The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Complete

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But now new light breaks upon us. Now Congress declares this ought never
to have been, and the like of it must never be again. The sacred right of
self-government is grossly violated by it. We even find some men who drew
their first breath--and every other breath of their lives--under this
very restriction, now live in dread of absolute suffocation if they
should be restricted in the "sacred right" of taking slaves to Nebraska.
That perfect liberty they sigh for--the liberty of making slaves of other
people, Jefferson never thought of, their own fathers never thought of,
they never thought of themselves, a year ago. How fortunate for them they
did not sooner become sensible of their great misery! Oh, how difficult
it is to treat with respect such assaults upon all we have ever really
held sacred!

But to return to history. In 1803 we purchased what was then called
Louisiana, of France. It included the present States of Louisiana,
Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa; also the Territory of Minnesota, and the
present bone of contention, Kansas and Nebraska. Slavery already existed
among the French at New Orleans, and to some extent at St. Louis. In 1812
Louisiana came into the Union as a slave State, without controversy. In
1818 or '19, Missouri showed signs of a wish to come in with slavery.
This was resisted by Northern members of Congress; and thus began the
first great slavery agitation in the nation. This controversy lasted
several months, and became very angry and exciting--the House of
Representatives voting steadily for the prohibition of slavery in
Missouri, and the Senate voting as steadily against it. Threats of the
breaking up of the Union were freely made, and the ablest public men of
the day became seriously alarmed. At length a compromise was made, in
which, as in all compromises, both sides yielded something. It was a law,
passed on the 6th of March, 1820, providing that Missouri might come into
the Union with slavery, but that in all the remaining part of the
territory purchased of France which lies north of thirty-six degrees and
thirty minutes north latitude, slavery should never be permitted. This
provision of law is the "Missouri Compromise." In excluding slavery north
of the line, the same language is employed as in the Ordinance of 1787.
It directly applied to Iowa, Minnesota, and to the present bone of
contention, Kansas and Nebraska. Whether there should or should not be
slavery south of that line, nothing was said in the law. But Arkansas
constituted the principal remaining part south of the line; and it has
since been admitted as a slave State, without serious controversy. More
recently, Iowa, north of the line, came in as a free State without
controversy. Still later, Minnesota, north of the line, had a territorial
organization without controversy. Texas, principally south of the line,
and west of Arkansas, though originally within the purchase from France,
had, in 1819, been traded off to Spain in our treaty for the acquisition
of Florida. It had thus become a part of Mexico. Mexico revolutionized
and became independent of Spain. American citizens began settling rapidly
with their slaves in the southern part of Texas. Soon they revolutionized
against Mexico, and established an independent government of their own,
adopting a constitution with slavery, strongly resembling the
constitutions of our slave States. By still another rapid move, Texas,
claiming a boundary much farther west than when we parted with her in
1819, was brought back to the United States, and admitted into the Union
as a slave State. Then there was little or no settlement in the northern
part of Texas, a considerable portion of which lay north of the Missouri
line; and in the resolutions admitting her into the Union, the Missouri
restriction was expressly extended westward across her territory. This
was in 1845, only nine years ago.

Thus originated the Missouri Compromise; and thus has it been respected
down to 1845. And even four years later, in 1849, our distinguished
Senator, in a public address, held the following language in relation to
it:

"The Missouri Compromise has been in practical operation for about a
quarter of a century, and has received the sanction and approbation of
men of all parties in every section of the Union. It has allayed all
sectional jealousies and irritations growing out of this vexed question,
and harmonized and tranquillized the whole country. It has given to Henry
Clay, as its prominent champion, the proud sobriquet of the 'Great
Pacificator,' and by that title, and for that service, his political
friends had repeatedly appealed to the people to rally under his standard
as a Presidential candidate, as the man who had exhibited the patriotism
and power to suppress an unholy and treasonable agitation, and preserve
the Union. He was not aware that any man or any party, from any section
of the Union, had ever urged as an objection to Mr. Clay that he was the
great champion of the Missouri Compromise. On the contrary, the effort
was made by the opponents of Mr. Clay to prove that he was not entitled
to the exclusive merit of that great patriotic measure, and that the
honor was equally due to others, as well as to him, for securing its
adoption; that it had its origin in the hearts of all patriotic men, who
desired to preserve and perpetuate the blessings of our glorious
Union--an origin akin to that of the Constitution of the United States,
conceived in the same spirit of fraternal affection, and calculated to
remove forever the only danger which seemed to threaten, at some distant
day, to sever the social bond of union. All the evidences of public
opinion at that day seemed to indicate that this compromise had been
canonized in the hearts of the American people, as a sacred thing which
no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb."

I do not read this extract to involve Judge Douglas in an inconsistency.
If he afterward thought he had been wrong, it was right for him to
change. I bring this forward merely to show the high estimate placed on
the Missouri Compromise by all parties up to so late as the year 1849.

But going back a little in point of time. Our war with Mexico broke out
in 1846. When Congress was about adjourning that session, President Polk
asked them to place two millions of dollars under his control, to be used
by him in the recess, if found practicable and expedient, in negotiating
a treaty of peace with Mexico, and acquiring some part of her territory.
A bill was duly gotten up for the purpose, and was progressing swimmingly
in the House of Representatives, when a member by the name of David
Wilmot, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, moved as an amendment, "Provided,
that in any territory thus acquired there never shall be slavery."

This is the origin of the far-famed Wilmot Proviso. It created a great
flutter; but it stuck like wax, was voted into the bill, and the bill
passed with it through the House. The Senate, however, adjourned without
final action on it, and so both appropriation and proviso were lost for
the time. The war continued, and at the next session the President
renewed his request for the appropriation, enlarging the amount, I think,
to three millions. Again came the proviso, and defeated the measure.
Congress adjourned again, and the war went on. In December, 1847, the new
Congress assembled. I was in the lower House that term. The Wilmot
Proviso, or the principle of it, was constantly coming up in some shape
or other, and I think I may venture to say I voted for it at least forty
times during the short time I was there. The Senate, however, held it in
check, and it never became a law. In the spring of 1848 a treaty of peace
was made with Mexico, by which we obtained that portion of her country
which now constitutes the Territories of New Mexico and Utah and the
present State of California. By this treaty the Wilmot Proviso was
defeated, in so far as it was intended to be a condition of the
acquisition of territory. Its friends, however, were still determined to
find some way to restrain slavery from getting into the new country. This
new acquisition lay directly west of our old purchase from France, and
extended west to the Pacific Ocean, and was so situated that if the
Missouri line should be extended straight west, the new country would be
divided by such extended line, leaving some north and some south of it.
On Judge Douglas's motion, a bill, or provision of a bill, passed the
Senate to so extend the Missouri line. The proviso men in the House,
including myself, voted it down, because, by implication, it gave up the
southern part to slavery, while we were bent on having it all free.

In the fall of 1848 the gold-mines were discovered in California. This
attracted people to it with unprecedented rapidity, so that on, or soon
after, the meeting of the new Congress in December, 1849, she already had
a population of nearly a hundred thousand, had called a convention,
formed a State constitution excluding slavery, and was knocking for
admission into the Union. The proviso men, of course, were for letting
her in, but the Senate, always true to the other side, would not consent
to her admission, and there California stood, kept out of the Union
because she would not let slavery into her borders. Under all the
circumstances, perhaps, this was not wrong. There were other points of
dispute connected with the general question of Slavery, which equally
needed adjustment. The South clamored for a more efficient fugitive slave
law. The North clamored for the abolition of a peculiar species of slave
trade in the District of Columbia, in connection with which, in view from
the windows of the Capitol, a sort of negro livery-stable, where droves
of negroes were collected, temporarily kept, and finally taken to
Southern markets, precisely like droves of horses, had been openly
maintained for fifty years. Utah and New Mexico needed territorial
governments; and whether slavery should or should not be prohibited
within them was another question. The indefinite western boundary of
Texas was to be settled. She was a slave State, and consequently the
farther west the slavery men could push her boundary, the more slave
country they secured; and the farther east the slavery opponents could
thrust the boundary back, the less slave ground was secured. Thus this
was just as clearly a slavery question as any of the others.

These points all needed adjustment, and they were held up, perhaps
wisely, to make them help adjust one another. The Union now, as in 1820,
was thought to be in danger, and devotion to the Union rightfully
inclined men to yield somewhat in points where nothing else could have so
inclined them. A compromise was finally effected. The South got their new
fugitive slave law, and the North got California, (by far the best part
of our acquisition from Mexico) as a free State. The South got a
provision that New Mexico and Utah, when admitted as States, may come in
with or without slavery as they may then choose; and the North got the
slave trade abolished in the District of Columbia.. The North got the
western boundary of Texas thrown farther back eastward than the South
desired; but, in turn, they gave Texas ten millions of dollars with which
to pay her old debts. This is the Compromise of 1850.

Preceding the Presidential election of 1852, each of the great political
parties, Democrats and Whigs, met in convention and adopted resolutions
indorsing the Compromise of '50, as a "finality," a final settlement, so
far as these parties could make it so, of all slavery agitation. Previous
to this, in 1851, the Illinois Legislature had indorsed it.

During this long period of time, Nebraska (the Nebraska Territory, not
the State of as we know it now) had remained substantially an uninhabited
country, but now emigration to and settlement within it began to take
place. It is about one third as large as the present United States, and
its importance, so long overlooked, begins to come into view. The
restriction of slavery by the Missouri Compromise directly applies to
it--in fact was first made, and has since been maintained expressly for
it. In 1853, a bill to give it a territorial government passed the House
of Representatives, and, in the hands of Judge Douglas, failed of passing
only for want of time. This bill contained no repeal of the Missouri
Compromise. Indeed, when it was assailed because it did not contain such
repeal, Judge Douglas defended it in its existing form. On January 4,
1854, Judge Douglas introduces a new bill to give Nebraska territorial
government. He accompanies this bill with a report, in which last he
expressly recommends that the Missouri Compromise shall neither be
affirmed nor repealed. Before long the bill is so modified as to make two
territories instead of one, calling the southern one Kansas.

Also, about a month after the introduction of the bill, on the Judge's
own motion it is so amended as to declare the Missouri Compromise
inoperative and void; and, substantially, that the people who go and
settle there may establish slavery, or exclude it, as they may see fit.
In this shape the bill passed both branches of Congress and became a law.

This is the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The foregoing history may
not be precisely accurate in every particular, but I am sure it is
sufficiently so for all the use I shall attempt to make of it, and in it
we have before us the chief material enabling us to judge correctly
whether the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is right or wrong. I think,
and shall try to show, that it is wrong--wrong in its direct effect,
letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective
principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world
where men can be found inclined to take it.

This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal, for
the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the
monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our
republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the
enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites;
causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially
because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with
the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the
Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right
principle of action but self-interest.

Before proceeding let me say that I think I have no prejudice against the
Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If
slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it
did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. This I
believe of the masses North and South. Doubtless there are individuals on
both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others
who would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence. We
know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North and become
tip-top abolitionists, while some Northern ones go South and become most
cruel slave masters.

When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the
origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said
that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of
it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I
surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do
myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do
as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the
slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But a
moment's reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I
think there is) there may be in this in the long run, its sudden
execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they
would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping
and surplus money enough to carry them there in many times ten days. What
then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite
certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one
in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to
denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and
socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine
would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.
Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the
sole question, if indeed it is any part of it. A universal feeling,
whether well or ill founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then
make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation
might be adopted, but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to
judge our brethren of the South.

When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge
them--not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any
legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not in its
stringency be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than our
ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting
slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the
African slave trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves
from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking of them into
Nebraska, can hardy be distinguished on any moral principle, and the
repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the
latter.

The arguments by which the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is sought to
be justified are these:

First. That the Nebraska country needed a territorial government.

Second. That in various ways the public had repudiated that
compromise and demanded the repeal, and therefore should not now
complain of it.

And, lastly, That the repeal establishes a principle which is
intrinsically right.

I will attempt an answer to each of them in its turn.

First, then: If that country was in need of a territorial organization,
could it not have had it as well without as with a repeal? Iowa and
Minnesota, to both of which the Missouri restriction applied, had,
without its repeal, each in succession, territorial organizations. And
even the year before, a bill for Nebraska itself was within an ace of
passing without the repealing clause, and this in the hands of the same
men who are now the champions of repeal. Why no necessity then for
repeal? But still later, when this very bill was first brought in, it
contained no repeal. But, say they, because the people had demanded, or
rather commanded, the repeal, the repeal was to accompany the
organization whenever that should occur.

Now, I deny that the public ever demanded any such thing--ever repudiated
the Missouri Compromise, ever commanded its repeal. I deny it, and call
for the proof. It is not contended, I believe, that any such command has
ever been given in express terms. It is only said that it was done in
principle. The support of the Wilmot Proviso is the first fact mentioned
to prove that the Missouri restriction was repudiated in principle, and
the second is the refusal to extend the Missouri line over the country
acquired from Mexico. These are near enough alike to be treated together.
The one was to exclude the chances of slavery from the whole new
acquisition by the lump, and the other was to reject a division of it, by
which one half was to be given up to those chances. Now, whether this was
a repudiation of the Missouri line in principle depends upon whether the
Missouri law contained any principle requiring the line to be extended
over the country acquired from Mexico. I contend it did not. I insist
that it contained no general principle, but that it was, in every sense,
specific. That its terms limit it to the country purchased from France is
undenied and undeniable. It could have no principle beyond the intention
of those who made it. They did not intend to extend the line to country
which they did not own. If they intended to extend it in the event of
acquiring additional territory, why did they not say so? It was just as
easy to say that "in all the country west of the Mississippi which we now
own, or may hereafter acquire, there shall never be slavery," as to say
what they did say; and they would have said it if they had meant it. An
intention to extend the law is not only not mentioned in the law, but is
not mentioned in any contemporaneous history. Both the law itself, and
the history of the times, are a blank as to any principle of extension;
and by neither the known rules of construing statutes and contracts, nor
by common sense, can any such principle be inferred.

Another fact showing the specific character of the Missouri law--showing
that it intended no more than it expressed, showing that the line was not
intended as a universal dividing line between Free and Slave territory,
present and prospective, north of which slavery could never go--is the
fact that by that very law Missouri came in as a slave State, north of
the line. If that law contained any prospective principle, the whole law
must be looked to in order to ascertain what the principle was. And by
this rule the South could fairly contend that, inasmuch as they got one
slave State north of the line at the inception of the law, they have the
right to have another given them north of it occasionally, now and then,
in the indefinite westward extension of the line. This demonstrates the
absurdity of attempting to deduce a prospective principle from the
Missouri Compromise line.

When we voted for the Wilmot Proviso we were voting to keep slavery out
of the whole Mexican acquisition, and little did we think we were thereby
voting to let it into Nebraska lying several hundred miles distant. When
we voted against extending the Missouri line, little did we think we were
voting to destroy the old line, then of near thirty years' standing.

To argue that we thus repudiated the Missouri Compromise is no less
absurd than it would be to argue that because we have so far forborne to
acquire Cuba, we have thereby, in principle, repudiated our former
acquisitions and determined to throw them out of the Union. No less
absurd than it would be to say that because I may have refused to build
an addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing
house! And if I catch you setting fire to my house, you will turn upon me
and say I instructed you to do it!

The most conclusive argument, however, that while for the Wilmot Proviso,
and while voting against the extension of the Missouri line, we never
thought of disturbing the original Missouri Compromise, is found in the
fact that there was then, and still is, an unorganized tract of fine
country, nearly as large as the State of Missouri, lying immediately west
of Arkansas and south of the Missouri Compromise line, and that we never
attempted to prohibit slavery as to it. I wish particular attention to
this. It adjoins the original Missouri Compromise line by its northern
boundary, and consequently is part of the country into which by
implication slavery was permitted to go by that compromise. There it has
lain open ever s, and there it still lies, and yet no effort has been
made at any time to wrest it from the South. In all our struggles to
prohibit slavery within our Mexican acquisitions, we never so much as
lifted a finger to prohibit it as to this tract. Is not this entirely
conclusive that at all times we have held the Missouri Compromise as a
sacred thing, even when against ourselves as well as when for us?

Senator Douglas sometimes says the Missouri line itself was in principle
only an extension of the line of the Ordinance of '87--that is to say, an
extension of the Ohio River. I think this is weak enough on its face. I
will remark, however, that, as a glance at the map will show, the
Missouri line is a long way farther south than the Ohio, and that if our
Senator in proposing his extension had stuck to the principle of jogging
southward, perhaps it might not have been voted down so readily.

But next it is said that the compromises of '50, and the ratification of
them by both political parties in '52, established a new principle which
required the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. This again I deny. I deny
it, and demand the proof. I have already stated fully what the
compromises of '50 are. That particular part of those measures from which
the virtual repeal of the Missouri Compromise is sought to be inferred
(for it is admitted they contain nothing about it in express terms) is
the provision in the Utah and New Mexico laws which permits them when
they seek admission into the Union as States to come in with or without
slavery, as they shall then see fit. Now I insist this provision was made
for Utah and New Mexico, and for no other place whatever. It had no more
direct reference to Nebraska than it had to the territories of the moon.
But, say they, it had reference to Nebraska in principle. Let us see. The
North consented to this provision, not because they considered it right
in itself, but because they were compensated--paid for it.