And if my position can be answered and refuted, I shall receive
the refutation with pleasure; I shall be glad to listen to reason,
aside, as I say, from indignation and passion. And if, by the force
of reasoning, my understanding can be convinced, I here pledge myself
to recant what I have asserted.
Let my position be answered; let me be told, let my constituents be
told, the people of my State be told--a State whose soil tolerates
not the foot of a slave--that they are bound by the Constitution to
a long and toilsome march under burning summer suns and a deadly
Southern clime for the suppression of a servile war; that they are
bound to leave their bodies to rot upon the sands of Carolina, to
leave their wives widows and their children orphans; that those who
cannot march are bound to pour out their treasures while their sons
or brothers are pouring out their blood to suppress a servile,
combined with a civil or a foreign war, and yet that there exists no
power beyond the limits of the slave State where such war is raging
to emancipate the slaves. I say, let this be proved--I am open to
conviction; but till that conviction comes, I put it forth not as a
dictate of feeling, but as a settled maxim of the laws of nations,
that, in such a case, the military supersedes the civil power; and on
this account I should have been obliged to vote, as I have said,
against one of the resolutions of my excellent friend from Ohio, (Mr.
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