Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution
Kay Dickinson
Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema
Series Editors
Samirah Alkassim
The Jerusalem Fund for Education & Community Development
Washington, DC, USA
Nezar Andary College of Humanities and Social Sciences
Zayed University
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
This series presents new perspectives and intimate analyses of Arab cinema. Providing distinct and unique scholarship, books in the series focus on well-known and new auteurs, historical and contemporary movements, specific films, and significant moments in Arab and North African film history and cultures. The use of multi-disciplinary and documentary methods creates an intimate contact with the diverse cultures and cinematic modes and genres of the Arab world. Primary documents and new interviews with directors and film professionals form a significant part of this series, which views filmmakers as intellectuals in their respective historical, geographic, and cultural contexts. Combining rigorous analysis with material documents and visual evidence, the authors address pertinent issues linking film texts to film studies and other disciplines. In tandem, this series will connect specific books to online access to films and digital material, providing future researchers and students with a hub to explore filmmakers, genres, and subjects in Arab cinema in greater depth, and provoking readers to see new frames of transnational cultures and cinemas.
More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15594
Kay Dickinson
Arab Film and Video Manifestos
Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution
Kay Dickinson
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Concordia University
Montreal, QC, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema
ISBN 978-3-319-99800-8 ISBN 978-3-319-99801-5 (eBook)
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Acknowledgements
The authors of the five manifestos collected in this book all recognize “their” writings as profoundly communal endeavours. The words around these manifestos derive, similarly, from collective effort, only a fraction of which can be attributed by name. Gary Crowdus, Yasmin Desouki, Alisa Lebow, Scott Mackenzie, Khalil Maqdisi, Kamran Rastegar, Philip Rizk, Stefan Tarnowski, Nadia Yaqub and Mohanad Yaqubi variously shared primary documents, helped with permissions, pointed out pertinent directions and sharpened the arguments and analyses. I could not have hoped for more able and politically committed translation collaborators than Samiha Khalil and Fadi Abu Ne’meh. For their patience, support and guidance, thanks to this book’s series editors, Samirah Alkassim and Nezar Andary, as well as Glenn Ramirez and Shaun Vigil at Palgrave. My heartfelt gratitude extends to everyone at SPi Global who contributed to the copy-editing, type-setting and production of this book.
Chapter 1’s ideas about the manifesto form were test run at the Populism: Seminar in Media and Political Theory at Concordia University and the Konstanz Feminist Forum. My appreciation extends to everyone who participated, offered insightful feedback and gamely chanted slogans or speed-wrote manifestos there.
I would not wish the completion of a book in little more than six months on anyone, and yet, in no small way, I did. I am immeasurably obliged to Rosalie Amanda Alston, Luca Caminati, Christine Dickinson, Lee Grieveson, Sima Kokotović and Masha Salazkina for reading this manuscript at break-neck speed so I could meet my deadline. I hope I have
honoured their insightful suggestions. I do not know what I would have done without them, in this respect and many others.
Lastly, this book comes from and is dedicated to the “Arab Revolutions” MA Film Studies class at Concordia University, past, present and future. We conduct this praxis together, you always more boldly and imaginatively than me.
The following manifestos are reprinted here with permission from previous publishers:
“Resolution of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting Algiers,” Dec. 5–14 (1973). Cineaste Pamphlet No. 1 (1974).
Mosireen. “Revolution Triptych.” In Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East, edited by Anthony Downey, 47–52. London: I.B.Tauris, 2014. I also thank Mosireen directly for their permission.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) made the political choice not to copyright “The Cinema and the Revolution.” I am nevertheless very grateful to everyone at PFLP English for their assistance and solidarity.
Praise for Arab Film and Video Manifestos
“Making clear the connections between pan-Arabism, tricontinentalism, the NonAligned Movement, and anti-imperialist struggles of the region, these five manifestos help us understand the longue durée of radical cinema movements in the Middle East and their global interpenetrations. For those of us who consider ourselves students of radical and militant cinema, this collection of previously unpublished manifestos from the Arab world is like encountering a mythical beast: we had heard of their existence but few of us had ever seen them. This book is both resource and inspiration and Dickinson’s well-researched and beautifully written essays help to contextualise these precious documents. A timely publication for our troubled times.”
—Alisa Lebow, author of Filming Revolution
4
Within Armed Struggle: “Manifesto of the
and Popular Front for
list of figures
Fig. 2.1 The Sparrow: Bahiyya and Johnny watch Nasser’s resignation speech
Fig. 3.1 The Pan-African Festival of Algiers: Performers and audience unite in dance
Fig. 4.1 The Palestine Film Unit
Fig. 4.2 They Do Not Exist: Guerrilla fighters read letters from the refugee camps
Fig. 5.1 Why Riot?: Molotov cocktails are distributed
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CHAPTER
1
Why the Manifesto?
Abstract This chapter explores how the manifesto form aims not to interpret the world, but to change it. It investigates how the manifesto became a popular format in the Arab world, one with particular commitment to anti-colonial liberation. The rousing stylistic potential of the manifesto genre receives attention, as does the group authorship of the five documents collected within the subsequent chapters. These manifestos interweave different temporal registers in order to challenge a debilitating conceptualization of history. They also invoke a sense of “the people” so vital for collective struggle. By presenting highly practical suggestions, these manifestos suggest how that struggle might be enacted and what sorts of brighter futures they can bring into being.
Keywords Manifesto • Revolution • Arab historiography • “The people” • Communal writing
What can writing about the moving image accomplish? The five film and video manifestos compiled in this volume hold high hopes for the answer to that question, as well as for the moving image’s own capacity to foment profound change. Not for the manifesto the small-scale modesty or narrowly evaluative focus familiar from academic or critical expression. These documents ask: what can film do for society? And vice versa? Although they
K. Dickinson, Arab Film and Video Manifestos, Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99801-5_1
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span a forty-five-year period (1968–2013) and hail from a range of different places (Egypt, international gatherings in Algeria, Palestine in exile), each urges, and puts faith in, a radical role for film or video’s role in culture and politics. Their authors hitch their ambitions to a particular genre of writing that they deem laden with possibility. To fully grasp the promise they find in it, this introductory chapter examines the capacities of the manifesto form itself, its ways and means, as well as its particular status in the Arab world.
First and foremost, a manifesto is a public declaration of intentions. The five upcoming documents decline to cower in reticently analytical registers because they have serious political work to accomplish. They compel us to see things as they are and as they should be, to convert, to act and, in the particular examples selected for this anthology, to join the revolution, through cinema and all other ways. They are nourished by a deep rooting in the political openings of their times and in their discernment of the transformative facilities of mass culture. Their writers stand up as committed militants in the wars against colonization, trade inequality and social injustice. They challenge the unjust means by which moving images circulate as commodities, and the confining pronouncements and misrepresentations in which they transact. They pull us straight to the heart of how film workers themselves understand the medium; its traditions, processes, practices and industries; its methods of communication and dissemination.
In reaching further than most writing about cinema, they surpass criticality for revolutionary intention. They do not stop short at emphatically pronouncing what is wrong. In almost the same breath, they compel practical means for change and concrete plans for acting otherwise. Their avowed participation in broader politics stimulates their concoction of correctives and solutions, dreams and perfect scenarios, simultaneous to their onslaught against oppression. As a genre, the manifesto denounces past mistakes and tragedies, fidgets uneasily and impatiently in an inadequate present and dares to project an unambiguous, tangible, preferable future. These five manifestos help formulate alternative social imaginaries of which a new horizon for cinema is merely one feature. Film workers here decisively articulate what they want from and for their medium; its capacity as a weapon in the struggle for freedom; how, in the immediate, it can function otherwise; and its place when that freedom is attained. Rarely is writing about cinema so dedicated to reform. Rarely does it call on us so unequivocally to join collective forces to demand what is due us all.
Doing justice to the manifesto’s reach into the future, this book advocates for something more than appreciating writings from the past as a window into bygone days. For certain, these five manifestos unlock, through their direct participation, valuable insights into broader liberation movements, from pan-Arabism and Third Worldism to the Palestinian struggle and the so-called Arab Spring. Yet the very circumstances prompting these mobilizations, the injustices they remonstrate, largely persist. This being the case, these manifestos remain vibrantly pertinent in their proposals about everything from decolonization and governmental oppression to the nuts and bolts of financing, distribution, audience activation, intellectual property and the social purpose of the filmmaker. The futures they model still have much to offer and hence the drive to bring them new readers.
Their infectious fighting spirit rouses us to explore the potential writing itself can activate. If manifestos contribute to more ambitious political mobilization, can historical analysis (of them) too? From within the discourses of revolutionary Arab historiography, the response to this question would be a resounding “yes.” As just one proponent of such activity, the Moroccan intellectual Abdallah Laroui, coming to the fore as part of the national liberation efforts of the 1960s, latches onto the past’s “instability, that constant changing of historical perspective,” the same restlessness familiar from the manifesto (Laroui 1970: 66). Laroui refuses to conceive of history as finished or as a static picture. For him, this interpretation colludes with the pinioning objectives of imperialism, its ambition to detain the Arab world in a stagnancy that is altogether easier to dismiss and control (see, for instance, Laroui 1970: 131, 136, 166–168). Instead, historiographers of his ilk throw themselves into history’s dynamism, particularly the forces that pit themselves against foreign domination (also a primary aggressor for our five manifestos). Another scholar, Youssef M. Choueiri, summarizes Laroui’s approach as one that “unleashes [history] into the turbulent passage of becoming. Its qualities are constantly changing in the whirlwind of conquests, invasions, and uprisings” (Choueiri 2003: 193). History simultaneously reveals, informs, reinforces and enacts struggle as it takes shape and transmogrifies. Through history, through its manifestos and fuelled by their vitality, entreaties from the past can open us to liberation as active participants within that history and what lies ahead of it.
Accordingly, this introduction first gauges how the manifesto became a popular format in the Arab world and assesses how these specificities of
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regional history might energize the present and future. The chapter then spends time within what the manifesto’s style of writing can induce, the potential surging-out of the form itself. Further in, the temporalities that the manifesto draws together are assessed: its interrelationship of past, present and future. Amidst all this, how does the manifesto fashion an “us” so vital for collective struggle? How does it speak out to but also create publics against and through which to achieve its objectives? All five manifestos compiled here were written communally. They thus fundamentally challenge individualistic expression in favour of speaking collectively about how an expansive implied “we” should act. Lastly, the closing section involves itself in how manifestos present their objectives as achievable through highly practical suggestions. They do so by encouraging at the same time as embodying filmmaking and writing praxis (the integration of theory and practice). In so doing, they fold their own activities into their desired templates for social, cultural, political and economic life. This introduction suspends the urge to discuss the role particular movies have played in these activities in order to dedicate its energies to the much less studied capabilities of the manifesto itself. As each primary document is introduced in the subsequent chapters, case study films will be drawn in so that cinematic output can be recognized as, of course, a central contributor to these manifestos’ revolutionary milieux.
Manifest History, Manifesto History
The Arab world is a place where manifestos have gained strong purchase historically. Indeed, a number of popular accounts of the ancestry of the manifesto cite the Baghdad Manifesto of 1011 as the genre’s genesis point. In reality, this text is more of an edict: the Abbasid caliphate declaiming the divine ascendancy of the Fatimid dynasty. All the same, tracing the manifesto’s lineage from this point encourages an acknowledgement of the genre’s sustained and efficacious presence across this part of the world. Manifestos, as will become apparent, have proven themselves a central component of political operations in the region.
From the outset, we have to concede that “manifesto” is not an Arabic word. We find an opening here, rather than a closure. What, in English (and other languages), we would ascribe to the manifesto is work typically done in the region by the term bayan, whose semantics are more capacious and enabling. Bayan means not just manifesto but also declaration, statement, communiqué and even inventory. This constellation insinuates and
formally encourages the listing of objectives that these types of documents embrace. Like so many Arabic words, bayan derives from a three-letter verbal root that proliferates an array of associated connotations. In this case, the root is b-y-n, a designation from whose kernel spring a number of other related connotations: to be evident, totally separate, make clear (form 2 of the verb, for Arabic speakers), to set forth, and discriminate (form 3), as well as further nouns implying rhetoric and eloquence. All these sibling meanings stoke manifestos’ clarity, flourish and demarcation of severance as they spiral outwards from its Arabic iterations. They offer expanded possibilities for the genre as a tool of revolution, cinematic and beyond. Etymology here cultivates various qualities that become exceedingly advantageous to the formulation of political gesture. Pronouncement binds with itemized stipulation and ideals with concrete backing.
It is no wonder, then, that recent Arab history is awash with manifestos, from Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book of 1975—part political agenda, part jumble of aphorisms, an everyday presence in media and education during its author’s dictatorship—to Hezbollah’s of 2009. Practically every political presence in the region has entered public discourse via this format and a not infrequent number mention the media. The Constitution of the Ba‘ath Party of 1947, at that point a manifesto, but latterly a founding discourse of governance, even explicitly petitions for media usage “which will be nationalist, Arab, free, progressive, comprehensive, profound, and humane in its goals” and thereby “improve the lot of the people” (“The Constitution of the Arab Resurrection. (Ba‘ath) Socialist Party of Syria,” 1959: 199, 200). Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, also drew film into his public declarations. His 1947 open letter statement, “Toward the Light,” for instance, encompasses a call for “The surveillance of theatres and cinemas, and a rigorous selection of plays and films” into a thirty-point list of what needs to be done regarding “the social and educational” (Al-Banna 1978: 127). Here we stray far from the beliefs of the five manifestos compiled in this volume, their writers often in direct confrontation with these parties and figures. The aim of citing them is to underscore the concentration and diversity of manifestos, not their similarities.
Yet, all these declarations, and many more, stem from the particular shape of modern Arab history, one that confirms Laroui’s insistence on immanence and struggle. This is not a region marked by slow, plodding democratic evolution. Instead, it has been wrought by imperialism and other despotisms, where revolutions are conjured in the mind, on paper, then enacted. Sometimes the manifesto even converts to doctrine via
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successful ascendance to power, as has been the case in Syria. However precarious or risky, these situations-in-waiting propagate a common people and a common ground into and for which rebellious proclamations can be dispatched. The planning of revolutionary action is well rehearsed in the Arab world and finds its iterations in the realms of filmmaking too, as well as the arts more generally (for a fuller account of the Arab literary manifestos, see Halim 1991; for the arts movements of the mid-twentieth century, LaCoss 2009–2010 and 2010; and for primary visual arts documents, including manifestos, Lenssen et al. 2018).
Once in power, many of the region’s regimes have then followed programmatic, statist inscriptions for the future: the sort of long-term projections that a stable government (often through refusal of meaningful elections) can envision without more democratic negotiations, blockages and compromises. These plans are regularly delivered in manifesto-like forms that reiterate incipient declarations. An example here would be President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt’s National Charter, which proposed constitutional, political, social and economic reforms that soon followed on from its publication in 1964. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, centralized planning reigned with the governments of Egypt (under Nasser), Algeria and Syria, redistributing agricultural land and reforming education, healthcare and labour according to scientific socialist principles. Even regimes much further to the right, such as those in the Gulf, have coordinated life from the top down (although certainly not through manifestos), with the state insisting itself as the primary organizer of public life. From all corners, the development, progress and good of the citizen have thereby been sculpted according to a staged rolling-out of a calculated and calculable future. This understanding of time overlaps in many ways with how temporality is characterized in the manifesto’s sense of practical change. When the film and video manifestos to come rise up against these political formations, they pointedly do so by way of a format that is common to both sides. Some manifestos explicitly affiliate with political organizations (as is the case for one of the Palestinian documents found in Chap. 4), and here they can work to propagate party programmes across the cinematic realm.
Indeed, the post-independence regimes of the mid-twentieth century significantly impacted cinema, including through nationalization of its industries in countries like Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Egypt. Further details of this process will be elaborated in subsequent chapters. These circumscriptions of cinema in some of the major film-producing countries of the region
reveal not only how the moving image regularly supposed itself to be a direct tool of the people but also how close filmmakers and their output have resided to the forces of anti-colonial national liberation. By the same token, the lull in manifesto writing witnessed from the 1980s to the 2000s tellingly occurs in parallel to a wholesale onslaught by supranational organizations like the International Monetary Fund (through their Structural Adjustment Programs) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to whom countries such as Egypt are hamstrung for disbursements. Both enforced similarly top-down privatization and deregulation that fractured civic cohesion and socialist planning, the altogether more fecund environment for manifesto writing. Making “unreasonable” demands sits low on the list of attributes encouraged by such neoliberal ideology. It should not go unregistered, though, that broader civil society movements, such as the “Damascus Spring” of 2000, were spearheaded by the intelligentsia. The Damascus Spring’s two public proclamations (bayan in name)—the “Statement of 99” and “The Statement of 2,000”—demanded legislative, electoral, political, gender and freedom of speech reform along with the rescinding of emergency law of then newly in power Bashar al-Assad. Both documents were signed by a roster of the country’s most eminent (and heretofore state-sponsored) filmmakers. Taking stock of this period, if the twentieth century was anyway a time when artists the world over issued manifestos, the Arab countries’ historical parameters provided the scope for film manifestos to hammer up some particularly political demands. These have been guided, as each chapter will reveal, by liberation movements of often a socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-autocratic Third Worldist and/or pan-Arab persuasion. The sorts of film movements to which they contribute—such as militant or Third Cinema—comprehensively conscribe filmmaking as committed revolutionary action. The propulsions of the unfinished national liberation, internationalist and Global Southern solidarity struggles to which they dedicate their efforts prevail. These manifestos can therefore continue to spur change through their especially compelling propositions.
style as substance
But how, precisely, are such messages, which leap into an incalculable public space but with lucid projections for its future, delivered? What are the particular tonalities and contours that distinguish and impel the manifesto format? As this section will elaborate, the very means by which the
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manifesto communicates seeks to call its demands into being. The art of writing (and the filmmaking it imagines) is imbued with and imbue actual aspirations for the grander scheme of life.
The manifesto issues both proclamatory and directive messages written coherently for public digestion. From Mosireen, whose “Revolution Triptych” appears in Chap. 5, we hear:
we too must take over the decrepit world of image creation.
The images are not ours, the images are the revolution’s.
How dare we trade in images of resistance to a system that we would feed by selling them?
How dare we perpetuate the cycle of private property in a battle that calls for the downfall of that very system?
How dare we profit from the mangled bodies, the cries of death of mothers who lost their children?
The manifesto’s daring, provocative claims arrive with urgency, even exuberance, as well as ultimatum. Assumptions are contested, a move that alienates the reader from a comfortable status quo and hastens them towards the horizon of the manifesto’s demands. With this first gesture, the manifesto categorically establishes what is wrong (an accusatory voice can prevail). Then typically follows what needs to be done, why and for whom. A later section of this chapter traces how this “us” unfurls beyond simply its authors to a greater sense of the people, the dimensions of whom vary from text to text.
Clarity stands as one of the manifesto’s abiding and imperative characteristics. A manifesto gets nowhere if it obfuscates its aims or what we are compelled to do, if it does not speak intelligibly to its intended audience. Lists, bullet points and ultimata feature regularly, while brevity and directness guide us to endpoints at greater speed. Delivery might be reiterative to drive home certain points, and replication of format itself becomes strategic. As Janet Lyon, a scholar of manifestos, illuminates:
the repetition of these structures and locutions across myriad political epochs attests to the form’s capacity to serve as a multiaccentual ideological sign, one that can be evoked in any number of struggles, on any number of sides. Such ‘multiaccentuality’ contributes to the manifesto’s continued use as an emblem of political combat: to write a manifesto is to participate symbolically in a history of struggle against dominant forces; it is to link one’s voice to the countless voices of previous revolutionary conflicts. (Lyon 1999: 3–4)
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
Speech of Henry W. Davis, of Maryland,
On the Mission of the American Party.
E from Mr. Davis’s speech in the House of Representatives, on the 6th of Jan., 1857, on the results of the recent Presidential election:
“The great lesson is taught by this election that both the parties which rested their hopes on sectional hostility, stand at this day condemned by the great majority of the country, as common disturbers of the public peace of the country.
“The Republican party was a hasty levy, en masse, of the Northern people to repel or revenge an intrusion by Northern votes alone. With its occasion it must pass away. The gentlemen of the Republican side of the House can now do nothing. They can pass no law excluding slavery from Kansas in the next Congress—for they are in a minority. Within two years Kansas must be a state of the Union. She will be admitted with or without slavery, as her people prefer. Beyond Kansas there is no question that is practically open. I speak to practical men. Slavery does not exist in any other territory,—it is excluded by law from several, and not likely to exist anywhere; and the Republican party has nothing to do and can do nothing. It has no future. Why cumbers it the ground?
“Between these two stand the firm ranks of the American party, thinned by desertions, but still unshaken. To them the eye of the country turns in hope. The gentleman from Georgia saluted the Northern Democrats with the title of heroes—who swam vigorously down the current. The men of the American party faced, in each section, the sectional madness. They would cry neither free nor slave Kansas; but proposed a safe administration of the laws, before which every right would find protection. Their voice was drowned amid the din of factions. The men of the North would have no moderation, and they have paid the penalty. The American party elected a majority of
this House: had they of the North held fast to the great American principle of silence on the negro question, and, firmly refusing to join either agitation, stood by the American candidate, they would not now be writhing, crushed beneath an utter overthrow. If they would now destroy the Democrats, they can do it only by returning to the American party. By it alone can a party be created strong at the South as well as at the North. To it alone belongs a principle accepted wherever the American name is heard—the same at the North as at the South, on the Atlantic or the Pacific shore. It alone is free from sectional affiliations at either end of the Union which would cripple it at the other. Its principle is silence, peace, and compromise. It abides by the existing law. It allows no agitation. It maintains the present condition of affairs. It asks no change in any territory, and it will countenance no agitation for the aggrandizement of either section. Though thousands fell off in the day of trial—allured by ambition, or terrified by fear—at the North and at the South, carried away by the torrent of fanaticism in one part of the Union, or driven by the fierce onset of the Democrats in another, who shook Southern institutions by the violence of their attack, and half waked the sleeping negro by painting the Republican as his liberator, still a million of men, on the great day, in the face of both factions, heroically refused to bow the knee to either Baal. They knew the necessities of the times, and they set the example of sacrifice, that others might profit by it. They now stand the hope of the nation, around whose firm ranks the shattered elements of the great majority may rally and vindicate the right of the majority to rule, and of the native of the land to make the law of the land.
The recent election has developed, in an aggravated form, every evil against which the American party protested. Again in the war of domestic parties, Republican and Democrat have rivalled each other in bidding for the foreign vote to turn the balance of a domestic election. Foreign allies have decided the government of the country— men naturalized in thousands on the eve of the election—eagerly struggled for by competing parties, mad with sectional fury, and grasping any instrument which would prostrate their opponents. Again, in the fierce struggle for supremacy, men have forgotten the ban which the Republic puts on the intrusion of religious influence on the political arena. These influences have brought vast multitudes of foreign born citizens to the polls, ignorant of American interests,
without American feelings, influenced by foreign sympathies, to vote on American affairs; and those votes have, in point of fact, accomplished the present result.
The high mission of the American is to restore the influence of the interests of the people in the conduct of affairs; to exclude appeals to foreign birth or religious feeling as elements of power in politics; to silence the voice of sectional strife—not by joining either section, but by recalling the people from a profitless and maddening controversy which aids no interest, and shakes the foundation not only of the common industry of the people, but of the Republic itself; to lay a storm amid whose fury no voice can be heard in behalf of the industrial interests of the country, no eye can watch and guard the foreign policy of the government, till our ears may be opened by the crash of foreign war waged for purposes of political and party ambition, in the name, but not by the authority nor for the interests, of the American people.
Return, then, Americans of the North, from the paths of error to which in an evil hour fierce passions and indignation have seduced you, to the sound position of the American party—silence on the slavery agitation. Leave the territories as they are—to the operation of natural causes. Prevent aggression by excluding from power the aggressors, and there will be no more wrong to redress. Awake the national spirit to the danger and degradation of having the balance of power held by foreigners. Recall the warnings of Washington against foreign influence—here in our midst—wielding part of our sovereignty; and with these sound words of wisdom let us recall the people from paths of strife and error to guard their peace and power; and when once the mind of the people is turned from the slavery agitation, that party which waked the agitation will cease to have power to disturb the peace of the land.
This is the great mission of the American party. The first condition of success is to prevent the administration from having a majority in the next Congress; for, with that, the agitation will be resumed for very different objects. The Ostend manifesto is full of warning; and they who struggle over Kansas may awake and find themselves in the midst of an agitation compared to which that of Kansas was a summer’s sea; whose instruments will be, not words, but the sword.
Joshua R. Giddings Against the Fugitive Slave Law.
In the House of Representatives, April 25, 1848.
“Why, sir, I never saw a panting fugitive speeding his way to a land of freedom, that an involuntary invocation did not burst from my lips, that God would aid him in his flight! Such are the feelings of every man in our free states, whose heart has not become hardened in iniquity. I do not confine this virtue to Republicans, nor to AntiSlavery men; I speak of all men, of all parties, in all Christian communities. Northern Democrats feel it; they ordinarily bow to this higher law of their natures, and they only prove recreant to the law of the ‘Most High,’ when they regard the interests of the Democratic party as superior to God’s law and the rights of mankind.
“Gentlemen will bear with me when I assure them and the President that I have seen as many as nine fugitives dining at one time in my own house—fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, parents, and children. When they came to my door, hungry and faint, cold and but partially clad, I did not turn round to consult the Fugitive Law, nor to ask the President what I should do. I knew the constitution of my country, and would not violate it. I obeyed the divine mandate, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. I fed them. I clothed them, gave them money for their journey, and sent them on their way rejoicing. I obeyed God rather than the President. I obeyed my conscience, the dictates of my heart, the law of my moral being, the commands of Heaven, and, I will add, the constitution of my country; for no man of intelligence ever believed that the framers of that instrument intended to involve their descendants of the free states in any act that should violate the teachings of the Most High, by seizing a fellow-being, and returning him to the hell of slavery. If that be treason, make the most of it.
“M . B , of Mississippi. I want to know if the gentleman would not have gone one step farther?
“M . G . Yes, sir; I would have gone one step farther. I would have driven the slave-catcher who dared pursue them from my premises. I would have kicked him from my door-yard, if he had made his appearance there; or, had he attempted to enter my dwelling, I would have stricken him down upon the threshold of my door.
Robert Toombs on Slavery,
At Tremont Temple, Boston, January 24th, 1856.
In 1790 there were less than seven hundred thousand slaves in the United States; in 1850 the number exceeded three and one quarter millions. The same authority shows their increase, for the ten years preceding the last census, to have been above twenty-eight per cent., or nearly three per cent. per annum, an increase equal, allowing for the element of foreign immigration, to the white race, and nearly three times that of the free blacks of the North. But these legal rights of the slave embrace but a small portion of the privileges actually enjoyed by him. He has, by universal custom, the control of much of his own time, which is applied, at his own choice and convenience, to the mechanic arts, to agriculture, or to some other profitable pursuit, which not only gives him the power of purchase over many additional necessaries of life, but over many of its luxuries, and in numerous cases, enables him to purchase his freedom when he desires it. Besides, the nature of the relation of master and slave begets kindnesses, imposes duties (and secures their performance), which exist in no other relation of capital and labor. Interest and humanity co-operate in harmony for the well-being of slave labor. Thus the monster objection to our institution of slavery, that it deprives labor of its wages, cannot stand the test of a truthful investigation. A slight examination of the true theory of wages, will further expose its fallacy. Under a system of free labor, wages are usually paid in money, the representative of products—under ours, in products themselves. One of your most distinguished statesmen and patriots, President John Adams, said that the difference to the state was “imaginary.” “What matters it (said he) whether a landlord, employing ten laborers on his farm, gives them annually as much money as will buy them the necessaries of life, or gives them those necessaries at short hand?” All experience has shown that if that be
the measure of the wages of labor, it is safer for the laborer to take his wages in products than in their fluctuating pecuniary value. Therefore, if we pay in the necessaries and comforts of life more than any given amount of pecuniary wages will buy, then our laborer is paid higher than the laborer who receives that amount of wages. The most authentic agricultural statistics of England show that the wages of agricultural and unskilled labor in that kingdom, not only fail to furnish the laborer with the comforts of our slave, but even with the necessaries of life; and no slaveholder could escape a conviction for cruelty to his slaves who gave his slave no more of the necessaries of life for his labor than the wages paid to their agricultural laborers by the noblemen and gentlemen of England would buy. Under their system man has become less valuable and less cared for than domestic animals; and noble dukes will depopulate whole districts of men to supply their places with sheep, and then with intrepid audacity lecture and denounce American slaveholders.
The great conflict between labor and capital, under free competition, has ever been how the earnings of labor shall be divided between them. In new and sparsely settled countries, where land is cheap, and food is easily produced, and education and intelligence approximate equality, labor can successfully struggle in this warfare with capital. But this is an exceptional and temporary condition of society. In the Old World this state of things has long since passed away, and the conflict with the lower grades of labor has long since ceased. There the compensation of unskilled labor, which first succumbs to capital, is reduced to a point scarcely adequate to the continuance of the race. The rate of increase is scarcely one per cent. per annum, and even at that rate, population, until recently, was considered a curse; in short, capital has become the master of labor, with all the benefits, without the natural burdens of the relation.
In this division of the earnings of labor between it and capital, the southern slave has a marked advantage over the English laborer, and is often equal to the free laborer of the North. Here again we are furnished with authentic data from which to reason. The census of 1850 shows that, on the cotton estates of the South, which is the chief branch of our agricultural industry, one-half of the arable lands are annually put under food crops. This half is usually wholly consumed on the farm by the laborers and necessary animals; out of the other
half must be paid all the necessary expenses of production, often including additional supplies of food beyond the produce of the land, which usually equals one-third of the residue, leaving but one-third for net rent. The average rent of land in the older non-slaveholding states is equal to one-third of the gross product, and it not unfrequently amounts to one-half of it (in England it is sometimes even greater), the tenant, from his portion, paying all expenses of production and the expenses of himself and family. From this statement it is apparent that the farm laborers of the South receive always as much, and frequently a greater portion of the produce of the land, than the laborer in the New or Old England. Besides, here the portion due the slave is a charge upon the whole product of capital and the capital itself; it is neither dependent upon seasons nor subject to accidents, and survives his own capacity for labor, and even the ruin of his master.
But it is objected that religious instruction is denied the slave— while it is true that religious instruction and privileges are not enjoined by law in all of the states, the number of slaves who are in connection with the different churches abundantly proves the universality of their enjoyment of those privileges. And a much larger number of the race in slavery enjoy the consolations of religion than the efforts of the combined Christian world have been able to convert to Christianity out of all the millions of their countrymen who remained in their native land.
The immoralities of the slaves, and of those connected with slavery, are constant themes of abolition denunciation. They are lamentably great; but it remains to be shown that they are greater than with the laboring poor of England, or any other country. And it is shown that our slaves are without the additional stimulant of want to drive them to crime—we have at least removed from them the temptation and excuse of hunger. Poor human nature is here at least spared the wretched fate of the utter prostration of its moral nature at the feet of its physical wants. Lord Ashley’s report to the British Parliament shows that in the capital of that empire, perhaps within the hearing of Stafford House and Exeter Hall, hunger alone daily drives its thousands of men and women into the abyss of crime.
It is also objected that our slaves are debarred the benefits of education. This objection is also well taken, and is not without force.
And for this evil the slaves are greatly indebted to the abolitionists. Formerly in none of the slaveholding states was it forbidden to teach slaves to read and write; but the character of the literature sought to be furnished them by the abolitionists caused these states to take counsel rather of their passions than their reason, and to lay the axe at the root of the evil; better counsels will in time prevail, and this will be remedied. It is true that the slave, from his protected position, has less need of education than the free laborer, who has to struggle for himself in the warfare of society; yet it is both useful to him, his master, and society.
The want of legal protection to the marriage relation is also a fruitful source of agitation among the opponents of slavery. The complaint is not without foundation. This is an evil not yet removed by law; but marriage is not inconsistent with the institution of slavery as it exists among us, and the objection, therefore, lies rather to an incident than to the essence of the system. But in the truth and fact marriage does exist to a very great extent among slaves, and is encouraged and protected by their owners; and it will be found, upon careful investigation, that fewer children are born out of wedlock among slaves than in the capitals of two of the most civilized countries of Europe—Austria and France; in the former, one-half of the children are thus born; in the latter, more than one-fourth. But even in this we have deprived the slave of no pre-existing right. We found the race without any knowledge of or regard for the institution of marriage, and we are reproached with not having as yet secured to it that, with all other blessings of civilization. To protect that and other domestic ties by laws forbidding, under proper regulations, the separation of families, would be wise, proper, and humane; and some of the slaveholding states have already adopted partial legislation for the removal of these evils. But the objection is far more formidable in theory than in practice. The accidents and necessities of life, the desire to better one’s condition, produce infinitely a greater amount of separation in families of the white than ever happens to the colored race. This is true even in the United States, where the general condition of the people is prosperous. But it is still more marked in Europe. The injustice and despotism of England towards Ireland has produced more separation of Irish families, and sundered more domestic ties within the last ten years, than African slavery has effected since its introduction into the
United States. The twenty millions of freemen in the United States are witnesses of the dispersive injustice of the Old World. The general happiness, cheerfulness, and contentment of slaves attest both the mildness and humanity of the system and their natural adaptation to their condition. They require no standing armies to enforce their obedience; while the evidence of discontent, and the appliances of force to repress it, are everywhere visible among the toiling millions of the earth; even in the northern states of this Union, strikes and mobs, unions and combinations against employers, attest at once the misery and discontent of labor among them. England keeps one hundred thousand soldiers in time of peace, a large navy, and an innumerable police, to secure obedience to her social institutions; and physical force is the sole guarantee of her social order, the only cement of her gigantic empire.
I have briefly traced the condition of the African race through all ages and all countries, and described it fairly and truly under American slavery, and I submit that the proposition is fully proven, that his position in slavery among us is superior to any which he has ever attained in any age or country. The picture is not without shade as well as light; evils and imperfections cling to man and all of his works, and this is not exempt from them.
Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana,
On Slave Property, in U. S. Senate, March 11, 1858.
Examine your Constitution; are slaves the only species of property there recognized as requiring peculiar protection? Sir, the inventive genius of our brethren of the north is a source of vast wealth to them and vast benefit to the nation. I saw a short time ago in one of the New York journals, that the estimated value of a few of the patents now before us in this Capitol for renewal was $40,000,000. I cannot believe that the entire capital invested in inventions of this character in the United States can fall short of one hundred and fifty or two hundred million dollars. On what protection does this vast property rest? Just upon that same constitutional protection which gives a remedy to the slave owner when his property is also found outside of the limits of the state in which he lives.
Without this protection what would be the condition of the northern inventor? Why, sir, the Vermont inventor protected by his own law would come to Massachusetts, and there say to the pirate who had stolen his property, “render me up my property, or pay me value for its use.” The Senator from Vermont would receive for answer, if he were the counsel of this Vermont inventor, “Sir, if you want protection for your property go to your own state; property is governed by the laws of the state within whose jurisdiction it is found; you have no property in your invention outside of the limits of your state; you cannot go an inch beyond it.” Would not this be so? Does not every man see at once that the right of the inventor to his discovery, that the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon those principles of eternal justice which God has implanted in the heart of man, and that wherever he cannot exercise them, it is because man, faithless to the trust that he has received from God, denies them the protection to which they are entitled?
Sir, follow out the illustration which the Senator from Vermont himself has given; take his very case of the Delaware owner of a horse riding him across the line into Pennsylvania. The Senator says: “Now, you see that slaves are not property like other property; if slaves were property like other property, why have you this special clause in your constitution to protect a slave? You have no clause to protect the horse, because horses are recognized as property everywhere.” Mr. President, the same fallacy lurks at the bottom of this argument, as of all the rest. Let Pennsylvania exercise her undoubted jurisdiction over persons and things within her own boundary; let her do as she has a perfect right to do—declare that hereafter, within the state of Pennsylvania, there shall be no property in horses, and that no man shall maintain a suit in her courts for the recovery of property in a horse; and where will your horse owner be then? Just where the English poet is now; just where the slaveholder and the inventor would be if the Constitution, foreseeing a difference of opinion in relation to rights in these subject-matters, had not provided the remedy in relation to such property as might easily be plundered. Slaves, if you please, are not property like other property in this: that you can easily rob us of them; but as to the right in them, that man has to overthrow the whole history of the world, he has to overthrow every treatise on jurisprudence, he has to ignore the common sentiment of mankind, he has to repudiate the authority of all that is considered sacred with man, ere he can reach the conclusion that the person who owns a slave, in a country where slavery has been established for ages, has no other property in that slave than the mere title which is given by the statute law of the land where it is found.
William Lloyd Garrison Upon the Slavery Question.
“Tyrants! confident of its overthrow, proclaim not to your vassals, that the American Union is an experiment of freedom, which, if it fails, will forever demonstrate the necessity of whips for the backs, and chains for limbs of people. Know that its subversion is essential to the triumph of justice, the deliverance of the oppressed, the vindication of the brotherhood of the race. It was conceived in sin, and brought forth in iniquity; and its career has been marked by unparalleled hypocrisy, by high-handed tyranny, by a bold defiance of the omniscience and omnipotence of God. Freedom indignantly disowns it, and calls for its extinction; for within its borders are three millions of slaves, whose blood constitutes its cement, whose flesh forms a large and flourishing branch of its commerce, and who are ranked with four-footed beasts and creeping things. To secure the adoption of the constitution of the United States, first, that the African slave trade—till that time a feeble, isolated, colonial traffic— should, for at least twenty years, be prosecuted as a national interest, under the American flag, and protected by the national arm; secondly, that slavery holding oligarchy, created by allowing threefifths of the slaveholding population to be represented by their taskmasters, should be allowed a permanent seat in congress; thirdly, that the slave system should be secured against internal revolt and external invasion, by the united physical force of the country; fourthly, that not a foot of national territory should be granted, on which the panting fugitive from slavery might stand, and be safe from his pursuers, thus making every citizen a slave-hunter and slave catcher. To say that this ‘covenant with death’ shall not be annulled—that this ‘agreement with hell’ shall continue to stand— that this refuge of lies shall not be swept away—is to hurl defiance at the eternal throne, and to give the lie to Him that sits thereon. It is
an attempt, alike monstrous and impracticable, to blend the light of heaven with the darkness of the bottomless pit, to unite the living with the dead, to associate the Son of God with the Prince of Evil. Accursed be the American Union, as a stupendous, republican imposture!”
“I am accused of using hard language. I admit the charge. I have been unable to find a soft word to describe villainy, or to identify the perpetrator of it. The man who makes a chattel of his brother—what is he? The man who keeps back the hire of his laborers by fraud— what is he? They who prohibit the circulation of the Bible—what are they? They who compel three millions of men and women to herd together like brute beasts—what are they? They who sell mothers by the pound, and children in lots to suit purchasers—what are they? I care not what terms are applied to them, provided they do apply. If they are not thieves, if they are not tyrants, if they are not men stealers, I should like to know what is their true character, and by what names they may be called. It is as mild an epithet to say that a thief is a thief, as to say that a spade is a spade. Words are but the signs of ideas. ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’ Language may be misapplied, and so be absurd or unjust; as for example, to say that an abolitionist is a fanatic, or that a slaveholder is an honest man. But to call things by their right names is to use neither hard nor improper language. Epithets may be rightly applied, it is true, and yet be uttered in a hard spirit, or with a malicious design. What then? Shall we discard all terms which are descriptive of crime, because they are not always used with fairness and propriety? He who, when he sees oppression, cries out against it— who, when he beholds his equal brother trodden under foot by the iron hoof of despotism, rushes to his rescue—who, when he sees the weak overborne by the strong, takes his side with the former, at the imminent peril of his own safety—such a man needs no certificate to the excellence of his temper, or the sincerity of his heart, or the disinterestedness of his conduct. Or is the apologist of slavery, he who can see the victim of thieves lying bleeding and helpless on the cold earth, and yet turn aside, like the callous-hearted priest or Levite, who needs absolution. Let us call tyrants, tyrants; not to do so is to misuse language, to deal treacherously with freedom, to
consent to the enslavement of mankind. It is neither amiable nor virtuous, but a foolish and pernicious thing, not to call things by their right names. ‘Woe unto them,’ says one of the world’s great prophets, ‘that call evil good, and good evil;’ that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”
Theodore Parker Against the Fugitive Slave Law.
His Protest Against the Return of Simms by the U. S. Commissioner at Boston.
“Come with me, my friends, a moment more, pass over this golgotha of human history, treading reverent as you go, for our feet are on our mother’s graves, and our shoes defile our father’s hallowed bones. Let us not talk of them; go farther on, look and pass by. Come with me into the inferno of the nations, with such poor guidance as my lamp can lend. Let us disquiet and bring up the awful shadows of empires buried long ago, and learn a lesson from the tomb.” “Come, old Assyria, with the Ninevitish dove upon thy emerald crown! what laid thee low? ‘I fell by my own injustice. Thereby Nineveh and Babylon came with me also to the ground.’” “Oh, queenly Persia, flame of the nations, wherefore art thou so fallen, who troddest the people under thee, bridgest the Hellespont with ships, and pouredst thy temple-wasting millions on the world? Because I trod the people under me, and bridged the Hellespont with ships, and poured my temple-wasting millions on the western world, I fell by my own misdeeds.” “Thou muse-like Grecian queen, fairest of all thy classic sisterhood of states, enchanting yet the world with thy sweet witchery, speaking in art and most seductive song, why liest thou there, with beauteous yet dishonored brow, reposing on thy broken harp? ‘I scorned the law of God; banished and poisoned wisest, justest men; I loved the loveliness of thought, and treasured that in more than Parian speech. But the beauty of justice, the loveliness of love, I trod them down to earth! Lo, therefore have I become as those barbarian states—as one of them!’” “Oh, manly and majestic Rome, thy seven-fold mural crown all broken at thy feet, why art thou here? It was not injustice brought thee low; for thy great book of law is prefaced with these words—justice is the
unchanged, everlasting will to give each man his right! ‘It was not the saint’s ideal; it was the hypocrite’s pretense.’ I made iniquity my law. I trod the nations under me. Their wealth gilded my palaces—where thou mayest see the fox and hear the owl—it fed my courtiers and my courtesans. Wicked men were my cabinet counselors, the flatterer breathed his poison in my ear. Millions of bondsmen wet the soil with tears and blood. Do you not hear it crying yet to God? Lo, here have I my recompense, tormented with such downfall as you see! Go back and tell the new-born child who sitteth on the Alleghanies, laying his either hand upon a tributary sea, a crown of thirty stars upon his youthful brow—tell him that there are rights which states must keep, or they shall suffer wrongs! Tell him there is a God who keeps the black man and the white, and hurls to earth the loftiest realm that breaks his just, eternal law! Warn the young empire, that he come not down dim and dishonored to my shameful tomb! Tell him that justice is the unchanging, everlasting will to give each man his right. I knew it, broke it, and am lost. Bid him know it, keep it, and be safe.”
The same speaker protests against the return of Simms.
“Where shall I find a parallel with men who will do such a deed— do it in Boston? I will open the tombs and bring up most hideous tyrants from the dead. Come, brood of monsters, let me bring up from the deep damnation of the graves wherein your hated memories continue for all time their never-ending rot. Come, birds of evil omen! come, ravens, vultures, carrion crows, and see the spectacle! come, see the meeting of congenial souls! I will disturb, disquiet, and bring up the greatest monsters of the human race! Tremble not, women! They cannot harm you now! Fear the living, not the dead!”
Come hither, Herod, the wicked. Thou that didst seek after that young child’s life, and destroyed the innocents! Let me look on thy face! No, go! Thou wert a heathen! Go, lie with the innocents thou hast massacred. Thou art too good for this company! “Come, Nero; thou awful Roman emperor, come up! No, thou wast drunk with power! schooled in Roman depravity. Thou hadst, besides, the example of thy fancied gods. Go, wait another day. I will seek a worse man.
“Come hither, St. Dominic! come, Torquemada; fathers of the Inquisition! merciless monsters, seek your equal here. No; pass by. You are no companion for such men as these. You were the servants of the atheistic popes, of cruel kings. Go to, and get you gone. Another time I may have work for you—now, lie there, and persevere to rot. You are not yet quite wicked and corrupt enough for this comparison. Go, get you gone, lest the sun goes back at sight of ye!
“Come up, thou heap of wickedness, George Jeffries! thy hands deep purple with the blood of thy fellow-men. Ah! I know thee, awful and accursed shade! Two hundred years after thy death men hate thee still, not without cause. Look me upon thee! I know thy history. Pause, and be still, while I tell to these men. * * * Come, shade of judicial butcher. Two hundred years, thy name has been pillowed in face of the world, and thy memory gibbeted before mankind. Let us see how thou wilt compare with those who kidnap men in Boston. Go, seek companionship with them. Go, claim thy kindred if such they be. Go, tell them that the memory of the wicked shall rot; that there is a God; an eternity; ay, and a judgment, too, where the slave may appeal against him that made him a slave, to Him that made him a man.
“What! Dost thou shudder? Thou turn back! These not thy kindred! Why dost thou turn pale, as when the crowd clutched at thy life in London street? Forgive me, that I should send thee on such an errand, or bid thee seek companionship with such—with Boston hunters of the slave! Thou wert not base enough! It was a great bribe that tempted thee! Again, I say, pardon me for sending thee to keep company with such men! Thou only struckest at men accused of crime; not at men accused only of their birth! Thou wouldst not send a man into bondage for two pounds! I will not rank thee with men who, in Boston, for ten dollars, would enslave a negro now! Rest still, Herod! Be quiet, Nero! Sleep, St. Dominic, and sleep, O Torquemada, in your fiery jail! Sleep, Jeffries, underneath ‘the altar of the church’ which seeks, with Christian charity to hide your hated bones!”
William H. Seward’s Speech on the Higher Law.
In the U. S. Senate, March 11, 1850.
“But it is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended by a COMPROMISE of questions which have arisen out of SLAVERY! I . Because, while admitting the purity and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I think all legislative compromises radically wrong, and essentially vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and the conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for ascertaining the truth. They involve a relinquishment of the right to reconsider in future the decision of the present, on questions prematurely anticipated. And they are a usurpation as to future questions of the providence of future legislators.
“Sir, it seems to me as if slavery had laid its paralyzing hand upon myself, and the blood were coursing less freely than its wont through my veins, when I endeavor to suppose that such a compromise has been effected, and my utterance forever is arrested upon all the great questions, social, moral, and political, arising out of a subject so important, and yet so incomprehensible. What am I to receive in this compromise? Freedom in California. It is well; it is a noble acquisition; it is worth a sacrifice. But what am I to give as an equivalent? A recognition of a claim to perpetuate slavery in the District of Columbia; forbearance towards more stringent laws concerning the arrest of persons suspected of being slaves found in the free States; forbearance from the PROVISO of freedom in the charter of new territories. None of the plans of compromise offered demand less than two, and most of them insist on all these
conditions. The equivalent then is, some portion of liberty, some portion of human rights in one region for liberty in another.”
“It is true indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary power over anything, whether acquired by law or seized by usurpation. The constitution regulates our stewardship; the constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to welfare and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purpose. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust, as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness. This is a State, and we are deliberating for it, just as our fathers deliberated in establishing the institutions we enjoy. Whatever superiority there is in our condition and hopes over those of any other ‘kingdom’ or ‘estate,’ is due to the fortunate circumstance that our ancestors did not leave things to ‘take their chances’ but that they ‘added amplitude and greatness’ to our commonwealth ‘by introducing such ordinances, constitutions, and customs as were wise.’ We in our turn have succeeded to the same responsibilities, and we cannot approach the duty before us wisely or justly, except we raise ourselves to the great consideration of how we can most certainly ‘sow greatness to our posterity and successors.’
“And now the simple, bold, and awful question which presents itself to us is this: shall we, who are founding institutions, social and political, for countless millions; shall we, who know by experience the wise and just, and are free to choose them, and to reject the erroneous and unjust; shall we establish human bondage, or permit it by our sufferance to be established? Sir, our forefathers would not have hesitated an hour. They found slavery existing here, and they left it only because they could not remove it. There is not only no free State which would now establish it, but there is no slave State which, if it had had the free alternative, as we now have, would have founded slavery. Indeed, our revolutionary predecessors had precisely the same question before them in establishing an organic law, under which the States of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin,
