Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/251

Rh accomplished and consummate orator in the country. It was said by a leading English paper that his speech in defence of Louisiana's right to secede "sent an electric thrill throughout the civilized world." Sir George Cornwall Lewis said to Lord Sherbrooke. "Have you read Benjamin's speech? It is better than our Benjamin (meaning Disraeli) could have done." He could hardly have paid Benjamin a higher compliment. One or too extracts from this speech will convince the most skeptical of the great powers of its author, and that Sumner was right in his estimate of him.

It was claimed by the Republicans, that whatever right to withdraw from the Union the thirteen original States might have, that those States included in the Louisiana Purchase, could claim and exercise no such right, since those States were purchased with the money and were consequently the property of the Federal Government. In this contention, Mr. Benjamin replied in part, as follows. He said: "I shall not pause to comment on this repulsive dogma of a party which asserts the right of property in free born white men, in order to reach its cherished object of destroying the right of property in slave born black men — still less shall I detain the Senate, in pointing out how shadowy the distinction between the condition of the servile African and that to which the white freemen of my State would be reduced, if it indeed be true that they are bound to this government by ties that cannot be legitimately dissolved without the consent of that very majority which wields its powers for their oppression. I simply deny the fact on which the argument is founded. I deny that the province of Louisiana, or the people of Louisiana, were ever conveyed to the United States for a price, as property that could be bought or sold." And he then, went on to prove hs assertion by the terms of the grant, and then said, "The rights of Louisiana, as a sovereign State, are those of Virginia, no more and no less. Let those who deny her right to resume delegated powers, successfully refute the claim of Virginia to the same right, in spite of her express reservation made and notified to her sister States when she consented to enter the Union; and, sir, permit me to say, that, of all the causes that justify the action of the