Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/655

 that the history of the last thirty years would he revised, corrected, and amended, and that it would then appear that the country, during all that period, had been resting in prosperity, and contentment, and peace, not upon a valid, constitutional, and irrevocable compromise between the slave states and the free states, but upon an unconstitutional and false, and even infamous, act of congressional usurpation.

On the contrary, I am now, if possible, more than ever satisfied that, after all this debate, the history of the country will go down to posterity just as it stood before, carrying to them the everlasting facts, that until 1820 the congress of the United States legislated to prevent the introduction of shivery into new territories whenever that object was practicable; and that in that year they so far modified that policy, under alarming apprehensions of civil convulsion, by a constitutional enactment in the character of a compact, as to admit Missouri a new slave state, but upon the express condition, stipulated in favor of the free states, that slavery should forever be prohibited in all the residue of the existing and unorganized territories of the United States lying north of the parallel 36° 30' north latitude. Certainly, I find nothing to win my favor toward the bill in the proposition of the senator from Maryland, [Mr. Pearce,] to restore the Clayton amendment, which was struck out in the house of representatives. So far from voting for that proposition, I shall vote against it now, as I did when it was under consideration here before, in accordance with the opinion adopted as early as any political opinions I ever had, and cherished as long, that the right of suffrage is not a mere conventional right, but an inherent natural right, of which no government can rightly deprive any adult man who is subject to its authority, and obligated to its support.

I hold, moreover, sir that inasmuch as every man is, by force of circumstances beyond his own control, a subject of government somewhere, he is, by the very constitution of human society, entitled to share equally in the conferring of political power on those who wield it, if he is not disqualified by crime; that in a despotic government he ought to be allowed arms, in a free government the ballot or the open vote, as a means of self-protection against unendurable oppression. I am not likely, therefore, to restore to this bill an amendment which would deprive it of an important feature imposed upon it by the house of representatives, and that one, perhaps, the only feature that harmonizes with my own convictions of justice. It is true that the house stipulates such suffrage for white men as a condition for opening the territory to the possible proscription and slavery of the African. I shall separate them. I shall vote for the former and against the latter, glad to get universal suffrage for white men, if only that can be gained now, and working right on, full of hope and confidence, for the prevention or the abrogation of slavery in the territories hereafter.

Sir, I am surprised at the pertinacity with which the honorable senator from Delaware, mine ancient and honorable friend, [Mr. Clayton,] perseveres in opposing the granting of the right of suffrage to the unnaturalized foreigner in