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William Henry Seward:
 ON THE
IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT
Delivered at Rochester, NY, October 25, 1858
The unmistakable outbreaks of zeal which occur all around me show that you
are earnest men-and such a man am I. Let us, therefore, at least for a time,
pass all secondary and collateral questions, whether of a personal or of a
general nature, and consider the main subject of the present canvass. The
Democratic party, or, to speak more accurately, the party which wears that
attractive name-is in possession of the federal government. The Republicans
propose to dislodge that party, and dismiss it from its high trust.
The main subject, then, is whether the Democratic party deserves to retain
the confidence of the American people. In attempting to prove it unworthy, I
think that I am not actuated by prejudices against that party, or by
prepossessions in favor of its adversary; for I have learned, by some
experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all
parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they
pursue.
Our country is a theatre, which exhibits, in full operation, two radically
different political systems; the one resting on the basis of servile or slave
labor, the other on voluntary labor of freemen. The laborers who are enslaved
are all negroes, or persons more or less purely of African derivation. But this
is only accidental. The principle of the system is, that labor in every
society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, grovelling and
base; and that the laborer, equally for his own good and for the welfare of the
State, ought to be enslaved. The white laboring man, whether native or
foreigner, is not enslaved, only because he cannot, as yet, be reduced to
bondage.
You need not be told now that the slave system is the older of the two, and
that once it was universal. The emancipation of our own ancestors, Caucasians
and Europeans as they were, hardly dates beyond a period of five hundred years.
The great melioration of human society which modern times exhibits is mainly due
to the incomplete substitution of the system of voluntary labor for the one of
servile labor, which has already taken place. This African slave system is one
which, in its origin and in its growth, has been altogether foreign from the
habits of the races which colonized these States, and established civilization
here. It was introduced on this continent as an engine of conquest, and for the
establishment of monarchical power, by the Portuguese and the Spaniards, and was
rapidly extended by them all over South America, Central America, Louisiana, and
Mexico. Its legitimate fruits are seen in the poverty, imbecility, and anarchy
which now pervade all Portuguese and Spanish America. The free-labor system is
of German extraction, and it was established in our country by emigrants from
Sweden, Holland, Germany, Great Britain, and Ireland. We justly ascribe to its
influences the strength, wealth, greatness, intelligence, and freedom, which the
whole American people now enjoy. One of the chief elements of the value of
human life is freedom in the pursuit of happiness. The slave system is not only
intolerable, unjust, and inhuman, toward the laborer, whom, only because he is a
laborer, it loads down with chains and converts into merchandise, but is
scarcely less severe upon the freeman, to whom, only because he is a laborer
from necessity , it denies facilities for employment, and whom it expels from
the community because it cannot enslave and convert into merchandise also. It
is necessarily improvident and ruinous, because, as a general truth, communities
prosper and flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they
practise or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity. The
free-labor system conforms to the divine law of equality, which is written in
the hearts and consciences of man, and therefore is always and everywhere
beneficent.
The slave system is one of constant danger, distrust, suspicion, and
watchfulness. It debases those whose toil alone can produce wealth and
resources for defence, to the lowest degree of which human nature is capable, to
guard against mutiny and insurrection, and thus wastes energies which otherwise
might be employed in national development and aggrandizement. The free-labor
system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial
employment and all the departments of authority, to the unchecked and equal
rivalry of all classes of men, at once secures universal contentment, and brings
into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral, and social energies
of the whole state. In states where the slave system prevails, the masters,
directly or indirectly, secure all political power, and constitute a ruling
aristocracy. In states where the free-labor system prevails, universal suffrage
necessarily obtains, and the state inevitably becomes, sooner or later, a
republic or democracy.
Russia yet maintains slavery, and is a despotism. Most of the other
European states have abolished slavery, and adopted the system of free labor.
It was the antagonistic political tendencies of the two systems which the first
Napoleon was contemplating when he predicted that Europe would ultimately be
either all Cossack or all republican. Never did human sagacity utter a more
pregnant truth truth. The two systems are at once perceived to be incongruous.
But they are more than incongruous-they are incompatible. They never have
permanently existed together in one country, and they never can. It would be
easy to demonstrate this impossibility, from the irreconcilable contrast between
their great principles and characteristics. But the experience of mankind has
conclusively established it. Slavery, as I have intimated, existed in every
state in Europe. Free labor has supplanted it everywhere except in Russia and
developed in modern times are now Turkey. State necessities developed in modern
times are now obliging even those two nations to encourage and employ free
labor; and already, despotic as they are, we find them engaged in abolishing
slavery. In the United States, slavery came into collision with free labor at
the close of the last century, and fell before it in New England, New York, New
Jersey, and Pennsylvania, but triumphed over it effectually, and excluded it for
a period yet undetermined, from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Indeed,
so incompatible are the two systems, that every new State which is organized
within our ever-extending domain makes its first political act a choice of the
one and the exclusion of the other, even at the cost of civil war, if necessary.
The slave States, without law, at the last national election, successfully
forbade, within their own limits, even the casting of votes for a candidate for
President of the United States supposed to be favorable to the establishment of
the free-labor system in new States.
Hitherto, the two systems have existed in different States, but side by side
within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is a
confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States constitute
only one nation. Increase of population, which is filling the States out to
their very borders, together with a new and extended network of railroads and
other avenues,, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is
rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or
consolidation. Thus, these antagonistic systems are continually coming into
closer contact, and collision results.
Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is
accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and
therefor ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United
States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding
nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of
South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled
by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts of legitimate
merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and
New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the
production of slaves, and Boston and New York becomes once more markets for
trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great
truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromises between
the slave and free States, and it is the existence of this great fact that
renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.
Startling as this saying may appear to you, fellow-citizens, it is by no means
an original or even a modern one. Our forefathers knew it to be true, and
unanimously acted upon it when they framed the constitution of the United
States. They regarded the existence of the servile system in so many of the
States with sorrow and shame, which they openly confessed, and they looked upon
the collision between them, which was then just revealing itself, and which we
are now accustomed to deplore, with favor and hope. They knew that one or the
other system must exclusively prevail.
Unlike too many of those who in modem time invoke their authority, they had
a choice between the two. They preferred the system of free labor, and they
determined to organize the government, and so direct its activity, that that
system should surely and certainly prevail. For this purpose, and no other,
they based the whole structure of the government broadly on the principle that
all men are created equal, and therefore free - little dreaming that, within the
short period of one hundred years, their descendants would bear to be told by
any orator, however popular, that the utterance of that principle was merely a
rhetorical rhapsody; or by any judge, however venerated, that it was attended by
mental reservation, which rendered it hypocritical and false. By the ordinance
of 1787 they dedicated all of the national domain not yet polluted by slavery to
free labor immediately, thenceforth and forever; while by the new constitution
and laws they invited foreign free labor from all lands under the sun, and
interdicted the importation of African slave labor, at all times, in all places,
and under all circumstances whatsoever. It is true that they necessarily and
wisely modified this policy of freedom by leaving it to the several States,
affected as they were by different circumstances, to abolish slavery in their
own way and at their own pleasure, instead of confiding that duty to Congress;
and that they secured to the slave States, while yet retaining the system of
slavery, a three-fifths representation of slaves in the federal government,
until they. should find themselves able to relinquish it with safety. But the
very nature of these modifications fortifies my position, that the fathers knew
that the two systems could not endure within the Union, and expected within a
short period slavery would disappear forever. Moreover, in order that these
modifications might not altogether defeat their grand design of a republic
maintaining universal equality, they provided that two thirds of the States
might amend the constitution.
It remains to say on this point only one word, to guard against
misapprehension. If these States are to again become universally slaveholding,
I do not pretend to say with what violations of the constitution that end shall
be accomplished. On the other hand, while I do confidently believe and hope
that my country will yet become a land of universal freedom, I do not expect
that it will be made so otherwise than through the action of the several States
co-operating with the federal government, and all acting in strict conformity
with their respective constitutions.
The strife and contentions concerning slavery, which gently disposed persons
so habitually deprecate, are nothing more than the ripening of the conflict
which the fathers themselves not only thus regarded with favor, but which they
may be said to have instituted.
It is not to be denied, however, that thus far the course of that contest
has not been according to their humane anticipations and wishes. In the field
of federal politics, slavery, deriving unlooked-for advantages from commercial
changes, and energies unforeseen from the facilities of combination between
members of the slaveholding class and between that class and other property
classes, early rallied, and has at length made a stand, not merely to retain its
original defensive position, but to extend its sway throughout the whole Union.
It is certain that the slaveholding class of American citizens indulge this high
ambition, and that they derive encouragement for it from the rapid and effective
political successes which they have already obtained. The plan of operation is
this: By continued appliances of patronage and threats of disunion, they will
keep a majority favorable to these designs in the Senate, where each State has
an equal representation. Through that majority they will defeat, as they best
can, the admission of free States and secure the admission of slave States.
Under the protection of the judiciary, they will, on the principle of the Dred
Scott case, carry slavery into all the territories of the United States now
existing and hereafter to be organized. By the action of the President and
Senate, using the treaty-making power, they will annex foreign slaveholding
States. In a favorable conjuncture they will induce Congress to repeal the act
of 1808 which prohibits the foreign slave trade, and so they will import from
Africa, at a cost of only twenty dollars a head, slaves enough to fill up the
interior of the continent. Thus relatively increasing the number of slave
States, they will allow no amendment to the constitution prejudicial to their
interest; and so, having permanently established their power, they expect the
federal judiciary to nullify all State laws which shall interfere with internal
or foreign commerce in slaves. When the free States shall be sufficiently
demoralized to tolerate these designs, they reasonably conclude that slavery
will be accepted by those States themselves. I shall not stop to show how
speedy or how complete would be the ruin which the accomplishment of these
slaveholding schemes would bring upon the country. For one, I should not remain
in the country to test the sad experiment. Having spent my manhood, though not
my whole life, in a free State, no aristocracy of any kind, much less an
aristocracy of slaveholders, shall ever make the laws of the land in which I
shall be content to live. Having seen the society around me universally engaged
in agriculture, manufactures, and trade, which were innocent and beneficent, I
shall never be a denizen of a State where men and women are reared as cattle,
and bought and sold as merchandise. When that evil day shall come, and all
further effort at resistance shall be impossible, then, if there shall be no
better hope for redemption than I can now foresee, I shall say with Franklin,
while looking abroad over the whole earth for a new and more congenial home, "Where
liberty dwells, there is my country." You will tell me that these fears are
extravagant and chimerical. I answer, they are so; but they are so only because
the designs of the slaveholders must and can be defeated. But it is only the
possibility of defeat that renders them so. They cannot be defeated by
inactivity. There is no escape from them compatible with non-resistance. How,
then, and in what way, shall the necessary resistance be made,? There is only
one way. The Democratic party must be permanently dislodged from the
government. The reason is, that the Democratic party is inextricably committed
to the designs of the slaveholders, which I have described. Let me be well
understood. I do not charge that the Democratic candidates for public office
now before the people are pledged to-much less that the Democratic masses who
support them really adopt-those atrocious and dangerous designs. Candidates
may, and generally do, mean to act justly, wisely, and patriotically, when they
shall be elected; but they become the ministers and servants, not the dictators,
of the power which elects them. The policy which a party shall pursue at a
future period is only gradually developed, depending on the occurrence of events
never fully foreknown. The motives of men, whether acting as electors or in any
other capacity, are generally pure. Nevertheless, it is not more true that "
hell is paved with good intentions," than it is that earth is covered with
wrecks resulting from innocent and amiable motives.
The very constitution of the Democratic party commits it to execute all the
designs of the slaveholders, whatever they may be. It is not a party of the
whole Union, of all the free States and of all the slave States; nor yet is it a
party of the free States in the North and in the Northwest; but it is a
sectional and local party, having practically its seat within the slave States,
and counting its constituency chiefly and almost exclusively there. Of all its
representatives in Congress and in the electoral colleges, two-thirds uniformly
come from these States. Its great element of strength lies in the vote of the
slaveholders, augmented by the representation of three-fifths of the slaves.
Deprive the Democratic party of this strength, and it would be a helpless and
hopeless minority, incapable of continued organization. The Democratic party,
being thus local and sectional, acquires new strength from the admission of ever
new slave State, and loses relatively by the admission of every new free State
into the Union.
A party is, in one sense, a joint stock association, in which those who
contribute most direct the action and management of the concern. The
slaveholders contributing in an overwhelming proportion to the capital strength
of the Democratic party, they necessarily dictate and prescribe its policy. The
inevitable caucus system enables them to do so with a show of fairness and
justice. If it were possible to conceive for a moment that the Democratic party
should disobey the behests of the slaveholders, we should then see a withdrawal
of the slaveholders, which would leave the party to perish. The portion of the
party which is found in the free States is a mere appendage, convenient to
modify its sectional character, without impairing its sectional constitution,
and is less effective in regulating its movements than the nebulous tail of the
corset is in determining the appointed, though apparently eccentric, course of
the fiery sphere from which it emanates.
To expect the Democratic party to resist slavery and favor freedom is as
unreasonable as to look for Protestant missionaries to the Catholic propaganda
of Rome. The history of the Democratic party commits it to the policy of
slavery. It has been the Democratic party, and no other agency, which has
carried that policy up to its present alarming culmination. Without stopping to
ascertain, critically, the origin of the present Democratic party, we may
concede its claim to date from the era of good feeling which occurred under the
administration of President Monroe. At that time, in this State, and about that
time in many others of the free States, the Democratic party deliberately
disfranchised the free colored or African citizen, and it has pertinaciously
continued this disfranchisement ever since. This was an effective aid to
slavery; for, while the slaveholder votes for his slaves against freedom, the
freed slave in the free States is prohibited from voting against slavery. In
1824 the democracy resisted the election of John Quincy Adams-himself before
that time an acceptable Democrat and in 1828 it expelled him from the presidency
and put a slaveholder in his place, although the office had been filled by
slaveholders thirty-two out of forty years.
In 1836, Martin Van Buren-the first non-slaveholding citizen of a free State
to whose election the Democratic party ever consented-signalized his
inauguration into the presidency by a gratuitous announcement that under no
circumstances would he ever approve a bill for the abolition of slavery in the
District of Columbia. From 1838 to 1844 the subject of abolishing slavery in
the District of Columbia and in the national dockyards and arsenals, was brought
before Congress by repeated popular appeals. The Democratic party thereupon
promptly denied the right of petition, and effectually suppressed the freedom of
speech in Congress, so far as the institution of slavery was concerned.
From 1840 to 1843 good and wise men counselled that Texas should remain
outside the Union until she should consent to relinquish her self-instituted
slavery; but the Democratic party precipitated her admission into the Union, not
only without that condition, but even with a covenant that the State might be
divided and reorganized so as to constitute four slave States instead of one.
In 1846, when the United States became involved in a war with Mexico, and it
was apparent that the struggle would end in the dismemberment of that republic,
which was a non-slaveholding power, the Democratic party rejected a declaration
that slavery should not be established within the territory to be acquired.
When, in 1850, governments were to be instituted in the territories of
California and New Mexico, the fruits of that war, the Democratic party refused
to admit New Mexico as a free State, and only consented to admit California as a
free State on the condition, as it has since explained the transaction, of
leaving all of New Mexico and Utah open to slavery, to which was also added the
concession of perpetual slavery in the District of Columbia, and the passage of
an unconstitutional, cruel, and humiliating law, for the recapture of fugitive
slaves, with a further stipulation that the subject of slavery should never
again be agitated in either chamber of Congress. When, in 1854, the
slaveholders were contentedly reposing on these great advantages, then so
recently won, the Democratic party unnecessarily, officiously, and with
super-serviceable liberality, awakened them from their slumber, to offer and
force on their acceptance the abrogation of the law which declared that neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude should ever exist within that part of the
ancient territory of Louisiana which lay outside of the State of Missouri, and
north of the parallel of 36' 30' of north latitudes law which, with the
exception of one other, was the only statute of freedom then remaining in the
federal code.
In 1856, when the people of Kansas had organized a new State within the
region thus abandoned to slavery, and applied to be admitted as a free State
into the Union, the Democratic party contemptuously rejected their petition, and
drove them with menaces and intimidations from the halls of Congress, and armed
the President with military power to enforce their submission to a slave code,
established over them by fraud and usurpation. At every subsequent stage of a
long contest which has since raged in Kansas, the Democratic party- has lent its
sympathies, its aid, and all the powers of the government which it controlled,
to enforce slavery upon that unwilling and injured people. And now, even at
this day, while it mocks us with the assurance that Kansas is free, the
Democratic party keeps the State excluded from her just and proper place in the
Union, under the hope that she may be dragooned into the acceptance of slavery.
The Democratic party, finally, has procured from a supreme judiciary, fixed
in its interest, a decree that slavery exists by force of the constitution in
every territory of the United States, paramount to all legislative authority,
either within the territory or residing in Congress.
Such is the Democratic party. It has no policy, state or federal, for
finance, or trade, or manufacture, or commerce, or education, or internal
improvements, or for the protection or even the security of civil or religious
liberty. It is positive and uncompromising in the interest of slavery-negative,
compromising, and vacillating, in regard to everything else. It boasts its love
of equality, and wastes its strength, and even its life, in fortifying the only
aristocracy known in the land. It professes fraternity, and, so often as
slavery requires, allies itself with proscription. It magnifies itself for
conquests in foreign lands, but it sends the national eagle forth always with
chains, and not the olive branch, in his fangs.
This dark record shows you, fellow-citizens, what I was unwilling to
announce at an earlier stage of this argument, that of the whole nefarious
schedule of slaveholding designs which I have submitted to you, the Democratic
party has left only one yet to be consummated-the abrogation of the law which
forbids the African slave-trade.
I know-few, I think, know better than I-the resources and energies of the
Democratic party, which is identical with the slave power. I do ample justice
to its traditional popularity. I know further-few, I think, know better than
I-the difficulties and disadvantages of organizing a new political force, like
the Republican party, and the obstacles it must encounter in laboring without
prestige and without patronage. But, understanding all this, I know that the
Democratic party must go down, and that the Republican party must rise into its
place. The Democratic party derived its strength, originally, from its adoption
of the principles of equal and exact justice to all men. So long as it
practised this principle faithfully it was invulnerable. It became vulnerable
when it renounced the principle, and since that time it has maintained itself,
not by virtue of its own strength, or even of its traditional merits, but
because there as yet had appeared in the political field no other party that had
the conscience and the courage to take up, and avow, and practise the
life-inspiring principle which the Democratic party had surrendered. At last,
the Republican party has appeared. It avows, now, as the Republican party of
1800 did, in one word, its faith and its works, " Equal and exact justice
to all men." Even when it first entered the field, only half organized, it
struck a blow which only just failed to secure complete and triumphant victory.
In this, its second campaign, it has already won advantages which render that
triumph now both easy and certain.
The secret of its assured success lies in that very characteristic which, in
the mouth of scoffers, constitutes its great and lasting imbecility and
reproach. It lies in the fact that it is a party of one idea; but that is a
noble one-an idea that fills and expands all generous souls; the idea of
equality-the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they
all are equal before the divine tribunal and divine laws.
I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the
world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty, senators and a hundred
representatives proclaim boldly in Congress to-day sentiments and opinions and
principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free State, dared
to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the government of the
United States, under the conduct of the Democratic party, has been all that time
surrendering one plain and castle after another to slavery, the people of the
United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together
the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles
which have been lost, and to confound and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the
betrayers of the constitution and freedom forever.
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