State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce
F >>
Franklin Pierce >> State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 | 8 |
9 |
10 |
11
Most questionable as was this proposition in all its constitutional
relations, nevertheless it received the sanction of Congress, with some
slight modifications of line, to save the existing rights of the intended
new State. It was reluctantly acquiesced in by Southern States as a
sacrifice to the cause of peace and of the Union, not only of the rights
stipulated by the treaty of Louisiana, but of the principle of equality
among the States guaranteed by the Constitution. It was received by the
Northern States with angry and resentful condemnation and complaint,
because it did not concede all which they had exactingly demanded. Having
passed through the forms of legislation, it took its place in the statute
book, standing open to repeal, like any other act of doubtful
constitutionality, subject to be pronounced null and void by the courts of
law, and possessing no possible efficacy to control the rights of the
States which might thereafter be organized out of any part of the original
territory of Louisiana.
In all this, if any aggression there were, any innovation upon preexisting
rights, to which portion of the Union are they justly chargeable? This
controversy passed away with the occasion, nothing surviving it save the
dormant letter of the statute.
But long afterwards, when by the proposed accession of the Republic of
Texas the United States were to take their next step in territorial
greatness, a similar contingency occurred and became the occasion for
systematized attempts to intervene in the domestic affairs of one section
of the Union, in defiance of their rights as States and of the stipulations
of the Constitution. These attempts assumed a practical direction in the
shape of persevering endeavors by some of the Representatives in both
Houses of Congress to deprive the Southern States of the supposed benefit
of the provisions of the act authorizing the organization of the State of
Missouri.
But the good sense of the people and the vital force of the Constitution
triumphed over sectional prejudice and the political errors of the day, and
the State of Texas returned to the Union as she was, with social
institutions which her people had chosen for themselves and with express
agreement by the reannexing act that she should be susceptible of
subdivision into a plurality of States.
Whatever advantage the interests of the Southern States, as such, gained by
this were far inferior in results, as they unfolded in the progress of
time, to those which sprang from previous concessions made by the South.
To every thoughtful friend of the Union, to the true lovers of their
country, to all who longed and labored for the full success of this great
experiment of republican institutions, it was cause of gratulation that
such an opportunity had occurred to illustrate our advancing power on this
continent and to furnish to the world additional assurance of the strength
and stability of the Constitution. Who would wish to see Florida still a
European colony? Who would rejoice to hail Texas as a lone star instead of
one in the galaxy of States? Who does not appreciate the incalculable
benefits of the acquisition of Louisiana? And yet narrow views and
sectional purposes would inevitably have excluded them all from the Union.
But another struggle on the same point ensued when our victorious armies
returned from Mexico and it devolved on Congress to provide for the
territories acquired by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The great
relations of the subject had now become distinct and clear to the
perception of the public mind, which appreciated the evils of sectional
controversy upon the question of the admission of new States. In that
crisis intense solicitude pervaded the nation. But the patriotic impulses
of the popular heart, guided by the admonitory advice of the Father of his
Country, rose superior to all the difficulties of the incorporation of a
new empire into the Union. In the counsels of Congress there was manifested
extreme antagonism of opinion and action between some Representatives, who
sought by the abusive and unconstitutional employment of the legislative
powers of the Government to interfere in the condition of the inchoate
States and to impose their own social theories upon the latter, and other
Representatives, who repelled the interposition of the General Government
in this respect and maintained the self-constituting rights of the States.
In truth, the thing attempted was in form alone action of the General
Government, while in reality it was the endeavor, by abuse of legislative
power, to force the ideas of internal policy entertained in particular
States upon allied independent States. Once more the Constitution and the
Union triumphed signally. The new territories were organized without
restrictions on the disputed point, and were thus left to judge in that
particular for themselves; and the sense of constitutional faith proved
vigorous enough in Congress not only to accomplish this primary object, but
also the incidental and hardly less important one of so amending the
provisions of the statute for the extradition of fugitives from service as
to place that public duty under the safeguard of the General Government,
and thus relieve it from obstacles raised up by the legislation of some of
the States.
Vain declamation regarding the provisions of law for the extradition of
fugitives from service, with occasional episodes of frantic effort to
obstruct their execution by riot and murder, continued for a brief time to
agitate certain localities. But the true principle of leaving each State
and Territory to regulate its own laws of labor according to its own sense
of right and expediency had acquired fast hold of the public judgment, to
such a degree that by common consent it was observed in the organization of
the Territory of Washington. When, more recently, it became requisite to
organize the Territories of Nebraska and Kansas, it was the natural and
legitimate, if not the inevitable, consequence of previous events and
legislation that the same great and sound principle which had already been
applied to Utah and New Mexico should be applied to them--that they should
stand exempt from the restrictions proposed in the act relative to the
State of Missouri.
These restrictions were, in the estimation of many thoughtful men, null
from the beginning, unauthorized by the Constitution, contrary to the
treaty stipulations for the cession of Louisiana, and inconsistent with the
equality of these States.
They had been stripped of all moral authority by persistent efforts to
procure their indirect repeal through contradictory enactments. They had
been practically abrogated by the legislation attending the organization of
Utah, New Mexico, and Washington. If any vitality remained in them it would
have been taken away, in effect, by the new Territorial acts in the form
originally proposed to the Senate at the first session of the last
Congress. It was manly and ingenuous, as well as patriotic and just, to do
this directly and plainly, and thus relieve the statute book of an act
which might be of possible future injury, but of no possible future
benefit; and the measure of its repeal was the final consummation and
complete recognition of the principle that no portion of the United States
shall undertake through assumption of the powers of the General Government
to dictate the social institutions of any other portion.
The scope and effect of the language of repeal were not left in doubt. It
was declared in terms to be "the true intent and meaning of this act not to
legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom,
but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their
domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of
the United States."
The measure could not be withstood upon its merits alone. It was attacked
with violence on the false or delusive pretext that it constituted a breach
of faith. Never was objection more utterly destitute of substantial
justification. When before was it imagined by sensible men that a
regulative or declarative statute, whether enacted ten or forty years ago,
is irrepealable; that an act of Congress is above the Constitution? If,
indeed, there were in the facts any cause to impute bad faith, it would
attach to those only who have never ceased, from the time of the enactment
of the restrictive provision to the present day, to denounce and condemn
it; who have constantly refused to complete it by needful supplementary
legislation; who have spared no exertion to deprive it of moral force; who
have themselves again and again attempted its repeal by the enactment of
incompatible provisions, and who, by the inevitable reactionary effect of
their own violence on the subject, awakened the country to perception of
the true constitutional principle of leaving the matter involved to the
discretion of the people of the respective existing or incipient States.
It is not pretended that this principle or any other precludes the
possibility of evils in practice, disturbed, as political action is liable
to be, by human passions. No form of government is exempt from
inconveniences; but in this case they are the result of the abuse, and not
of the legitimate exercise, of the powers reserved or conferred in the
organization of a Territory. They are not to be charged to the great
principle of popular sovereignty. On the contrary, they disappear before
the intelligence and patriotism of the people, exerting through the ballot
box their peaceful and silent but irresistible power.
If the friends of the Constitution are to have another struggle, its
enemies could not present a more acceptable issue than that of a State
whose constitution clearly embraces "a republican form of government" being
excluded from the Union because its domestic institutions may not in all
respects comport with the ideas of what is wise and expedient entertained
in some other State. Fresh from groundless imputations of breach of faith
against others, men will commence the agitation of this new question with
indubitable violation of an express compact between the independent
sovereign powers of the United States and of the Republic of Texas, as well
as of the older and equally solemn compacts which assure the equality of
all the States.
But deplorable as would be such a violation of compact in itself and in all
its direct consequences, that is the very least of the evils involved. When
sectional agitators shall have succeeded in forcing on this issue, can
their pretensions fail to be met by counter pretensions? Will not different
States be compelled, respectively, to meet extremes with extremes? And if
either extreme carry its point, what is that so far forth but dissolution
of the Union? If a new State, formed from the territory of the United
States, be absolutely excluded from admission therein, that fact of itself
constitutes the disruption of union between it and the other States. But
the process of dissolution could not stop there. Would not a sectional
decision producing such result by a majority of votes, either Northern or
Southern, of necessity drive out the oppressed and aggrieved minority and
place in presence of each other two irreconcilably hostile confederations?
It is necessary to speak thus plainly of projects the offspring of that
sectional agitation now prevailing in some of the States, which are as
impracticable as they are unconstitutional, and which if persevered in must
and will end calamitously. It is either disunion and civil war or it is
mere angry, idle, aimless disturbance of public peace and tranquillity.
Disunion for what? If the passionate rage of fanaticism and partisan spirit
did not force the fact upon our attention, it would be difficult to believe
that any considerable portion of the people of this enlightened country
could have so surrendered themselves to a fanatical devotion to the
supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States as
totally to abandon and disregard the interests of the 25,000,000 Americans;
to trample under foot the injunctions of moral and constitutional
obligation, and to engage in plans of vindictive hostility against those
who are associated with them in the enjoyment of the common heritage of our
national institutions.
Nor is it hostility against their fellow-citizens of one section of the
Union alone. The interests, the honor, the duty, the peace, and the
prosperity of the people of all sections are equally involved and imperiled
in this question. And are patriotic men in any part of the Union prepared
on such issue thus madly to invite all the consequences of the forfeiture
of their constitutional engagements? It is impossible. The storm of frenzy
and faction must inevitably dash itself in vain against the unshaken rock
of the Constitution. I shall never doubt it. I know that the Union is
stronger a thousand times than all the wild and chimerical schemes of
social change which are generated one after another in the unstable minds
of visionary sophists and interested agitators. I rely confidently on the
patriotism of the people, on the dignity and self-respect of the States, on
the wisdom of Congress, and, above all, on the continued gracious favor of
Almighty God to maintain against all enemies, whether at home or abroad,
the sanctity of the Constitution and the integrity of the Union.
***
State of the Union Address
Franklin Pierce
December 2, 1856
Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:
The Constitution requires that the President shall from time to time not
only recommend to the consideration of Congress such measures as he may
judge necessary and expedient, but also that he shall give information to
them of the state of the Union. To do this fully involves exposition of all
matters in the actual condition of the country, domestic or foreign, which
essentially concern the general welfare. While performing his
constitutional duty in this respect, the President does not speak merely to
express personal convictions, but as the executive minister of the
Government, enabled by his position and called upon by his official
obligations to scan with an impartial eye the interests of the whole and of
every part of the United States.
Of the condition of the domestic interests of the Union--its agriculture,
mines, manufactures, navigation, and commerce--it is necessary only to say
that the internal prosperity of the country, its continuous and steady
advancement in wealth and population and in private as well as public
well-being, attest the wisdom of our institutions and the predominant
spirit of intelligence and patriotism which, notwithstanding occasional
irregularities of opinion or action resulting from popular freedom, has
distinguished and characterized the people of America. In the brief
interval between the termination of the last and the commencement of the
present session of Congress the public mind has been occupied with the care
of selecting for another constitutional term the President and
Vice-President of the United States.
The determination of the persons who are of right, or contingently, to
preside over the administration of the Government is under our system
committed to the States and the people. We appeal to them, by their voice
pronounced in the forms of law, to call whomsoever they will to the high
post of Chief Magistrate.
And thus it is that as the Senators represent the respective States of the
Union and the members of the House of Representatives the several
constituencies of each State, so the President represents the aggregate
population of the United States. Their election of him is the explicit and
solemn act of the sole sovereign authority of the Union.
It is impossible to misapprehend the great principles which by their recent
political action the people of the United States have sanctioned and
announced.
They have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the
States of the Union as States: they have affirmed the constitutional
equality of each and all of the citizens of the United States as citizens,
whatever their religion, wherever their birth or their residence; they have
maintained the inviolability of the constitutional rights of the different
sections of the Union, and they have proclaimed their devoted and
unalterable attachment to the Union and to the Constitution, as objects of
interest superior to all subjects of local or sectional controversy, as the
safeguard of the rights of all, as the spirit and the essence of the
liberty, peace, and greatness of the Republic. In doing this they have at
the same time emphatically condemned the idea of organizing in these United
States mere geographical parties, of marshaling in hostile array toward
each other the different parts of the country, North or South, East or
West.
Schemes of this nature, fraught with incalculable mischief, and which the
considerate sense of the people has rejected, could have had countenance in
no part of the country had they not been disguised by suggestions plausible
in appearance, acting upon an excited state of the public mind, induced by
causes temporary in their character and, it is to be hoped, transient in
their influence.
Perfect liberty of association for political objects and the widest scope
of discussion are the received and ordinary conditions of government in our
country. Our institutions, framed in the spirit of confidence in the
intelligence and integrity of the people, do not forbid citizens, either
individually or associated together, to attack by writing, speech, or any
other methods short of physical force the Constitution and the very
existence of the Union. Under the shelter of this great liberty, and
protected by the laws and usages of the Government they assail,
associations have been formed in some of the States of individuals who,
pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery
into the present or future inchoate States of the Union, are really
inflamed with desire to change the domestic institutions of existing
States. To accomplish their objects they dedicate themselves to the odious
task of depreciating the government organization which stands in their way
and of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of
particular States with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their
fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in
their assaults upon the Constitution, framed and adopted by our fathers,
and claiming for the privileges it has secured and the blessings it has
conferred the steady support and grateful reverence of their children. They
seek an object which they well know to be a revolutionary one. They are
perfectly aware that the change in the relative condition of the white and
black races in the slaveholding States which they would promote is beyond
their lawful authority; that to them it is a foreign object; that it can
not be effected by any peaceful instrumentality of theirs; that for them
and the States of which they are citizens the only path to its
accomplishment is through burning cities, and ravaged fields, and
slaughtered populations, and all there is most terrible in foreign
complicated with civil and servile war; and that the first step in the
attempt is the forcible disruption of a country embracing in its broad
bosom a degree of liberty and an amount of individual and public prosperity
to which there is no parallel in history, and substituting in its place
hostile governments, driven at once and inevitably into mutual devastation
and fratricidal carnage, transforming the now peaceful and felicitous
brotherhood into a vast permanent camp of armed men like the rival
monarchies of Europe and Asia. Well knowing that such, and such only, are
the means and the consequences of their plans and purposes, they endeavor
to prepare the people of the United States for civil war by doing
everything in their power to deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral
authority and to undermine the fabric of the Union by appeals to passion
and sectional prejudice, by indoctrinating its people with reciprocal
hatred, and by educating them to stand face to face as enemies, rather than
shoulder to shoulder as friends.
It is by the agency of such unwarrantable interference, foreign and
domestic, that the minds of many otherwise good citizens have been so
inflamed into the passionate condemnation of the domestic institutions of
the Southern States as at length to pass insensibly to almost equally
passion late hostility toward their fellow-citizens of those States, and
thus finally to fall into temporary fellowship with the avowed and active
enemies of the Constitution. Ardently attached to liberty in the abstract,
they do not stop to consider practically how the objects they would attain
can be accomplished, nor to reflect that, even if the evil were as great as
they deem it, they have no remedy to apply, and that it can be only
aggravated by their violence and unconstitutional action. A question which
is one of the most difficult of all the problems of social institution,
political economy, and statesmanship they treat with unreasoning
intemperance of thought and language. Extremes beget extremes. Violent
attack from the North finds its inevitable consequence in the growth of a
spirit of angry defiance at the South. Thus in the progress of events we
had reached that consummation, which the voice of the people has now so
pointedly rebuked, of the attempt of a portion of the States, by a
sectional organization and movement, to usurp the control of the Government
of the United States.
I confidently believe that the great body of those who inconsiderately took
this fatal step are sincerely attached to the Constitution and the Union.
They would upon deliberation shrink with unaffected horror from any
conscious act of disunion or civil war. But they have entered into a path
which leads nowhere unless it be to civil war and disunion, and which has
no other possible outlet. They have proceeded thus far in that direction in
consequence of the successive stages of their progress having consisted of
a series of secondary issues, each of which professed to be confined within
constitutional and peaceful limits, but which attempted indirectly what few
men were willing to do directly; that is, to act aggressively against the
constitutional rights of nearly one-half of the thirty-one States.
In the long series of acts of indirect aggression, the first was the
strenuous agitation by citizens of the Northern States, in Congress and out
of it, of the question of Negro emancipation in the Southern States.
The second step in this path of evil consisted of acts of the people of the
Northern States, and in several instances of their governments, aimed to
facilitate the escape of persons held to service in the Southern States and
to prevent their extradition when reclaimed according to law and in virtue
of express provisions of the Constitution. To promote this object,
legislative enactments and other means were adopted to take away or defeat
rights which the Constitution solemnly guaranteed. In order to nullify the
then existing act of Congress concerning the extradition of fugitives from
service, laws were enacted in many States forbidding their officers, under
the severest penalties, to participate in the execution of any act of
Congress whatever. In this way that system of harmonious cooperation
between the authorities of the United States and of the several States, for
the maintenance of their common institutions, which existed in the early
years of the Republic was destroyed; conflicts of jurisdiction came to be
frequent, and Congress found itself compelled, for the support of the
Constitution and the vindication of its power, to authorize the appointment
of new officers charged with the execution of its acts, as if they and the
officers of the States were the ministers, respectively, of foreign
governments in a state of mutual hostility rather than fellow-magistrates
of a common country peacefully subsisting under the protection of one
well-constituted Union. Thus here also aggression was followed by reaction,
and the attacks upon the Constitution at this point did but serve to raise
up new barriers for its defense and security.
The third stage of this unhappy sectional controversy was in connection
with the organization of Territorial governments and the admission of new
States into the Union. When it was proposed to admit the State of Maine, by
separation of territory from that of Massachusetts, and the State of
Missouri, formed of a portion of the territory ceded by France to the
United States, representatives in Congress objected to the admission of the
latter unless with conditions suited to particular views of public policy.
The imposition of such a condition was successfully resisted; but at the
same period the question was presented of imposing restrictions upon the
residue of the territory ceded by France. That question was for the time
disposed of by the adoption of a geographical line of limitation.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 | 8 |
9 |
10 |
11