Speech to the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1858
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to
perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order
of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility,
fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other
class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes
the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might
as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one
or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she
found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her
own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in
capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them
for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the
common "consent of mankind," which, according to Cicero, "lex naturae
est." The highest proof of what is Nature's law. We are old-fashioned at
the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by "ears polite;" I will
not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it;
it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.
The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had
abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of
the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the
fiat, "the poor ye always have with you;" for the man who lives by daily
labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in
the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole
hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them,
are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves
are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no
begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much
employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and
scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at
any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more
beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than
you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that
whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are
black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed
them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God
first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the
whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South.
They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from
intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.
Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They
are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled
by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political
power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories
of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that
the ballot-box is stronger than "an army with banners," and could
combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your
government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have
mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks,
with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.
You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you
like for us to send lecturers and agitators North, to teach these
people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?
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