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388 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. JANUARY, 1861. [[line]] [[column 1]] United States are duly extended over them, and faithfully executed. The coolest and wisest statesmen of the Republic deny the right of peaceful secession. They admit the right of revolution ; but revolution in this country is rebellion, and rebellion is treason, and treason is levying war against the United States, with something more substantial than paper resolutions and windy declamations.—There must be swords, guns, powder, balls, and men behind them to use them. Now, when matters reach that point, South Carolina must conquer the United States, or the United States must conquer South Carolina. The right of South Carolina to secede, therefore, depends upon her ability to do so, and to stay so. If she can whip the Federal Government and scourge and keep it beyond her borders, and compel the United States to regard her as other than a revolted province, she can get out of the Union. But until she does all this, ABRAHAM LINCOLN is bound by his oath of office to regard her as one of the United States, and subject to the 'Union, the Constitution and the laws.' Such every body knows to be the true legal view of secession ; but the question comes—is there virtue enough in the Federal Government to enforce the law. When a poor slaves escapes to Boston, and hides in the cellars and garrets of humane men, the U. S. Government is strong. It can line the streets with soldiers, surround the granite Court House with chains, and convert the temple of justice into a prison to catch, hold and hurl the fugitive back into the house of bondage; but has that Government virtue enough to enforce the laws against the slaveholding, women-whipping rebels of Charleston? We do not ask, has Mr. Buchanan the virtue to do this? The fact is, that old man is in a fair way to win for himself the infamy of another Benedict Arnold. Only under his fostering care could the sate of disorder and alarm have reached its present magnitude. His message was a virtual invitation to the slave States to secede from the Union, assuring them that no force would be employed against them. Of all old sinners, there is less hope of him who paints his crimes with prayers, who prays for light when he means to walk in darkness, who repents only of righteousness and clings to wrong, turns his back on justice, and flings around slavery the mantel of religion. of such a man there is no hoe. Even should he resist, it would be a sham resistance, more to show the enemies of the Government in a favorable light, than to punish and to subdue them to law and order. Of him nothing can be expected but weakness, cunning, treachery and gross hypocrisy; and we believe naught else is expected of him. Like Louis XI., he can pray and poison, count beads and cut throats. In the crafty wording of his proclamation of fast, you might suppose that Mr. Buchanan had slavery in his eye as one of the sins of the nation; but we have only to read his message to know what he regards as our great sin. It is opposition to slavery, to making merchandize of men, to trading in human flesh, to selling women at auctions, to driving them to toil, and giving them naught for their work. It is anti-slavery, that has brought the frown of Heaven upon our land! Oh! what a stench arises from the rottenness of such piety; and yet such is the current religion [[/column 1 ]] [[start column 2]] of the Bell-Everett and Squatter Sovereignty religion of the national fusion parties of the country. Nothing will so rapidly and effectually bring religion into utter contempt, as this making it the mantle to hide the monstrous and shocking enormities, the blood-chilling and unutterable cruelty and wickedness of slavery. Mr. BUCHANAN threw around his character the very poetry of villainy, when he called upon the nation to join him in prayer and fasting. But to the dissolution of the Union, and its chance of success. Conquering a Federal army, and driving out all Federal officers, is not the only difficulty to be overcome. The slave population of South Carolina may at last prove the most serious check upon disunion. They are more than equal to the whites in number, and cannot have failed to learn something from passing events. All the precautions of their tyrant masters have not hid form them the fact that they, in some sort, have a direct interest in the controversy between the State and the Federal Government. It is more than probable that they have given Mr. LINCOLN credit for having intentions towards them far more benevolent and just than any he is known to cherish.—His pledges to protect and uphold slavery in the States have not reached them ; while certain dim, undefined, but large and exaggerated notions of his emancipating purposes have taken firm hold of them, and have grown larger and firmer with every look, nod and undertone of their oppressors. They were taught to look for freedom by the election of JOHN C. FREMONT. He failed ; but he so nearly succeeded, that hope was entertained that another trial would bring certain victory. That victory they have been taught to believe has now been achieved; that a friend of their's is now about to take the reins of Government ; that he is a 'Black Republican ;' that his mission is to free the slaves. Let them learn that there is enmity between the State and the Federal Government, and that South Carolina has broken away from the Union to defeat their liberation from bondage ; that ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the President, is on their side, and against their masters; that he has only been defeated in giving them their liberty by taking the State out of the Union, and it is easy to see that such impressions and ideas might burst forth and spread havoc and death among slaveholders to an extent never surpassed even in the annals of St. Domingo-South Carolina, in such an event, would be more likely to fight her way back into the Union, than to fight her way out of it. Her salvation as a slave State might be made to depend upon Federal arms. But will not the cotton States join South Carolina? They probably will ; but the elements of weakness would be the same. South Carolina would only be prevented on a larger scale : with her, those cotton States have to extinguish the life of the Federal Government within their limits, and keep that extinguished. This can only be done by force, by treachery, or by negotiation ; and to neither will ABRAHAM LINCOLN succumb. To do so would be to put the razor to the throat of his party, write himself down a coward, make political platforms, worse than a mockery, and to become the pliant tool of the very barbarism which he was elected to restrain, and 'place it where the public mind would [[/column 2]] [[start column 3]] rest in the belief in its ultimate extinction'—He is pledged to the maintenance of the Union; and if he has the will, he will not lack the power to maintain it against all foes. But if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders ; it if can only be stuck together and held together by a new drain on the negro's blood ; if the North is to forswear the exercise of all rights incompatible with the safety and perpetuity of slavery ; that slavery shall be the only right, the only system superior to investigation, and superior to progress—we say, if this (and it is all demanded) be the price of the Union, then will every right minded man and woman in the land say, let the Union perish, and perish forever. As against compromises and national demoralization, welcome, ten thousand times over, the hardships consequent upon a dissolution of the Union. [[line]] THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE. --- This paper contains three propositions, the adoption of which, it is believed, will settle and compose the minds of the slaveholders of the country who now threaten to break up the Union : 1st. An express recognition of the right of property in slaves in the States where it now exists, or may hereafter exist. 2d. The duty of protecting this right in all the common Territories throughout their Territorial existence, and until they shall be admitted into the Union, with or without slavery. 3d. A like recognition of a master to have his slave, who has escaped from one State to another, restored and delivered up to him, and of the validity of the Fugitive Slave Law enacted for this purpose, together with a declaration that all State laws imparing or defeating the right, are violations of the Constitution, and are, consequently, null and void. These are notable and significant suggestions and propositions. They want 'express' guarantees in the U. S. Constitution, of the right of property in men for the States and for the Territories, and an 'express' constitutional recognition of the right to recapture fugitive slaves in the free States. This is an admission on the part of the highest officer in the Government that there is no such 'express' guarantees of the 'right of property' in slaves in the Constitution of the United States; and the admission, though made with a pro-slavery intention, is entirely correct. Notwithstanding all the compromises and concessions made to the Slave Power; notwithstanding all the pompous and solemn guarantees said to be contained in the Constitution, it now stands confessed, before all national and the world, by the President of the U. S. himself, that there is no 'express' recognition of a 'right of property' in man in the U. S. Constitution. The confession may have come too late, and yet for one we re rejoice that, late or early, the country has at last heard, what they have too long refused to hear, that there is no 'express' recognition of the right of property in slaves in the supreme law of the land. [[line]] —Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky has ordered a motion on the Supreme Court for a writ of 'mandamus' against Gov. Dennison of Ohio, growing out of the latter's refusal to surrender Lago upon Magoffin's requisition. Lago was indicted in Kentucky for enticing a slave to escape from his master, but escaped to Ohio, and Gov. D. refused to give him up.
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