Never, sir, was there a more signal instance of "holding the word of promise to the ear, and breaking it to the hope." Where are the "ample" means of obtaining relief from the unendurable tyranny that grinds down the free-State men of Kansas into the dust? How can they "carry their points at the polls?" Let facts answer:
- The Council, which passed these laws, has extended its term of service till 1858; so that, if the entire representative branch was unanimous for their repeal, the higher branch has the power to prevent the slightest change in them for two long years!
- The free-State men in Kansas are absolutely shut out from the polls by test-oaths, which no one with the soul of a freeman, who traces all the outrages there directly to the enactment of the Nebraska bill, can conscientiously swear to.
- Even if they do go there, and swear to sustain the Nebraska bill, and the fugitive slave law, the election law is purposely framed, as I have shown, to invite invasions of Missourians, to to control the elections in favor of slavery.
- They are driven from the jury-box as well as disfranchised, and prevented from acting as attorneys in the courts, unless they take the test oath proscribed by their conquerors.
- Free speech is not tolerated. They are left "perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way," except, if they speak a word against slavery, they are convicted of felony and hurried to the chain-gang.
- The presses in the Territory, at Leavenworth and Lawrence, in favor of freedom, have been destroyed, and the two last by authority of the court of Judge Lecompte, thus "crushing out" the freedom of the press.
- Indictments are found by packed juries against every prominent free-State citizen and those who are not forced to flee from the Territory are arrested and imprisoned; while those who have stolen from free-State men, tarred and feathered them, burned their houses or murdered them, go at large unpunished.
In such a state of affairs as this, to talk of going to the polls and having the laws repealed is worse than a mockery. It is an insult. It is like binding a man hand and foot, throwing him into the river, and telling him to swim on shore and he will be saved. It is like loading a man with irons, and then telling him to run for his life. The only relief possible, if Kansas is not promptly admitted as a State, which I hope may be effected, is in a change of the Administration and of the party that so recklessly misrules the land; and that will furnish an effectual relief.
As I look, sir, to the smiling valleys and fertile plains of Kansas, and witness there the sorrowful scenes of civil war, in which, when forbearance at last ceased to be a virtue, the free-State men of the Territory felt it necessary, deserted as they were by their Government, to defend their lives, their families, their property, and their hearthstones, the language of one of the noblest statesman of the age, uttered six years ago at the other end of this Capitol, rises before my mind. I allude to the great statesman of Kentucky, Henry Clay. And while the party which, while he lived, lit the torch of slander at every avenue of his private life, and libelled him before the American people by every epithet that renders man infamous, as a gambler, debauchee, traitor, and enemy of his country, are now engaged in shedding fictitious tears over his grave, and appealing to his old supporters to aid by their votes in shielding them from the indignation of an uprisen people, I ask them to read this language of his, which comes to us as from his tomb to-day. With the change of hut a single geographical word in the place of "Mexico," how prophetically does it apply to the very scenes and issues of this year! And who can doubt with what party he would stand in the coming campaign, if he were restored to us from the damps of the grave, when they read the following, which fell from his lips in 1850, and with which, thanking the House for its attention, I conclude my remarks.
"But if, unhappily, we should be involved in war, in civil war, between the two parties of this Confederacy, in which the effort upon the one side should be to restrain the introduction of slavery into the new Territories, and upon the other side to force its introduction there, what a spectacle should we present to the astonishment of mankind, in an effort not to propagate rights, but—I must say it, though I trust it will be understood to be said with no design to excite feeling—a war to propagate wrongs in the Territories thus acquired from Mexico! It would be a war in which we should have no sympathies, no good wishes—in which all mankind would be against us; for, from the commencement of the Revolution down to the present time, we have constantly reproached our British ancestors for the introduction of slavery into this country."
