any degree resembling that which was avowed and justified in those other Conventions to which I have alluded, or so far as those proceedings can be shown to be disloyal to the Constitution, or tending to disunion, so far I shall be as ready as any one to bestow on them reprehension and censure.
Having dwelt long on this Convention, and other occurrences of that day, in the hope, probably, (which will not be gratified) that I should leave the course of this debate to follow him, at length, in those excursions, the honorable member returned, and attempted another object. He referred to a speech of mine in the other House, the same which I had occasion to allude to myself the other day; and has quoted a passage or two from it, with a bold, though uneasy and laboring air of confidence, as if he had detected in me an inconsistency. Judging from the gentleman’s manner, a stranger to the course of the debate, and to the point in discussion, would have imagined, from so triumphant a tone, that the honorable member was about to overwhelm me with a manifest contradiction. Any one who heard him, and who had not heard what I had, in fact, previously said, must have thought me routed and discomfited, as the gentleman had promised. Sir, a breath blows all this triumph away. There is not the slightest difference in the sentiments of my remarks on the two occasions. What I said here on Wednesday, is in exact accordance with the opinions expressed by me in the other House in 1825. Though the gentleman had the metaphysics of Hudibras—though he were able
“To sever and divide “A hair ’twixt North and Northwest side,” he yet could not insert his metaphysical scissors between the fair reading of my remarks in 1825, and what I said here last week. There is not only no contradiction, no difference, but, in truth, too exact a similarity, both in thought and language, to be entirely in just taste. I had myself quoted the same speech; had recurred to it, and spoke with it open before me; and much of what I said was little more than a repetition from it. In order to make finishing work with this alleged contradiction, permit me to recur to the origin of this debate, and review its course. This seems expedient, and may be done as well now as at any time.
Well, then, its history is this: The honorable member from Connecticut moved a resolution, which constitutes the first branch of that which is now before us; that is to say, a resolution, instructing the Committee on Public Lands to inquire into the expediency of limiting, for a certain period, the sales of the public lands, to such as have heretofore been offered for sale; and whether sundry offices, connected with the sales of the lands, might not be abolished, without detriment to the public service.
In the progress of the discussion which arose on this resolution, an honorable member from New Hampshire moved to amend the resolution, so as entirely to reverse its object; that is, to strike it all out, and insert a direction to the committee to inquire into the expediency of adopting measures to hasten the sales, and extend more rapidly the surveys of the lands.
The honorable member from Maine, [Mr. Sprague ,] suggested that both those propositions might well enough go, for consideration, to the committee; and in this state of the question the member from South Carolina addressed the Senate in his first speech. He rose, he said, to give us his own free thoughts on the public lands. I saw him rise, with pleasure, and listened with expectation, though before he concluded, I was filled with surprise. Certainly, I was never more surprised, than to find him following up, to the extent he did, the sentiments and opinions, which the gentleman from Missouri had put forth, and which it is known he has long entertained.
I need not repeat at large the general topics of the honorable gentleman’s speech. When he said, yesterday, that he did not attack the Eastern States, he certainly must have forgotten, not only particular remarks, but the whole drift and tenor of his speech; unless he means, by not attacking, that he did not commence hostilities,—but that another had preceded him in the attack. He, in the first place, disapproved of the whole course of the Government, for forty years, in regard to its dispositions of the public land; and then, turning northward and eastward, and fancying he had found a cause for alleged narrowness and niggardliness in the “accursed policy” of the Tariff, to which he represented the people of New England as wedded, he went on, for a full hour, with remarks, the whole scope of which was to exhibit the results of this policy, in feelings and in measures unfavorable to the West. I thought his opinions unfounded and erroneous, as to the general course of the Government, and ventured to reply to them.
The gentleman had remarked on the analogy of other cases, and quoted the conduct of European Governments, towards their own subjects, settling on this continent, as in point, to show, that we had been harsh and rigid in selling, when we should have given the public lands to settlers. I thought the honorable member had suffered his judgment to be betrayed by a false analogy; that he was struck with an appearance of resemblance, where there was no real similitude. I think so still. The first settlers of North America were enterprising spirits, engaged in private adventure, or fleeing from tyranny at home. When arrived here, they were forgotten by the mother country, or remembered only to be oppressed. Carried away again by the appearance of analogy, or struck with the eloquence of the passage, the honorable member yesterday observed that the conduct of Government towards the Western emigrants, or my representation of it, brought to his mind a celebrated speech in the British Parliament. It was, sir, the speech of Col. Barre. On the question of the stamp act, or tea tax, I forget which, Col. Barre had heard a member on the Treasury Bench argue, that the people of the United States, being British colonists, planted by the maternal care, nourished by the indulgence, and protected by the arms of England, would not grudge their mite to relieve the mother country from the heavy burden under which she groaned. The language of Col. Barre, in reply to this, was—They planted by your care? Your oppression planted them in America. They fled from your tyranny, and grew by your neglect of them. So soon as you began to care for them, you showed your care by sending persons to spy out their liberties, misrepresent their character, prey upon them and eat out their substance.
And now does the honorable gentleman mean to maintain, that language like this is applicable to the conduct of the Government of the United States towards the Western emigrants, or to any representation given by me of that conduct? Were the settlers in the West driven thither by our oppression? Have they flourished only by our neglect of them? Has the Government done nothing but to prey upon them, and eat out their substance? Sir, this fervid eloquence of the British speaker, just, when and where it was uttered, and fit to remain an exercise for the schools, is not a little out of place, when it is brought thence to be applied here, to the conduct of our own country towards her own citizens. From America to England, it may be true; from Americans to their own Government it would be strange language. Let us leave it, to be recited and declaimed by our boys, against a foreign nation; not introduce it here, to recite and declaim ourselves against our own.
But I come to the point of the alleged contradiction. In my remarks on Wednesday, I contended that we could not give away gratuitously all the public lands; that we held them in trust; that the Government had solemnly pledged itself to dispose of them as a common fund for
