the month of May, 1854, when this deed was done, its authors have been in a permanent state of excuse and justification; and being many, and in possession of the Government, and with the control of many newspapers, and the right of composing official papers and public documents, they have plied the public mind with incessant repetition of these justificatory pieces, each an improvement upon its predecessor in all the qualities which the defence of so bad a cause requires; undaunted mendacity, moral callosity, mental obliquity, Old Bailey attorney perversions of law and evidence. The last annual message of Mr. Pierce was the last opportunity for this defensive pleading, and being the last, it was carefully seized on, and vigorously improved to the best advantage. The message was big with it. It was a large plea, and a bold one, and conspicuously presented. In quantity it filled eleven octavo pages, (leaving but seventeen for all the appropriate subjects which belong to that official paper;) in boldness, it inaugurated a new era in our Presidential messages-the era of historical falsification in those high papers, heretofore considered the sacred receptacle of veracious history; in conspicuity, being thrust into the front of the message, instead of being relegated to its fag-end, where such low matter should go, if, indeed, allowed to enter a message at all; which it never was before. Veracious history must rebuke this first attempt to make the Presidential annual message a vehicle of historical falsification; and the work is easily done, all the facts necessary to the correction of the fallacious statements being of record in the debates and journals of Congress, and other authentic public evidence. These misstatements, after a preliminary one to usher in the others, arrange themselves under three heads: first, in what relates to the formation of the Missouri Compromise; secondly, in what relates to its abrogation; thirdly, in what relates to the present state of parties, and their respective shares in producing the present agitation.

This preliminary misstatement is the assumption, that the issue of the last Presidential election was a national ratification of the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise. No assumption could be more unfounded. That election proved just the reverse of what has been assumed. It was intended that it should be so, (in the nomination and election of some one of the prominent destroyers of the compromise,) and the Convention at Cincinnati was

gorged with office-holding retainers of the administration for that purpose but no such destroyer of the compromise could be nominated; and no one of them could have been elected if nominated. It was the trump argument in favor of Mr. Buchanan, that he was not one of these destroyers; and, although known to "acquiesce" in the deed after it was done, yet his long and most conspicuous championship of that measure, and his geographical position, led to the belief that he would not improve upon its abrogation, nor complete its iniquities by lending himself to the ulterior designs of its authors. That belief, and the discredit brought upon his opponent by the support of some violent men, (and it is the violent always who impress character upon a party,) who preached against the existence of slavery in the States-against the admission of any more slave States-and against the compromises of the Constitution and of the ordinance of '87, for the surrender of fugitive slaves: it was this belief, and this discredit, which turned the scales in the election; and it required all that both these cardinal causes could do to elect Mr. Buchanan. This is public, undeniable truth; and it requires a courageous and veteran disregard of the laws of veracity to assume the contrary, as the message is made to do.

And now for the enactment of the Missouri Compromise, which the message very properly styles "a political enactment," as it certainly is; and then gives this account of it:

"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 re-enactment 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."

This paragraph is characteristic, ana exemplifies all the modes of conveying untruths which long ages have invented: direct assertion, fallacious inference, equivocal phrase, and false inuendo. The word "restrictive" has no application to the Compromise Act. It applied exclusively to the State of Missouri, and the attempt to restrain her, as a State, from the admission of slaves. The compromise was a territorial measure, applying exclusively to territory, and establishing, not a restrictive, but a partition line; a line of territorial division, upon the principle of the division of the South-west and North-west Territory by the old Congress in 1787, and sanctioned by the new Congress in 1789. The principle of each was the same, and the dividing line so nearly the same, that the Louisiana line may stand for a continuation of the north-west line, making about equal division, until the South gave away nearly the whole of hers. A compromise is agreed to; a restriction is imposed; and it is falsifying the character of the act of 1820 to call it restrictive. The power of each House of Congress agreed to it; the negative in each was inconsiderable.

Then comes a litter of unfounded suggestions, implied in the word "acquiesce," three times repeated in six lines, and every time pregnant with a fallacious implication-each more glaring than the other. It is the lawyer-like way of saying what Mr. Calhoun said pointedly, that the Missouri Compromise was imposed upon the South by the North, and only acquiesced in because too weak to relieve herself. For it is as notorious as that the South exists, that both these compromises-that by which Missouri and Arkansas became admitted as slave States, and that of 1845 by which Texas (and four more slave States to be made out of her territory) became admitted-were measures of the South, carried by her votes, and the votes of her friends in the free States; and that, in each case, she was so determined upon the measure as to threaten secession from the Union if it was not obtained. This is matter of public history; and therefore, the mendacity of these three implications, in six lines, becomes too flagrant to admit of comment, or to require proof. We proceed to another, the Southern proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, or, in the language of the message, "to acquiesce" in the extension; and its defeat by Northern votes. In the first place, that extension was resisted

by others as well as by Northern votes-resisted by all Southern men opposed to planting slavery in new places—and vehemently by Mr. Clay, who repulsed the proposition indignantly when pushed at him by Mr. Davis of Mississippi, declaring, with an emphasis which electrified the Senate, that no power on earth should ever make him vote for slavery in any place where it did not already exist. For that was the nature of the vote involved in this insidiously proposed extension-being directly the reverse of voting for the same line in the ancient Louisiana. Astronomically, the lines were the same: politically, they were opposite: one running through territory all slave, and making one-half free; the other running through territory all free, and making one-half slave. Call this extended line the same! You had as well call black and white the same. And this, in fact, is what the message is made to do, with a reproach to all Northern men who would not agree to spread slavery over the broad expanse of all that half of California, New Mexico and Utah, which lies south of 36° 30'; and it is for not agreeing to convert this great extent of old free soil into new slave soil, that these Northern representatives are thus chid and reproached in the message. Certainly, Mr. Cushing would not so have rebuked them in the year 1836, when he was opposing the admission of Arkansas as a slave State; or, in the year 1838, when, with Mr. Slade, of Vermont, and with all the abolitionists in the

*

* The extraordinary circumstances under which I rise to address the Committee, impel me to brevity and succinctness; but they would afford me no justification for a passive acquiescence in the admission of Arkansas into the Union, with all the sins of its constitution upon its head. The constitution of Arkansas contains a provision, forbidding the legislature to emancipate slaves without the consent of the owner, and forbidding it to pass any law to prevent slaveholders with their slaves from emigrating to the State. This provision of the constitution of Arkansas is condemned by those I represent as anti-republican, as wrong on general principles of civil polity, and as unjust to the inhabitants of the non-slaveholding States. I concur in reprobatlng such a clause. I cannot, by any vote of mine, ratify or sanction a constitution of government which undertakes in this way to foreclose in advance the progress of civilization and of liberty for ever. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wise), who I cheerfully admit is always frank and honorable in his course upon this floor, has just declared that, as a Southern man, he had felt it to be his duty to come forward and take a stand in behalf of an institution of the South. That institution is slavery. In like manner I feel it to be my duty, as a Northern man, to take a counter stand in conservation of one among the dearest of the institutions of the North. This institution is liberty."-Mr. Cushing's Speech against the admission of Arkansas.

House of Representatives, by his efforts to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, he drove the Southern members to secession from the floor of the House, to consult in a committee room in the basement of the Capitol, upon the decisive step of returning to their constituents. *

Then comes the fundamental falsehood which lies at the foundation of the attack on the Missouri Compromise, affirming that it had been virtually repealed by the negative action of Congress in 1850, in refusing to extend the compromise line to the Pacific, and in refusing to legislate upon slavery in California, New Mexico, Utah and Washington-Washington, as the message says; though there was no Territory of Washington at that time, and the territory which afterwards composed it, had been included in the legislation on Oregon, of which it was a part; and from which that institution was excluded. But, take the statement as it stands, and judge it upon its words; and for that purpose it must be given in its own words: for nothing but itself can do justice to itself in the exhibition of such legerdemain in handling law and facts. And here it is:

"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."

Here is a farrago of law and fact for you-a sample of assertion and inference-which ignores truth, reason, common sense, and law logic. A refusal to extend a line is, to repeal it: a refusal to act upon slavery in Territories where it was already

*Of the sixty-three members of the House who pertinaciously backed Mr. Slade during the two days that the struggle continued, one was Mr. Caleb Cushing, then as zealous to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia (for the motion was to instruct a committee to bring in a peremptory bill for that purpose) as he has since shown himself active to abolish all impediments to the general territorial diffusion of slavery— even in the old free territory, once a part of the empire of Montezuma.