The Great Conspiracy - John Alexander Logan

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of the privileges, immunities and rights of citizenship which pertain, according to that decision, only to the White man," Mr. Douglas also took exception thus: "I am free to say to you that in my opinion this Government of ours is founded on the White basis. It was made by the White man for the benefit of the White man, to be administered by White men, in such manner as they should determine. It is also true that a Negro, an Indian, or any other man of inferior race to a White man, should be permitted to enjoy, and humanity requires that he should have, all the rights, privileges, and immunities which he is capable of exercising consistent with the safety of society. * * * But you may ask me what are these rights and these privileges? My answer is, that each State must decide for itself the nature and extent of these rights. * * * Without indorsing the wisdom of that decision, I assert that Virginia has the same power by virtue of her sovereignty to protect Slavery within her limits, as Illinois has to banish it forever from our own borders. I assert the right of each State to decide for itself on all these questions, and I do not subscribe to the doctrine of my friend, Mr. Lincoln, that uniformity is either desirable or possible. I do not acknowledge that the States must all be Free or must all be Slave. I do not acknowledge that the Negro must have civil and political rights everywhere or nowhere. * * * I do not acknowledge any of these doctrines of uniformity in the local and domestic regulations in the different States. * * * Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare upon the Supreme Court of the United States because of their judicial decision in the Dred Scott case. I yield obedience to the decisions in that Court—to the final determination of the highest judicial tribunal known to our Constitution. He objects to the Dred Scott decision because it does not put the Negro in the possession of the rights of citizenship on an equality with the White man. I am opposed to Negro equality. * * * I would extend to the Negro, and the Indian, and to all dependent races every right, every privilege, and every immunity consistent with the safety and welfare of the White races; but equality they never should have, either political or social, or in any other respect whatever. * * * My friends, you see that the issues are distinctly drawn."

      On the following evening (July 10th) at Chicago, Mr. Lincoln addressed another enthusiastic assemblage, in reply to Mr. Douglas; and, after protesting against a charge that had been made the previous night by the latter, of an "unnatural and unholy" alliance between Administration Democrats and Republicans to defeat him, as being beyond his own knowledge and belief, proceeded: "Popular Sovereignty! Everlasting Popular Sovereignty! Let us for a moment inquire into this vast matter of Popular Sovereignty. What is Popular Sovereignty? We recollect at an early period in the history of this struggle there was another name for the same thing—Squatter Sovereignty. It was not exactly Popular Sovereignty, but Squatter Sovereignty. What do those terms mean? What do those terms mean when used now? And vast credit is taken by our friend, the Judge, in regard to his support of it, when he declares the last years of his life have been, and all the future years of his life shall be, devoted to this matter of Popular Sovereignty. What is it? Why it is the Sovereignty of the People! What was Squatter Sovereignty? I suppose if it had any significance at all, it was the right of the people to govern themselves, to be sovereign in their own affairs while they were squatted down in a country not their own—while they had squatted on a territory that did not belong to them in the sense that a State belongs to the people who inhabit it—when it belonged to the Nation—such right to govern themselves was called 'Squatter Sovereignty.'

      "Now I wish you to mark. What has become of that Squatter Sovereignty? What has become of it? Can you get anybody to tell you now that the people of a Territory have any authority to govern themselves, in regard to this mooted question of Slavery, before they form a State Constitution? No such thing at all, although there is a general running fire and although there has been a hurrah made in every speech on that side, assuming that that policy had given the people of a Territory the right to govern themselves upon this question; yet the point is dodged. To-day it has been decided—no more than a year ago it was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, and is insisted upon to-day, that the people of a Territory have no right to exclude Slavery from a Territory, that if any one man chooses to take Slaves into a Territory, all the rest of the people have no right to keep them out. This being so, and this decision being made one of the points that the Judge (Douglas) approved, * * * he says he is in favor of it, and sticks to it, and expects to win his battle on that decision, which says there is no such thing as Squatter Sovereignty; but that any man may take Slaves into a Territory and all the other men in the Territory may be opposed to it, and yet by reason of the Constitution they cannot prohibit it; when that is so, how much is left of this vast matter of Squatter Sovereignty, I should like to know? Again, when we get to the question of the right of the people to form a State Constitution as they please, to form it with Slavery or without Slavery—if that is anything new, I confess I don't know it * * *.

      "We do not remember that, in that old Declaration of Independence, it is said that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' There, is the origin of Popular Sovereignty. Who, then, shall come in at this day and claim that he invented it? The Lecompton Constitution connects itself with this question, for it is in this matter of the Lecompton Constitution that our friend, Judge Douglas, claims such vast credit. I agree that in opposing the Lecompton Constitution, so far as I can perceive, he was right. * * * All the Republicans in the Nation opposed it, and they would have opposed it just as much without Judge Douglas's aid as with it. They had all taken ground against it long before he did. Why, the reason that he urges against that Constitution, I urged against him a year before. I have the printed speech in my hand now. The argument that he makes, why that Constitution should not be adopted, that the people were not fairly represented nor allowed to vote, I pointed out in a speech a year ago which I hold in my hand now, that no fair chance was to be given to the people. * * * The Lecompton Constitution, as the Judge tells us, was defeated. The defeat of it was a good thing or it was not. He thinks the defeat of it was a good thing, and so do I, and we agree in that. Who defeated it? Yes, he furnished himself, and if you suppose he controlled the other Democrats that went with him, he furnished three votes, while the Republicans furnished twenty. That is what he did to defeat it. In the House of Representatives he and his friends furnished some twenty votes, and the Republicans furnished ninety odd. Now, who was it that did the work? * * * Ground was taken against it by the Republicans long before Douglas did it. The proportion of opposition to that measure is about five to one."

      Mr. Lincoln then proceeded to take up the issues which Mr. Douglas had joined with him the previous evening. He denied that he had said, or that it could be fairly inferred from what he had said, in his Springfield speech, that he was in favor of making War by the North upon the South for the extinction of Slavery, "or, in favor of inviting the South to a War upon the North, for the purpose of nationalizing Slavery." Said he: "I did not even say that I desired that Slavery should be put in course of ultimate extinction. I do say so now, however; so there need be no longer any difficulty about that. * * * I am tolerably well acquainted with the history of the Country and I know that it has endured eighty-two years half Slave and half Free. I believe—and that is what I meant to allude to there—I believe it has endured, because during all that time, until the introduction of the Nebraska Bill, the public mind did rest all the, time in the belief that Slavery was in course of ultimate extinction. That was what gave us the rest that we had through that period of eighty-two years; at least, so I believe.

      "I have always hated Slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist—I have been an Old Line Whig—I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began. I always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in course of ultimate extinction. * * * The great mass of the Nation have rested in the belief that Slavery was in course of ultimate extinction. They had reason so to believe. The adoption of the Constitution and its attendant history led the People to believe so, and that such was the belief of the framers of the Constitution itself. Why did those old men about the time of the adoption of the Constitution decree that Slavery should not go into the new territory, where it had not already gone? Why declare that within twenty years the African Slave Trade, by which Slaves are supplied, might be cut off by Congress? Why were all these acts? I might enumerate

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