The right to have [slave] property protected in the
territory
is not a mere abstraction without application or practical value.
In the past there are instances where the people of the
Southern States might have colonized and brought new slave States
into the Union had the principle been recognized, and the
Government, the trustee of the Southern States, exercised its
appropriate powers to make good for the slaveholder the
guarantees of the Constitution . . . When the gold mines of
California were discovered, slaveholders at the South saw that,
with their command of labor, it would be easy at a moderate outlay
to make fortunes digging gold. The inducements to go there were
great, and there was no lack of inclination on their part. But, to
make the emigration profitable, it was necessary that the [slave]
property
of Southern settlers should be safe, otherwise it was plainly a
hazardous enterprise, neither wise nor feasible. Few were
reckless enough to stake property, the accumulation of years,
in a struggle with active prejudices amongst a mixed population,
where for them the law was a dead letter through the hostile
indifference of the General Government, whose duty it was, by the
fundamental law of its existence, to afford adequate protection --
executive, legislative, and judicial -- to the property of every
man,
of whatever sort, without discrimination. Had the people of the
Southern States been satisfied they would have received fair play
and equal protection at the hands of the Government, they would
have gone to California with their slaves. . . . California would
now have been a Slave State in the Union. . . .
What has been the policy pursued in Kansas? Has the territory
had
a fair chance of becoming a Slave State? Has the principle of
equal
protection to slave property been carried out by the Government
there in
any of its departments? On the contrary, has not every appliance
been
used to thwart the South and expel or prohibit her sons from
colonizing
there? . . . In our opinion, had the principle of equal protection
to
Southern men and Southern property been rigorously observed by the
General Government, both California and Kansas would undoubtedly
have
come into the Union as Slave States. The South lost those States
for the
lack of proper assertion of this great principle. . . .
New Mexico, it is asserted, is too barren and arid for Southern
occupation and settlement. . . . Now, New Mexico . . . teems with
mineral resources. . . . There is no vocation in the world in which
slavery can be more useful and profitable than in mining. . . .
[Is] it
wise, in our present condition of ignorance of the resources of New
Mexico, to jump to the conclusion that the South can have no
interest
in its territories, and therefore shall waive or abandon her right
of colonizing them? . . .
We frequently talk of the future glories of our republican
destiny on the
continent, and of the spread of our civilization and free
institutions
over Mexico and the Tropics. Already we have absorbed two of her
States,
Texas and California. Is it expected that our onward march is to
stop
here? Is it not more probable and more philosophic to suppose
that, as
in the past, so in the future, the Anglo-Saxon race will, in the
course
of years, occupy and absorb the whole of that splendid by
ill-peopled
country, and to remove by gradual process, before them, the
worthless
mongrel races that now inhabit and curse the land? And in the
accomplishment of this destiny is there a Southern man so bold as
to say,
the people of the South with their slave property are to consent to
total
exclusion. . . . ? Our people will never sit still and see
themselves
excluded from all expansion, to please the
North.