Kentucky, in which case I shall hardly feel myself at liberty to decline, conferred as the office will be without any solicitation from me, without my being a candidate, and with the knowledge of a strong disinclination on my part to return to that body. Deference to the will of the General Assembly, a sense of duty, and the possibility of my being able to do some good, overcome my repugnance. If I go to Washington, it will be with an anxious desire that I shall be able to support the measures of the new Administration, in consequence of their conformity with Whig policy.

There seems to be yet some slight prospect of a settlement at Washington of the Free Soil question; but we shall see.

The cholera has nearly entirely disappeared from this city.

SOURCE: Calvin Colton, Editor, The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay, p. 584

Diary of Edward Bates: April 20, 1859

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

Edward Bates to the Whig Committee of New York, February 24, 1859

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.

_______________

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.

SOURCE: Howard K. Beale, Editor, Annual Report of The American Historical Association For The Year 1930, Vol. 4, The Diary Of Edward Bates, pp. 1-9