The Art of Public Speaking
said no. Your senators say no. Your House of Representatives says no.
Throughout the length and breadth of your conspiracy against the
Constitution there is but one shout of no! This recognition of this
right is the price of my allegiance. Withhold it, and you do not get my
obedience. This is the philosophy of the armed men who have sprung up in
this country. Do you ask me to support a government that will tax my
property: that will plunder me; that will demand my blood, and will not
protect me? I would rather see the population of my native State laid
six feet beneath her sod than they should support for one hour such a
government. Protection is the price of obedience everywhere, in all
countries. It is the only thing that makes government respectable. Deny
it and you can not have free subjects or citizens; you may have slaves.
We demand, in the next place, "that persons committing crimes against
slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, shall be delivered
up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other
property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee
shall be the test of criminality." That is another one of the demands of
an extremist and a rebel.
But the nonslaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts,
have steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro and that negro
was a slave, to deliver him up. It was refused twice on the requisition
of my own State as long as twenty-two years ago. It was refused by Kent
and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each
of the then federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we
submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead
letter from that day to this. The next case came up between us and the
State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the
governor of that State; and he refused it. Why? He said it was not
against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he would
not comply with the demand. He made a similar refusal to Virginia. Yet
these are our confederates; these are our sister States! There is the
bargain; there is the compact. You have sworn to it. Both these
governors swore to it. The senator from New York swore to it. The
governor of Ohio swore to it when he was inaugurated. You can not bind
them by oaths. Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect
to whip freemen into loving such brethren! They will have a good time in
doing it!
It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried
out. The Constitution says slaves are property; the Supreme Court says
so; the Constitution says so. The theft of slaves is a crime; they are
a subject-matter of felonious asportation. By the text and letter of the
Constitution you agreed to give them up. You have sworn to do it, and
you have broken your oaths. Of course, those who have done so look out
for pretexts. Nobody expected them to do otherwise. I do not think I
ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some
pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings,
hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him. Yet this requirement
of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an
extremist and a rebel.
The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under
the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, without being entitled
either to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other similar
obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee. Here is
the Constitution:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws
thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law
or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor,
but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such
service or labor may be due."
This language is plain, and everybody understood it the same way for the
first forty years of your government. In 1793, in Washington's time, an
act was passed to carry out this provision. It was adopted unanimously
in the Senate of the United States, and nearly so in the House of
Representatives. Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the
Constitution did not mean a negro slave. It was clear; it was plain. Not
only the federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States,
decided that this was a constitutional obligation. How is it now? The
North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their natural
character, they commenced with the fraudulent fiction that fugitives
were entitled to habeas corpus, entitled to trial by jury in the State
to which they fled. They pretended to believe that our fugitive slaves
were entitled to more rights than their white citizens; perhaps they
were right, they know one another better than I do. You may charge a
white man with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not
require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is nothing to
determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he fled,
and then he is to be delivered up upon demand. White people are
delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves. Slaves, black
people, you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes
have been invented to defeat your plain constitutional obligations.
Senators, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations
and the duties of the federal government. I am content and have ever
been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not
believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I
would have voted for it as a proposition _de novo_, yet I am bound to it
by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by
established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given
to it, and intend to give to it, unfaltering support and allegiance, but
I choose to put that allegiance on the true ground, not on the false
idea that anybody's blood was shed for it. I say that the Constitution
is the whole compact. All the obligations, all the chains that fetter
the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely
excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that "the powers not
granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to
the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people."
Now I will try it by that standard; I will subject it to that test. The
law of nature, the law of justice, would say--and it is so expounded by
the publicists--that equal rights in the common property shall be
enjoyed. Even in a monarchy the king can not prevent the subjects from
enjoying equality in the disposition of the public property. Even in a
despotic government this principle is recognized. It was the blood and
the money of the whole people (says the learned Grotius, and say all the
publicists) which acquired the public property, and therefore it is not
the property of the sovereign. This right of equality being, then,
according to justice and natural equity, a right belonging to all
States, when did we give it up? You say Congress has a right to pass
rules and regulations concerning the Territory and other property of the
United States. Very well. Does that exclude those whose blood and money
paid for it? Does "dispose of" mean to rob the rightful owners? You must
show a better title than that, or a better sword than we have.
What, then, will you take? You will take nothing but your own judgment;
that is, you will not only judge for yourselves, not only discard the
court, discard our construction, discard the practise of the government,
but you will drive us out, simply because you will it. Come and do it!
You have sapped the foundations of society; you have destroyed almost
all hope of peace. In a compact where there is no common arbiter, where
the parties finally decide for themselves, the sword alone at last
becomes the real, if not the constitutional, arbiter. Your party says
that you will not take the decision of the Supreme Court. You said so at
Chicago; you said so in committee; every man of you in both Houses says
so. What are you going to do? You say we shall submit to your
construction. We shall do it, if you can make us; but not otherwise, or
in any other manner. That is settled. You may call it secession, or you
may call it revolution; but there is a big fact standing before you,
ready to oppose you--that fact is, freemen with arms in their hands.
_THEODORE ROOSEVELT_
INAUGURAL ADDRESS
(1905)
MY FELLOW CITIZENS:--No people on earth have more cause to be thankful
than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in
our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good, Who has
blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large
a measure of well-being and happiness.
To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our
national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and yet
we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are
exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been
obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our
life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and
hardier virtues wither away.
Under such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed, and the
success which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently
believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of
vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding realization of all that life
has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is
ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a
mighty people can thrive best, alike as regard the things of the body
and the things of the soul.
Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from us.
We have duties to others and duties to ourselves--and we can shirk
neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its
greatness into relation to the other nations of the earth, and we must
behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.
Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of
cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words but
in our deeds that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will
by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of
all their rights.
But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most
when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever careful to
refrain from wronging others, we must be no less insistent that we are
not wronged ourselves. We wish peace; but we wish the peace of justice,
the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right, and
not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts rightly and justly
should ever have cause to fear, and no strong power should ever be able
to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression.
Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but
still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in
wealth, in population, and in power, as a nation has seen during a
century and a quarter of its national life, is inevitably accompanied by
a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that
rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility and
danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We
now face other perils the very existence of which it was impossible that
they should foresee.
Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes
wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the half century