On March 4th Calhoun attempted to speak, but found himself unable and handed his speech to Mason who read it for him. He rejected Clay's Compromise as futile and denied utterly the right of the inhabitants of a Territory to exclude slavery. He accused the North of having pursued a course of systematic hostility to Southern institutions since the close of the Revolution, and cited the Ordinance of 1787, the Missouri Compromise and the exclusion of slavery from Oregon as instances of Northern aggression; and now, he said, the final and fatal act of exclusion was attempted. He denounced the action of the people of California in organizing a State without congressional authority as revolutionary and rebellious.
He grimly announced that the South had no concessions to make, even to save the poor wreck of a once glorious Union. He plainly told them that if the Union was to be saved the North must save it. It must open the Territories to slavery. It must surrender fugitive slaves. It must cease agitating the slavery question. The Constitution must be amended so as to restore to the South the power of protecting itself. If they were not willing to do these acts of justice, nor that the South should depart in peace, let them say so, that it might know what to do when the question was reduced to one of submission or resistance.
Three days later Webster delivered his famous 7th of March speech.
He criticized with severity the Northern Democracy for its eager and officious subserviency to the South throughout the whole controversy arising out of the Mexican War, hinting that it had been even more eager to server than the South had been to accept its service. He said that the Mexican War had been prosecuted for the purpose of the acquisition of territory for the extension of slavery, but that the nature of the country had defeated, in large part, the hopes of the South. He declared that the whole question of slavery was settled by a higher law than that of Congress and that there was not then a foot of territory whose status was not already fixed by the laws of the several States or the decree of the Almighty; that, by the irrepealable laws of physical geography, slavery was already excluded from California and New Mexico. He "would not take pains uselessly to reaffirm an ordinance of Nature, nor to reenact the will of God." He denounced the Abolitionists and urged upon the Northern States the duty of faithfully and energetically enforcing the abhorred Fugitive Slave Law.
Seward, speaking a few days later, insisted that it was their clear duty to admit California under any Constitution adopted by it, republican in form, and assured then that had its Constitution permitted slavery he would still have deemed it his duty to vote for its admission. He protested against the Fugitive Slave Law as necessarily nugatory and utterly impossible of execution because unanimously condemned by the public sentiment of the North. In answer to the crushing argument that the Constitution carried slavery into the Territories and that cheerful obedience must be yielded to the supreme law, he announced the startling doctrine that there was a HIGHER LAW than the Constitution, to which their first duty was due; that slavery was a violation of this HIGHERLAW and hence the Constitution itself was powerless to establish it in the Territories.
On the 13th and 14th Douglas spoke. The speech was able and adroit. It was marred by the introduction of party-politics into a discussion of such gravity. He was always prone to lapse from statesmanlike dignity to the level of the politician and viewed most matters primarily in their relation to he transient questions of party politics. He undertook the ambitious task of replying to the speeches of Webster, Seward, and Calhoun. He repelled the charge made by Webster that the Northern Democracy had surrendered to the slave power in supporting the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, declaring that they had supported those measures from patriotic motives, and that he was "one of those Northern Democrats who supported annexation with all the zeal of his nature." "With a touch of the Northwest--the Northwestern Democracy," sneered Webster, who contemptuously looked upon him as a crude blustering youth from the far West. But Webster, whose contempt for his coarse taste was justified, had misjudged his resources and power.
"Yes, sir," replied Douglas, "I am glad to hear the Senator say 'With a touch of the Northwest'; I thank him for the distinction. We have heard so much talk about the North and South, as if those two sections were the only ones necessary to be taken into consideration * * * that I am gratified to find that there are those who appreciate the important truth that there is a power in this Nation, greater than either the North or the South--a growing, increasing, swelling power, that will be able to speak the law to this Nation and to execute the law as spoken. That power is the country known as the great West, the Valley of the Mississippi, one and indivisible from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, stretching on the ones side and the other to the extreme sources of the Ohio and the Missouri--from the Alleghenies to the Rocky Mountains.
