State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce
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Franklin Pierce >> State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce
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In this connection it should not be forgotten that when France, of her own
accord, resolved, for considerations of the most farsighted sagacity, to
cede Louisiana to the United States, and that accession was accepted by the
United States, the latter expressly engaged that "the inhabitants of the
ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and
admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the Federal
Constitution, to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and
immunities of citizens of the United States; and in the meantime they shall
be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty,
property, and the religion which they profess;" that is to say, while it
remains in a Territorial condition its inhabitants are maintained and
protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, with a right
then to pass into the condition of States on a footing of perfect equality
with the original States.
The enactment which established the restrictive geographical line was
acquiesced in rather than approved by the States of the Union. It stood on
the statute book, however, for a number of years; and the people of the
respective States acquiesced in the reenactment of the principle as applied
to the State of Texas, and it was proposed to acquiesce in its further
application to the territory acquired by the United States from Mexico. But
this proposition was successfully resisted by the representatives from the
Northern States, who, regardless of the statute line, insisted upon
applying restriction to the new territory generally, whether lying north or
south of it, thereby repealing it as a legislative compromise, and, on the
part of the North, persistently violating the compact, if compact there
was.
Thereupon this enactment ceased to have binding virtue in any sense,
whether as respects the North or the South, and so in effect it was treated
on the occasion of the admission of the State of California and the
organization of the Territories of New Mexico, Utah, and Washington.
Such was the state of this question when the time arrived for the
organization of the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska. In the progress of
constitutional inquiry and reflection it had now at length come to be seen
clearly that Congress does not possess constitutional power to impose
restrictions of this character upon any present or future State of the
Union. In a long series of decisions, on the fullest argument and after the
most deliberate consideration, the Supreme Court of the United States had
finally determined this point in every form under which the question could
arise, whether as affecting public or private rights--in questions of the
public domain, of religion, of navigation, and. of servitude.
The several States of the Union are by force of the Constitution coequal in
domestic legislative power. Congress can not change a law of domestic
relation in the State of Maine; no more can it in the State of Missouri.
Any statute which proposes to do this is a mere nullity; it takes away no
right, it confers none. If it remains on the statute book unrepealed, it
remains there only as a monument of error and a beacon of warning to the
legislator and the statesman. To repeal it will be only to remove
imperfection from the statutes, without affecting, either in the sense of
permission, or of prohibition, the action of the States or of their
citizens.
Still, when the nominal restriction of this nature, already a dead letter
in law, was in terms repealed by the last Congress, in a clause of the act
organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, that repeal was made the
occasion of a widespread and dangerous agitation. It was alleged that the
original enactment being a compact of perpetual moral obligation, its
repeal constituted an odious breach of faith. An act of Congress, while it
remains unrepealed, more especially if it be constitutionally valid in the
judgment of those public functionaries whose duty it is to pronounce on
that point, is undoubtedly binding on the conscience of each good citizen
of the Republic. But in what sense can it be asserted that the enactment in
question was invested with perpetuity and entitled to the respect of a
solemn Compact? Between whom was the compact? No distinct contending powers
of the Government, no separate sections of the Union treating as such,
entered into treaty stipulations on the subject. It was a mere clause of an
act of Congress, and, like any other controverted matter of legislation,
received its final shape and was passed by compromise of the conflicting
opinions or sentiments of the members of Congress. But if it had moral
authority over men's consciences, to whom did this authority attach? Not to
those of the North, who had repeatedly refused to confirm it by extension
and who had zealously striven to establish other and incompatible
regulations upon the subject. And if, as it thus appears, the supposed
compact had no obligatory force as to the North, of course it could not
have had any as to the South, for all such compacts must be mutual and of
reciprocal obligation.
It has not unfrequently happened that lawgivers, with undue estimation of
the value of the law they give or in the view of imparting to it peculiar
strength, make it perpetual in terms; but they can not thus bind the
conscience, the judgment, and the will of those who may succeed them,
invested with similar responsibilities and clothed with equal authority.
More careful investigation may prove the law to be unsound in principle.
Experience may show it to be imperfect in detail and impracticable in
execution. And then both reason and right combine not merely to justify but
to require its repeal.
The Constitution, supreme, as it is, over all the departments of the
Government--legislative, executive, and judicial--is open to amendment by
its very terms; and Congress or the States may, in their discretion,
propose amendment to it, solemn compact though it in truth is between the
sovereign States of the Union. In the present instance a political
enactment which had ceased to have legal power or authority of any kind was
repealed. The position assumed that Congress had no moral right to enact
such repeal was strange enough, and singularly so in view of the fact that
the argument came from those who openly refused obedience to existing laws
of the land, having the same popular designation and quality as. compromise
acts; nay, more, who unequivocally disregarded and condemned the most
positive and obligatory injunctions of the Constitution itself, and sought
by every means within their reach to deprive a portion of their
fellow-citizens of the equal enjoyment of those rights and privileges
guaranteed alike to all by the fundamental compact of our Union.
This argument against the repeal of the statute line in question was
accompanied by another of congenial character and equally with the former
destitute of foundation in reason and truth. It was imputed that the
measure originated in the conception of extending the limits of slave labor
beyond those previously assigned to it, and that such was its natural as
well as intended effect; and these baseless assumptions were made, in the
Northern States, the ground of unceasing assault upon constitutional
right.
The repeal in terms of a statute, which was already obsolete and also null
for unconstitutionality, could have no influence to obstruct or to promote
the propagation of conflicting views of political or social institution.
When the act organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska was passed,
the inherent effect upon that portion of the public domain thus opened to
legal settlement was to admit settlers from all the States of the Union
alike, each with his convictions of public policy and private interest,
there to found, in their discretion, subject to such limitations as the
Constitution and acts of Congress might prescribe, new States, hereafter to
be admitted into the Union. It was a free field, open alike to all, whether
the statute line of assumed restriction were repealed or not. That repeal
did not open to free competition of the diverse opinions and domestic
institutions a field which without such repeal would have been closed
against them; it found that field of competition already opened, in fact
and in law. All the repeal did was to relieve the statute book of an
objectionable enactment, unconstitutional in effect and injurious in terms
to a large portion of the States.
Is it the fact that in all the unsettled regions of the United States, if
emigration be left free to act in this respect for itself, without legal
prohibitions on either side, slave labor will spontaneously go everywhere
in preference to free labor? Is it the fact that the peculiar domestic
institutions of the Southern States possess relatively so much of vigor
that wheresoever an avenue is freely opened to all the world they will
penetrate to the exclusion of those of the Northern States? Is it the fact
that the former enjoy, compared with the latter, such irresistibly superior
vitality, independent of climate, soil, and all other accidental
circumstances, as to be able to produce the supposed result in spite of the
assumed moral and natural obstacles to its accomplishment and of the more
numerous population of the Northern States? The argument of those who
advocate the enactment of new laws of restriction and condemn the repeal of
old ones in effect avers that their particular views of government have no
self-extending or self-sustaining power of their own, and will go nowhere
unless forced by act of Congress. And if Congress do but pause for a moment
in the policy of stern coercion; if it venture to try the experiment of
leaving men to judge for themselves what institutions will best suit them;
if it be not strained up to perpetual legislative exertion on this
point--if Congress proceed thus to act in the very spirit of liberty, it is
at once charged with aiming to extend slave labor into all the new
Territories of the United States.
Of course these imputations on the intentions of Congress in this respect,
conceived, as they were, in prejudice and disseminated in passion, are
utterly destitute of any justification in the nature of things and contrary
to all the fundamental doctrines and principles of civil liberty and
self-government.
While, therefore, in general, the people of the Northern States have never
at any time arrogated for the Federal Government the power to interfere
directly with the domestic condition of persons in the Southern States,
but, on the contrary, have disavowed all such intentions and have shrunk
from conspicuous affiliation with those few who pursue their fanatical
objects avowedly through the contemplated means of revolutionary change of
the Government and with acceptance of the necessary consequences--a civil
and servile war--yet many citizens have suffered themselves to be drawn
into one evanescent political issue of agitation after another,
appertaining to the same set of opinions, and which subsided as rapidly as
they arose when it came to be seen, as it uniformly did, that they were
incompatible with the compacts of the Constitution and the existence of the
Union. Thus when the acts of some of the States to nullify the existing
extradition law imposed upon Congress the duty of passing a new one, the
country was invited by agitators to enter into party organization for its
repeal; but that agitation speedily ceased by reason of the
impracticability of its object. So when the statute restriction upon the
institutions of new States by a geographical line had been repealed, the
country was urged to demand its restoration, and that project also died
almost with its birth. Then followed the cry of alarm from the North
against imputed Southern encroachmeats, which cry sprang in reality from
the spirit of revolutionary attack on the domestic institutions of the
South, and, after a troubled existence of a few months, has been rebuked by
the voice of a patriotic people.
Of this last agitation, one lamentable feature was that it was carried on
at the immediate expense of the peace and happiness of the people of the
Territory of Kansas. That was made the battlefield, not so much of opposing
factions or interests within itself as of the conflicting passions of the
whole people of the United States. Revolutionary disorder in Kansas had its
origin in projects of intervention deliberately arranged by certain members
of that Congress which enacted the law for the organization of the
Territory; and when propagandist colonization of Kansas had thus been
undertaken in one section of the Union for the systematic promotion of its
peculiar views of policy there ensued as a matter of course a counteraction
with opposite views in other sections of the Union.
In consequence of these and other incidents, many acts of disorder, it is
undeniable, have been perpetrated in Kansas, to the occasional interruption
rather than the permanent suspension of regular government. Aggressive and
most reprehensible incursions into the Territory were undertaken both in
the North and the South, and entered it on its northern border by the way
of Iowa, as well as on the eastern by way of Missouri; and there has
existed within it a state of insurrection against the constituted
authorities, not without countenance from inconsiderate persons in each of
the great sections of the Union. But the difficulties in that Territory
have been extravagantly exaggerated for purposes of political agitation
elsewhere. The number and gravity of the acts of violence have been
magnified partly by statements entirely untrue and partly by reiterated
accounts of the same rumors or facts. Thus the Territory has been seemingly
filled with extreme violence, when the whole amount of such acts has not
been greater than what occasionally passes before us in single cities to
the regret of all good citizens, but without being regarded as of general
or permanent political consequence.
Imputed irregularities in the elections had in Kansas, like occasional
irregularities of the same description in the States, were beyond the
sphere of action of the Executive. But incidents of actual violence or of
organized obstruction of law, pertinaciously renewed from time to time,
have been met as they occurred by such means as were available and as the
circumstances required, and nothing of this character now remains to affect
the general peace of the Union. The attempt of a part of the inhabitants of
the Territory to erect a revolutionary government, though sedulously
encouraged and supplied with pecuniary aid from active agents of disorder
in some of the States, has completely failed. Bodies of armed men, foreign
to the Territory, have been prevented from entering or compelled to leave
it; predatory bands, engaged in acts of rapine under cover of the existing
political disturbances, have been arrested or dispersed, and every
well-disposed person is now enabled once more to devote himself in peace to
the pursuits of prosperous industry, for the prosecution of which he
undertook to participate in the settlement of the Territory.
It affords me unmingled satisfaction thus to announce the peaceful
condition of things in Kansas, especially considering the means to which it
was necessary to have recourse for the attainment of the end, namely, the
employment of a part of the military force of the United States. The
withdrawal of that force from its proper duty of defending the country
against foreign foes or the savages of the frontier to employ it for the
suppression of domestic insurrection is, when the exigency occurs, a matter
of the most earnest solicitude. On this occasion of imperative necessity it
has been done with the best results, and my satisfaction in the attainment
of such results by such means is greatly enhanced by the consideration
that, through the wisdom and energy of the present executive of Kansas and
the prudence, firmness, and vigilance of the military officers on duty
there tranquillity has been restored without one drop of blood having been
shed in its accomplishment by the forces of the United States.
The restoration of comparative tranquillity in that Territory furnishes the
means of observing calmly and appreciating at their just value the events
which have occurred there and the discussions of which the government of
the Territory has been the subject. We perceive that controversy concerning
its future domestic institutions was inevitable; that no human prudence, no
form of legislation, no wisdom on the part of Congress, could have
prevented it.
It is idle to suppose that the particular provisions of their organic law
were the cause of agitation. Those provisions were but the occasion, or the
pretext, of an agitation which was inherent in the nature of things.
Congress legislated upon the subject in such terms as were most consonant
with the principle of popular sovereignty which underlies our Government.
It could not have legislated otherwise without doing violence to another
great principle of our institutions--the imprescriptible right of equality
of the several States.
We perceive also that sectional interests and party passions have been the
great impediment to the salutary operation of the organic principles
adopted and the chief cause of the successive disturbances in Kansas. The
assumption that because in the organization of the Territories of Nebraska
and Kansas Congress abstained from imposing restraints upon them to which
certain other Territories had been subject, therefore disorders occurred in
the latter Territory, is emphatically contradicted by the fact that none
have occurred in the former. Those disorders were not the consequence, in
Kansas, of the freedom of self-government conceded to that Territory by
Congress, but of unjust interference on the part of persons not inhabitants
of the Territory. Such interference, wherever it has exhibited itself by
acts of insurrectionary character or of obstruction to process of law, has
been repelled or suppressed by all the means which the Constitution and the
laws place in the hands of the Executive.
In those parts of the United States where, by reason of the inflamed state
of the public mind, false rumors and misrepresentations have the greatest
currency it has been assumed that it was the duty of the Executive not only
to suppress insurrectionary movements in Kansas, but also to see to the
regularity of local elections. It needs little argument to show that the
President has no such power. All government in the United States rests
substantially upon popular election. The freedom of elections is liable to
be impaired by the intrusion of unlawful votes or the exclusion of lawful
ones, by improper influences, by violence, or by fraud. But the people of
the United States are themselves the all sufficient guardians of their own
rights, and to suppose that they will not remedy in due season any such
incidents of civil freedom is to suppose them to have ceased to be capable
of self-government. The President of the United States has not power to
interpose in elections, to see to their freedom, to canvass their votes, or
to pass upon their legality in the Territories any more than in the States.
If he had such power the Government might be republican in form, but it
would be a monarchy in fact; and if he had undertaken to exercise it in the
case of Kansas he would have been justly subject to the charge of
usurpation and of violation of the dearest rights of the people of the
United States.
Unwise laws, equally with irregularities at elections, are in periods of
great excitement the occasional incidents of even the freest and best
political institutions; but all experience demonstrates that in a country
like ours, where the right of self-constitution exists in the completest
form, the attempt to remedy unwise legislation by resort to revolution is
totally out of place, inasmuch as existing legal institutions afford more
prompt and efficacious means for the redress of wrong.
I confidently trust that now, when the peaceful condition of Kansas affords
opportunity for calm reflection and wise legislation, either the
legislative assembly of the Territory or Congress will see that no act
shall remain on its statute book violative of the provisions of the
Constitution or subversive of the great objects for which that was ordained
and established, and will take all other necessary steps to assure to its
inhabitants the enjoyment, without obstruction or abridgment, of all the
constitutional rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens of the United
States, as contemplated by the organic law of the Territory.
Full information in relation to recent events in this Territory will be
found in the documents communicated herewith from the Departments of State
and War.
I refer you to the report of the Secretary of the Treasury for particular
information concerning the financial condition of the Government and the
various branches of the public service connected with the Treasury
Department.
During the last fiscal year the receipts from customs were for the first
time more than $64,000,000, and from all sources $73,918,141, which, with
the balance on hand up to the 1st of July, 1855, made the total resources
of the year amount to $92,850,117. The expenditures, including $3,000,000
in execution of the treaty with Mexico and excluding sums paid on account
of the public debt, amounted to $60,172,401, and including the latter to
$72,948,792, the payment on this account having amounted to $12,776,390.
On the 4th of March, 1853, the amount of the public debt was $69,129,937.
There was a subsequent increase of $2,750,000 for the debt of Texas, making
a total of $71,879,937. Of this the sum of $45,525,319, including premium,
has been discharged, reducing the debt to $30,963,909, all which might be
paid within a year without embarrassing the public service, but being not
yet due and only redeemable at the option of the holder, can not be pressed
to payment by the Government.
On examining the expenditures of the last five years it will be seen that
the average, deducting payments on account of the public debt and
$10,000,000 paid by treaty to Mexico, has been but about $48,000,000. It is
believed that under an economical administration of the Government the
average expenditure for the ensuing five years will not exceed that sum,
unless extraordinary occasion for its increase should occur. The acts
granting bounty lands will soon have been executed, while the extension of
our frontier settlements will cause a continued demand for lands and
augmented receipts, probably, from that source. These considerations will
justify a reduction of the revenue from customs so as not to exceed
forty-eight or fifty million dollars. I think the exigency for such
reduction is imperative, and again urge it upon the consideration of
Congress.
The amount of reduction, as well as the manner of effecting it, are
questions of great and general interest, it being essential to industrial
enterprise and the public prosperity, as well as the dictate of obvious
justice, that the burden of taxation be made to rest as equally as possible
upon all classes and all sections and interests of the country.
I have heretofore recommended to your consideration the revision of the
revenue laws, prepared under the direction of the Secretary of the
Treasury, and also legislation upon some special questions affecting the
business of that Department, more especially the enactment of a law to
punish the abstraction of official books or papers from the files of the
Government and requiring all such books and papers and all other public
property to be turned over by the outgoing officer to his successor; of a
law requiring disbursing officers to deposit all public money in the vaults
of the Treasury or in other legal depositories, where the same are
conveniently accessible, and a law to extend existing penal provisions to
all persons who may become possessed of public money by deposit or
otherwise and who shall refuse or neglect on due demand to pay the same
into the Treasury. I invite your attention anew to each of these objects.
The Army during the past year has been so constantly employed against
hostile Indians in various quarters that it can scarcely be said, with
propriety of language, to have been a peace establishment. Its duties have
been satisfactorily performed, and we have reason to expect as a result of
the year's operations greater security to the frontier inhabitants than has
been hitherto enjoyed. Extensive combinations among the hostile Indians of
the Territories of Washington and Oregon at one time threatened the
devastation of the newly formed settlements of that remote portion of the
country. From recent information we are permitted to hope that the
energetic and successful operations conducted there will prevent such
combinations in future and secure to those Territories an opportunity to
make steady progress in the development of their agricultural and mineral
resources.
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