Speech of Hon. S. A. Douglas, of Illinois, on the State of the Union

Excerpt from Speech of Hon. S. A. Douglas, of Illinois, on the State of the Union: Delivered in the Senate, January 3, 1861 Mr. Douglas said: Mr. President: No act of my public life has ever caused me so much regret as the necessity of voting in the special committee of thirteen for the resolution reporting to the Senate our inability to agree upon any general plan of adjustment, which would restore peace to the country and insure the integrity of the Union. If we wish to understand the real causes which have produced such wide-spread and deep-seated discontent in the slaveholding States, we must go back beyond the recent presidential election, and trace the origin and history of the slavery agitation from the period when it first became an active element in Federal politics. Without fatiguing the Senate with tedious details, I may be permitted to assume, without the fear of successful contradiction, that whenever the Federal Government has attempted to decide and control the slavery question in the newly acquired Territories, regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants, alienation of feeling, sectional strife, and discord have ensued; and whenever Congress has refrained from such interference, harmony and fraternal feeling have been restored. The whole volume of our nation's history may be confidently appealed to in support of this proposition. The most memorable instances are the fearful sectional controversies which brought the Union to the verge of disruption in 1820, and again in 1850. It was the territorial question in each case which presented the chief points of difficulty, because it involved the irritating question of the relative political power of the two sections. All the other questions, which entered into and served to increase the slavery agitation, were deemed of secondary importance, and dwindled into insignificance so soon as the territorial question was definitely settled. From the period of the organization of the Federal Government, under the Constitution, in 1789, down to 1820, all the territorial governments had been organized upon the basis of non-interference by Congress with the domestic institutions of the people. During that period several new Territories were organized, including Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, and Alabama. In no one of these Territories did Congress attempt to interfere with the question of slavery, either to introduce or exclude, protect or prohibit it. During the whole of this period there was peace and good-will between the people of all parts of the Union so far as the question of slavery was concerned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.