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Franklin Pierce was demonstrating his devotion to the slave-power, while Rufus Choate poured forth his wealth of words in debate, his dark complexion corrugated by swollen veins, and his great, sorrowful eyes gazing earnestly at his listeners. In the House of Representatives there were unusually brilliant and able men.
His views on this point are marked by candor and moderation, though he is firm and uncompromising in his hostility to concession for the purpose of conciliating the Slave-Power. Political compromises, he maintains, though liable to abuse, are the necessary incidents of all governments, excepting pure and simple despotisms. Liberty cannot exist without diversity of opinions.
Garrison's pungent characterization of the "Union" at the dinner of the Free Democracy as "but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power," found almost instant illustration of its truth in the startling demand of that power for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
Then came the War with Mexico; the attempt by means of the Wilmot proviso to check the growing territorial-greed and rapacity of the Slave-power; and the acquisition by the United States, of California and New Mexico, under the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which brought Peace.
Sumner as a fanatic unfit to associate with them, and they refused him a place on any committee, as "outside of any political organization." This stimulated him in the preparation of a remarkable arraignment of the slave-power, which he called the "crime against Kansas."
It's a little like this Mexican war, a mixed-up problem and only one thing clear. A few schemers have led the country into it to increase the slave-power and make us forget that we threatened England when we couldn't carry out the threat. And yet, if you look at it broadly, these are the smaller things and they do not last.
But the debates in both Houses, in which the most violent language was indulged by the Southern Fire-eaters, as well as other events, soon proved that there was a settled purpose on the part of the Slave-Power and its adherents to resist and spit upon all attempts at placation.
I believe, then, as I have already said, that God intends one of two things. He either intends to destroy the United States by this slave-power, or he intends to bless my country and the world by the unfoldings of his wisdom in this matter. I believe he will bless the world in the working out of this slavery.
The real danger to the Union will come when the encroachments of the Slave-Power and the concessions of the Trade-Power shall have made it a burden instead of a blessing.
But above your valor and your patriotism, we look with still higher hope to those moral laws whose vindication is involved in the issue of the conflict; and we feel assured, that, while for the Slave-Power the future can hold no possibility of enduring prosperity, for Free America it promises the regeneration of a higher and holier national existence, when the one great blot which marred the glory of the past shall have been expiated and effaced forever.
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