Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/222

 198 T. W. Davenport. pleasii re. " " Now Florida ! " " Certainly. ' ' Next, ' ' Violate your treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees ; expel those tribes from the lands they have held from time immemorial, so as to let us expand our plantations!" "So said, so done." "Now for Texas!" "You have it." "Next, a third more of Mexico ! " " Yours it is. " " Now, break the Missouri compact, and let slavery wrestle with free labor for the vast region consecrated by that Compact to Freedom!" "Very good. What next T ' " Buy us Cuba, for one hundred to one hundred and fifty millions!" "We have tried; but Spain refuses to sell." "Then wrest it from her at all hazards!" And all this time, while slavery was using the Union as her catspaw— dragging the Republic into iniquitous wars and enormous ex- penditures, and grasping empire after empire thereby — Northern men (or, more accurately, men of the North) were constantly asking why people living in the Free States could not let slavery alone, mind their own business, and expend their surplus philanthropy on the poor at their own doors, rathe^" than on the happy and contented slaves ! But we must not lay all these aggressions to the Southern people alone, although especially acceptable to their predomi- nant interest, for on all such propositions they had help from the North. Upon all questions affecting the peculiar insti- tution the South was solid while the North was divided. Slavery had no diverse politics. Mr. Dixon, in a speech made before the United States Senate, said : "I have been charged, through one of the leading journals of this city, with having proposed the amendment, which T notified the Senate I in- tended to offer, with a view to embarrass the Democratic party. It was said that I was a Whig from Kentucky, and that the amendment proposed by me should be looked upon with suspicion by the opposite party. Sir, I wish to remark that, upon the question of slavery, I know no whiggery, and I know no democracy. I am a pro-slavery man. I am from a slave-holding State; I represent a slave-holding constitu- ency, and I am here to maintain the rights of that people whenever they are presented before the Senate. ' '