Page:Webster and Hayne's Celebrated Speeches.djvu/98

94 Mr. Jay negotiated the treaty of 1794 with England, he did not know that cotton was exported at all from the United States; and I have heard it said that, after the treaty which gave to the United States the right to carry their own commodities to England, in their own ships, the custom house in London refused to admit cotton, upon an allegation that it could not be an American production, there being, as they supposed, no cotton raised in America. They would hardly think so now!

Well, sir, we know what followed. The age of cotton became a golden age for our southern brethren. It gratified their desire for improvement and accumulation at the same time that it excited it. The desire grew by what it fed upon, and there soon came to be an eagerness for other territory, a new area, or new areas, for the cultivation of the cotton crop, and measures leading to this result were brought about, rapidly, one after another, under the lead of southern men at the head of the government, they having a majority in both branches to accomplish their ends. The honorable member from Carolina observed that there has been a majority all along in favor of the north. If that be true, sir, the north has acted either very liberally and kindly, or very weakly; for they never exercised that majority five times in the history of the government. Never. Whether they were outgeneralled, or whether it was owing to other causes, I shall not stop to consider; but no man acquainted with the history of the country can deny, that the general lead in the politics of the country for three fourths of the period that has elapsed since the adoption of the constitution has been a southern lead. In 1802, in pursuit of the idea of opening a new cotton region, the United States obtained a cession from Georgia of the whole of her western territory, now embracing the rich and growing state of Alabama. In 1803 Louisiana was purchased from France, out of which the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri have been framed, as slaveholding states. In 1819 the cession of Florida was made, bringing another cession of slaveholding property and territory. Sir, the honorable member from South Carolina thought he saw in certain operations of the government, such as the manner of collecting the revenue and the tendency of those measures to promote emigration into the country, what accounts for the more rapid growth of the north than the south. He thinks that more rapid growth, not the operation of time, but of the system of government established under this constitution. That is a matter of opinion. To a certain extent it may be so; but it does seem to me that if any operation of the government could be shown in any degree to have promoted the population, and growth, and wealth of the north, it is much more sure that there are sundry important and distinct operations of the government, about which no man can doubt, tending to promote, and which absolutely have promoted, the increase of the slave interest and the slave territory of the south. Allow me to say that it was not time that brought in Louisiana; it was the act of men. It was not time that brought in Florida; it was the act of men. And lastly, sir, to complete those acts of men, which have contributed so much to enlarge the area and the sphere of the institution of slavery, Texas, great, and vast, and illimitable Texas, was added to the Union, as a slave state, in 1845; and that, sir, pretty much closed the whole chapter, and settled the whole account. That closed the whole chapter—that settled the whole account, because the annexation of Texas, upon the conditions and under the guaranties upon which she was admitted, did not leave an acre of land, capable of being cultivated by slave labor, between this Capitol and