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1
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I thank
you, dear Sir, for the copy you have been so kind as to send me of the letter
to your constituents on the Missouri question. It is a perfect justification
to them. I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers, or pay any attention
to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be
a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this
momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me
with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed,
indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.
A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political,
once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated;
and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. I can say, with
conscious truth, that there is no a man on earth who would sacrifice more
than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable
way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle
which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation
and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due
sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we nave the wolf by the ears,
and we can neither hold him, nor savely let him go. Justice is in one scale,
and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the
passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a
single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over
a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally
facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen
on a greater number of coadjutors. An abstinence too, from this act of power,
would remove the jealousy excited by the undertaking of Congress to regulate
the condition of the different descriptions of men composing a State. This
certainly is the exclusive right of every State, which nothing in the constitution
has taken from them and given to the General Government. Could Congress,
for example, say, that the non-freemen of Connecticut shall be freemen,
or that they shall no emigrate into any other state? |
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2
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I
regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of
themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness
to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions
of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to
weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they
will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected
by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate
this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the
world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the
offering of my high esteem and respect. |
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