Is there any mistake about that? Is there any forty-shilling attorney here to make a question of it? No. I will not disgrace my profession by supposing such a thing. There is not, in or out of an attorney's office in the county of Erie, or elsewhere, one who could raise a doubt, or a particle of a doubt, about the meaning of this provision of the Constitution. He may act as witnesses do, sometimes, on the stand. He may wriggle, and twist, and say he cannot tell, or cannot remember. I have seen many such efforts in my time, on the part of witnesses, to falsify and deny the truth. But there is no man who can read these words of the Constitution of the United States, and say they are not clear and imperative. "No person," the Constitution says, "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." Why, you may be told by forty conventions in Massachusetts, in Ohio, in New York, or elsewhere, that, if a colored man comes here, he comes as a freeman; that is a non sequitur. It is not so. If he comes as a fugitive from labor, the Constitution says he is not a freeman, and that he shall be delivered up to those who are entitled to his service.

Gentlemen, that is the Constitution of the United States. Do we, or do we not, mean to conform to it, and to execute that part of the Constitution as well as the rest of it? I believe there are before me here members of Congress. I suppose there may be here members of the State legislature, or executive officers under the State government. I suppose there may be judicial magistrates of New York, executive officers, assessors, supervisors, justices of the peace, and constables before me. Allow me to say, Gentlemen, that there is not, that there cannot be, any one of these officers in this assemblage, or elsewhere, who has not, according to the form of the usual obligation, bound himself by a solemn oath to support the Constitution. They have taken their oaths on the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God, or by uplifted hand, as the case may be, or by a solemn affirmation, as is the practice in some cases; but among all of them, there is not a man who holds, nor is there any man who can hold, any office in the gift of the United

States, or of this State, or of any other State, who does not bind himself, by the solemn obligation of an oath, to support the Constitution of the United States. Well, is he to tamper with that? Is he to palter? Gentlemen, our political duties are as much matters of conscience as any other duties; our sacred domestic ties, our most endearing social relations, are no more the subjects for conscientious consideration and conscientious discharge, than the duties we enter upon under the Constitution of the United States. The bonds of political brotherhood, which hold us together from Maine to Georgia, rest upon the same principles of obligation as those of domestic and social life.

Now, Gentlemen, that is the plain story of the Constitution of the United States, on the question of slavery. I contend, and have always contended, that, after the adoption of the Constitution, any measure of the government calculated to bring more slave territory into the United States was beyond the power of the Constitution, and against its provisions. That is my opinion, and it always has been my opinion. It was inconsistent with the Constitution of the United States, or thought to be so, in Mr. Jefferson's time, to attach Louisiana to the United States. A treaty with France was made for that purpose. Mr. Jefferson's opinion at that moment was, that an alteration of the Constitution was necessary to enable it to be done. In consequence of considerations to which I need not now refer, that opinion was abandoned, and Louisiana was admitted by law, without any provision in, or alteration of, the Constitution. At that time I was too young to hold any office, or take any share in the political affairs of the country. Louisiana was admitted as a slave State, and became entitled to her representation in Congress on the principle of a mixed basis. Florida was afterwards admitted. Then, too, I was out of Congress. I had formerly been a member, but had ceased to be so. I had nothing to do with the Florida treaty, or the admission of Florida. My opinion remains unchanged, that it was not within the original scope or design of the Constitution to admit new States out of foreign territory; and, for one, whatever may be said at the Syracuse convention, or at any other assemblage of insane persons, I never would consent, and never have consented, that there should be one foot of slave territory beyond what the old

thirteen States had at the time of the formation of the Union. Never, never! The man cannot show his face to me, and say he can prove that I ever departed from that doctrine. He would sneak away, and slink away, or hire a mercenary press to cry out, What an apostate from liberty Daniel Webster has become! But he knows himself to be a hypocrite and a falsifier.

But, Gentlemen, I was in public life when the proposition to annex Texas to the United States was brought forward. You know that the revolution in Texas, which separated that country from Mexico, occurred in the year 1835 or 1836. I saw then, and I do not know that it required any particular foresight, that it would be the very next thing to bring Texas, which was designed to be a slave-holding State, into this Union. I did not wait. I sought an occasion to proclaim my utter aversion to any such measure, and I determined to resist it with all my strength to the last. On this subject, Gentlemen, you will bear with me, if I now repeat, in the presence of this assembly, what I have before spoken elsewhere. I was in this city in the year 1837, and, some time before I left New York on that excursion from which I returned to this place, my friends in New York were kind enough to offer me a public dinner as a testimony of their regard. I went out of my way, in a speech delivered in Niblo's Garden, on that occasion, for the purpose of showing that I anticipated the attempt to annex Texas as a slave territory, and said it should be opposed by me to the last extremity. Well, there was the press all around me, - the Whig press and the Democratic press. Some spoke in terms commendatory enough of my speech, but all agreed that I took pains to step out of my way to denounce in advance the annexation of Texas as slave territory to the United States. I said on that occasion:

"Gentlemen, we all see that, by whomsoever possessed, Texas is likely to be a slave-holding country; and I frankly avow my entire unwillingness to do any thing that shall extend the slavery of the African race on this continent, or add other slave-holding States to the Union. When I say that I regard slavery in itself as a great moral, social, and political evil, I only use language which has been adopted by distinguished men, themselves citizens of slave-holding States. I shall do nothing, therefore, to favor or encourage its further extension. We have slavery already amongst us. The Constitution found it in the Union; it recognized it,

and gave it solemn guaranties. To the full extent of these guaranties we are all bound, in honor, in justice, and by the Constitution. All the stipulations contained in the Constitution in favor of the slave-holding States which are already in the Union ought to be fulfilled, and, so far as depends on me, shall be fulfilled, in the fulness of their spirit and to the exactness of their letter. Slavery, as it exists in the States, is beyond the reach of Congress. It is a concern of the States themselves; they have never submitted it to Congress, and Congress has no rightful power over it. I shall concur, therefore, in no act, no measure, no menace, no indication of purpose, which shall interfere or threaten to interfere with the exclusive authority of the several States over the subject of slavery as it exists within their respective limits. All this appears to me to be matter of plain and imperative duty. But when we come to speak of admitting new States, the subject assumes an entirely different aspect. Our rights and our duties are then both different. The free States, and all the States, are then at liberty to accept or to reject. When it is proposed to bring new members into this political partnership, the old members have a right to say on what terms such new partners are to come in, and what they are to bring along with them. In my opinion, the people of the United States will not consent to bring into the Union a new, vastly extensive, and slave-holding country, large enough for half a dozen or a dozen States. In my opinion, they ought not to consent to it."

Gentlemen, I was mistaken; Congress did consent to the bringing in of Texas. They did consent, and I was a false prophet. Your own State consented, and the majority of the representatives of New York consented. I went into Congress before the final consummation of the deed, and there I fought, holding up both my hands, and urging, with a voice stronger than it now is, my remonstrances against the whole of it. But you would have it so, and you did have it so. Nay, Gentlemen, I will tell the truth, whether it shames the Devil or not. Persons who have aspired high as lovers of liberty, as eminent lovers of the Wilmot Proviso, as eminent Free Soil men, and who have mounted over our heads, and trodden us down as if we were mere slaves, insisting that they are the only true lovers of liberty, they are the men, the very men, that brought Texas into this Union. This is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I declare it before you, this day. Look to the journals. Without the consent of New York, Texas would not have come into the Union, either under the original reso47

VOL. II.

lutions or afterwards. But New York voted for the measure. The two Senators from New York voted for it, and decided the question; and you may thank them for the glory, the renown, and the happiness of having five or six slave States added to the Union. Do not blame me for it. Let them answer who did the deed, and who are now proclaiming themselves the champions of liberty, crying up their Free Soil creed, and using it for selfish and deceptive purposes. They were the persons who aided in bringing in Texas. It was all fairly told to you, both beforehand and afterwards. You heard Moses and the prophets, but if one had risen from the dead, such was your devotion to that policy, at that time, you would not have listened to him for a moment. I do not, of course, speak of the persons now here before me, but of the general political tone in New York, and especially of those who are now Free Soil apostles. Well, all that I do not complain of; but I will not now, or hereafter, before the country, or the world, consent to be numbered among those who introduced new slave power into the Union. I did all in my power to prevent it.

Then, again, Gentlemen, the Mexican war broke out. Vast territory was acquired, and the peace was made; and, much as I disliked the war, I disliked the peace more, because it brought in these territories. I wished for peace indeed, but I desired to strike out the grant of territory on the one side, and the payment of the $12,000,000 on the other. That territory was unknown to me; I could not tell what its character might be. The plan came from the South. I knew that certain Southern gentlemen wished the acquisition of California, New Mexico, and Utah, as a means of extending slave power and slave population. Foreseeing a sectional controversy, and, as I conceived, seeing how much it would distract the Union, I voted against the treaty with Mexico. I voted against the acquisition. I wanted none of her territory, neither California, New Mexico, nor Utah. They were rather ultra-American, as I thought. They were far from us, and I saw that they might lead to a political conflict, and I voted against them all, against the treaty and against the peace, rather than have the territories. Seeing that it would be an occasion of dispute, that by the controversy the whole Union would be agitated, Messrs. Berrien, Badger, and other respectable and distinguished men of the South, voted