Speech of Hon. John U. Pettit, of Indiana: On the Restoration of the Missouri Compromise; Delivered in the House of Representative, August 2, 1856 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Speech of Hon. John U. Pettit, of Indiana: On the Restoration of the Missouri Compromise; Delivered in the House of Representative, August 2, 1856

It will be regarded the more because it has seemed to be in hazard. Its restoration will be hailed as the augury of permanent peace. It will kindle illuminations, and fill the land with gladness, and the whole nation will go forth to greet it, as old Athens at the crisis of her fate, when the barbaric host cast its shadow over all her seas and plains, poured out from all her gates to bring home the banished Aristides.

This is needful for two reasons - in justice to the injured North, to rebuke her betrayers, who, false to representative duty, and for purposes of personal aggrandizement, made commerce of the national honor and happiness; but, for the greater reason of reassuring good faith and generous compromise, as the only means of lasting har mony.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Speech of Hon. John U. Pettit, of Indiana: On the Restoration of the Missouri Compromise; Delivered in the House of Representative, August 2, 1856

The House being in the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union -

Mr. Pettit said:

Mr. Chairman: I propose referring - and for the reason, only, that it has a direct and immediate connection with the most pressing exigency of legislation - to the means and motives that moved the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas bill; to the mischievous consequences, without a single benefit to any one, that have flowed from it, without intermission and with steady augmentation; and to express, with much respect to the differing opinions of others, my own opinion in favor of repealing so much of it as shall restore the Missouri compromise, as the sure means of bringing back the national peace and happiness.

In speaking of the Nebraska-Kansas bill, and in my present condemnation of it, I do not mean to embrace the provisions of it that are confined, though with many details, to establishing territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska, creating functions and officers of government, and clothing their inhabitants with certain limited privileges of making and administering their own laws. In all these things the provisions of the law are well enough, or only of questionable expediency. All persons alike, whether friendly to the repeal of the Missouri compromise or not, accede, in the main, to the propriety of this legislation. We have all long felt an honest national pride at seeing our civilization, rejoicing in conscious freedom and strength, going steadily West, and at length beginning to occupy the unpeopled and almost illimitable plains that stretch away beyond the Missouri. The time was ripe for establishing territorial governments there. All were agreed in this; and it has been no matter of objection to that law that it ordained governments for Kansas and Nebraska. Nor has it been an objection that, during the territorial condition, which is only the infancy of a State, and when, according to Burke's nervous expression, the State has not yet hardened into the bone and gristle of manhood, two of the departments of the Government, the executive and the judicial, were wholly lodged in the appointment of the President of the United States, without any consent of the people of the Territories; for, by maintaining so much of sovereignty over the Territories, after their being erected into governments, the Federal authority has been able to repress such anomalies of condition, as that gross and barbarian one in Utah that now shocks the national sense so much, and to cultivate their assimilation to the States preparatory to admission. And, especially, it has been no objection to the law from the people of the free States, where the sovereignty of the people is so much a principle and a fact, that it delegated limited powers of government to the people of the Territories, who are best acquainted with their own conveniences and wants. If, in organizing the territorial governments, it had any fault, it was that it gave the people too little power. In all these respects, just such territorial governments had been established, - and just such powers of legislation had been conveyed to the inhabitants of the Territories, by every law creating a territorial government since the Constitution. There was no novelty - in this nothing that inculcated any new principle or adopted any new practice. The Nebraska-Kansas bill, in the framework of territorial government it established in its functions and offices - in its executive, judiciary, and Legislature - did for Kansas and Nebraska what the ordinance of July 13, 1787, reaffirmed, in all its parts, by the first Congress under the Constitution, did for the Northwest Territory - what the act of June 12, 1838, establishing the Territory of Iowa, did for that Territory - what the act of August 14, 1848, establishing Ore