Franklin Repository

Great Speech of

Hon. John Hickman.

In the Independent Democratic Convention at

Harrisburg, on the 13th inst.

Mr. President:- I am glad to meet you- to join you upon an occasion so interesting and important as the present one. I heartily endorse the propriety of this convention. The base outrage recently attempted here by the minions of despotic federal authority merits a stern rebuke, but not more than the weakness and heartlessness which conceived and commanded it. I love and admire the honesty and courage with which Gov. Packer has appreciated and discharged all his public duties. To him and his able and accomplished Attorney General and Secretary of the Commonwealth, are our thanks eminently due for a manifestation of that devoted patriotism which impelled them to consider their country first, and consequences afterwards. It is no surprising that political prostitution should condemn it. The popular affection, however, will be to them a shield more protective than fortresses of granite and of iron. But I desire to speak of other matters.

At this day, resolutions complimentary to the present national administration may be pardoned, when proceeding from official sycophants, but they can do neither good no harm. The history of Mr. Buchanan's executive life has already been written, and too plainly, to be obliterated by bribed eulogy, or to be misunderstood by the people of this State and nation. Neither political conjuration nor party magic can make them forget the wicked violation of pledges, the arrogance of bloated power, the prostitution of Congress, the profligacy of departments, or the rapid and marked encroachments upon popular constitutional rights. Judgement, final judgement, has been calmly and deliberately passed upon this treason to the democracy, this assassination of common honesty, and it is as irreversable as the decree of God. It is wise, therefore, in this convention, to speak the truth plainly, and to avoid the folly of an attempt to cover up an audacious criminality we must all condemn.

By the action of the 34th Congress, the complaints made by the residents of Kansas were ascertained to be true. Although the South, by the legislation of 1854, was pledged to maintain the domestic sovereighty of the territories, a portion of their people from Missouri entered upon the soil of Kansas, and, by force and fraud, seized the law making power, stilled the voice of the majority, and enacted statutes disgraceful to the age and nation. This fact, when legally revealed, made a deep impression upon the public mind, and Mr. Buchanan found it necessary, in order to carry the election in his own State, to pledge himself distinctly to the maintenance of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, and to defend the rights of those who had been thus ruthlessly despoiled. I will not pretend to indicate the particular weakness in his nature that induced him to turn the hand of the suicide against his own fame, as it matters little whether it arose from timidity, a fear of his friends, a careless disregard of fair dealing, or a weak and puerile vanity. It is enough to know that he deceived all our hopes, turned with the blackest ingratitude upon that self-sacrificing friendship by which he reached the goal of his feverish ambition, and sought by all the means within the reach of drunken and staggering authority to disgrace every man whom he could not debauch. Suddenly, and as by the touch of the wand of the magician, he became transformed from the sympathizer with down trodden freedom, to the open and shameless defender of aggressive and law defying slavery.

The halls of the national legislature were turned into marts for conscience; he published his interpretations of party principles and platforms with the arrogance of a dictator; and commanded his subordinates in office, and his coward slaves, to reiteratie and proclaim his bulls of party excommunication against all who were rash enough to follow an independent judgment. These acts of themselves are enough to sever allegiance. It would be an ill-shaped manhood which could tolerate them in silence. But because we denounce them, we are unathematised as rebellious. So, we will see where the rebellion will end. It will end in the supremacy of the laws; in the integrity of the constitution; in the purification of parties; in the sworn loyalty of executives; and the vigorous growth, material greatness, and eternal dominance of the North. That is where it will end. Popular sovereignty, invoked by the South, will be defended by us, and it shall unfold the veiled yet dimly discovered destiny of this great republic. We are battling for the right, for the spirit of the institutions our fathers established; let us feel that we are doing this, and we will accomplish the victory of our century. Not a mere naked triumph at the polls, but the great success afterwards -the untrammelled self-government of man; the dedication of a continent to consistent liberty.

Those who stop to talk of conciliation and compromises between us and the self-constituted oracles of the Democratic party, can have but a feeble appreciation of the condition of things. When you can harmonize light and darkness, integrity and corruption, the partiotic devotion of the private citizen to the principles of our government, with a tyranny worse than that of the middle ages, it will be time enough to cry "peace." Let this truth be made prominent -that there is an eternal antagonism between freedom and slavery.--The constitution of the human mind and the human heart makes it inevitable; and the one or the other must eventually gain the ascendancy. The struggle between them, but just begun, is now going on in our midst, and he is but a superficial observer who does not discover it. We have acted honorably -benevolenty. For long, long years we have defended the chartered rights of our Southern brethren; we have even conceded their exactions; we have given them all the advantages springing from unequal legislation; we have CHANGED POLICY to suit their notions of interest; until having grown fat, they demand as a prerogative what we granted as a favor, and having found a President without affections, a sworn officer not afraid of perjury, willing to back their pretensions, they would now treat us as a common enemy, and brand our names with indellible infamy. They have done more -they have gone farther; they have come amongst us, and bribed cupidity with gold, ambition with promotion, and vanity with temporary consequence, to do violence to justice. Longer forbearance not only ceases to be virtuous, but it becomes cowardly and base. The North has rights, long in abeyance truly, yet not lost; we will save them; by walls of fire and blood, if needs be, we will save them.

In what I have just said, I would not be misunderstood; I know I cannot escape misrepresentation. I would resist aggression on the part of the South, not her constitutional guarantees; and I would force a plain, distinct, unequivocal recognition of the rightful claims of the North; nothing more, nothing less. Who can safely complain of this?

I wish I could stop here. If this were all of the accusation, we might forget the past in the exercise of a profuse charity, but unfortunately, we are not allowed to do so. A usurpation has been accomplished which saps the very foundation of our political structure. Mr. Buchanan has demanded an absorption of the powers of Congress in those of the Executive. To carry out his treachery to us, he has assailed the representatives of the people. He has bribed the venal, rewarded the aspiring, alarmed the timid, and deceived the honest. By such means was the Lecompton Constitution carried into a provisional law, in contemptuous disregard of the known will of the people upon whom it was imposed, and in direct contravention of the letter and spirit of the organic act itself. The reason which prompted the commission of the outrage is too manifest to be doubted. It was to purchase flattery of the South; to force slavery upon the soil of the North; and to strengthen and aggrandise one section of the Union at the expense and hazard of the other. Then, compliance with the executive behests was the est of the democracy, and to disregard them was tapostacy.

More recently, however, when the recommedations of the President were thought to favor the manufacturing and agricultural States -when the propriey of a new tariff law was suggested- and when the so-called Democratic members of the Senate and House of Representatives, and even Cabinet Officers, raised the voice of denunciatory opposition, it was all right, and rebellion became loyalty. And yet Pennsylvanians see nothing wrong in this; nay, they commend it. Chains never clanked upon the limbs of beings more servile and debased. We might, perhaps, be able to open their eyes to the truth, and loosen their tongues to utter it, by continuing them in office under a new administration governed by a more benign policy. If parties with such plastic notions, shall be able to grasp the control of our government, then must the strong empire of the North be dwarfed to barrenness, and eighteen millions of white slaves here, be added to the four millions of black slaves yonder. This is indeed a stange illustration of the advantages of free government which proclaims a necessity for crushing out the inherent power of a people by fashioning their institutions for them requiring it to be sanctioned, and yet allows and encourages a denial of law by which alone a bankrupt treasury can be replenished, and honest debts paid.

But, sir, we charge further upon the administration of Mr. Buchanan one of the main causes by which we have reached the point of national insolvency, a reckless prodigality in the expenditures of the public money, and a previling vice in the departments of the government. It is a gross mistake to suppose that our increased expenses are owing to an expansion of territory and the removal of our frontier. The administration of Mr. Van Buren, with an annual outlay of thiry-seven millions of dollars, was pronounced extravagant; now our expenses are close upon one hundred millions a year. But we have got used to talking of millions without stopping to consider the magnitude of the figures.--Why, sir, all the horses and mules in this county, numbering over six thousand, would scarcely draw, in silver, the money required to foot our government bills for a single year. Do you enquire why this is so? I will tell you. We have abandoned our former and better practices. When Mr. Jefferson was President, he required honesty and capability in his appointees; now, subordinates are selected for their known lack of independence, conscience and will. There was a time, which our fathers remember, when to be the head of a department, a Secretary of Treasury or of War, or of the Navy, require greatness, and inspired confidence; now a man of very moderate dimensions will suffice for either place. An ex-Governor or effete Senator will always answer for the position, provided he has the marks of gyves upon his legs and does not know too much. I think we will be able to furnish one hereafter who may claim by a double title. I hazard little in saying there is now more money squandered and stolen yearly, than it required during the administrations of Madison, Monroe, and the younger Adams, to support the government.

There is not only no careful supervision of our finances, but funds are drawn, constantly, directly from your treasury to rewared favorits, and to give approved shape to public opinion at the polls; in other words, to cary elections. The Secretary of the Navy, among others, may know something of this. If he should not, the Patterson letter, with the President's endorsement, may afford him information. Public property, of great value, is sold, privately and covertly, at a tithe of its worth; other is brought at almost fabulous prices. Navy Yards, Post Offices, Custom Houses and Mints, have been stocked, crowded crammed, for weeks and months, with superannuates and idlers, and paid the wages only due to well taught craft and deserving industry, for the mere purpose of overriding the legal voters, returning parasites, tumbler and trencher friends, to Congress, and publishing an attested lie to the world. These acts- these flagrant violations of preservative law and decent behavior- have all been endorsed here, in this place, in this Capitol, and uttered and published as true and genuine Democracy. God save the Republic! And knowing them all, and in the face of them all, the President himself, to whom but three short years ago we gave the fullness of our confidence, now bleached by age, and blanching before the frowns of an outraged and insulted constituency, cants and whines, in hypocritical numbers, over the degeneracy of the times, and in the expression of a fear lest elections should be carried by gold. Catching the sounds of lamentation as they issue from the open casements and portals of the White House, your Biglers, et id omne genus, move with the hushed and solemn tread of mourners, and shed gouty tears of blood.

The indefensible and destructive management of the Post Office Department, requires especially to be noticed. Within a very short period, for the mere purposes of enriching contractors, bestowing largesses upon sterile and uninhabited districts of the South, and acquiring power, the expenditures have been almost double -run up to the enormous sum of twenty milions of dollars- and the mail system made a by-word and a reproach.--With new, extended, and expensive routes, without corresponding returns, sunk in fathomless debt, aye, paralised by burthens, its chief lustily cries for help and piteously begs the sinew of prolonged malfeasance. But upon whom does he call? Upon those to whom the appeal is always made when money, votes, soldires, or other effective help is required -upon the laboring, thrifty- the "mud sills" of Eastern, Northern, Middle and Western States. It is consoling to know we are good enough to pay, if not to receive. We are at least able, if not respectable. If we have not chivalry, we have fields, and farms and factories. Let us then, without whimpering, "split the difference." The "F.F. V's" or the "F.F.T's" shall take all the posts of patronage, and we will pay their debts. The plan proposed, by which we shall do this, is a very simple one. We have only to pay five cents, instead of three, on each letter we write, abolish the present "franking privilege," and, consequently, cut off the distribution of all seeds and agricultural and mechanical and political information from our people, and the thing is, in a great measure, accomplished. And why not do this? To be sure we more than pay now for all our postal service, and these documents are highly prized by us, but do we not know that "the domestic institution" is too poor to pay, and too ignorant to read. We seem to be prone eternally to forget that we were mad for hewers of wood and drawers of water. If we would remember this fact. I think we could cordially unite with those who met here on the 16th ult., and join them in paeans and praise to the new American Monarchy.

It has become humiliating to pride to speak the truth, for it has become unfashionable, and almost incredible. Largely in debt, pressed on all sides by voracious creditors, with no present ability to pay, and with constantly accumulating liabilities, the President of the United States has shown himself incompetent to carry any measure of relief. Yes, this man and his Cabinet are appalled, terror stricken, and motionless in view of the natural results of their own policy. If it were permissable, I would recommend them to infuse a little of their Lecompton fire into the tariff recommendation--

"Instead of standing, staring altogether,

Like garden gods -and not so decent either."

To blind our sight to its short comings, to cover up its disgraceful defeats, and to reconstruct its sinking fortunes, the administration now proposes, by virtue of a transfer of the war-making power to itself, to visit chastisement upon feeble states for imaginary wrongs, and by the acquisition of Cuba to extend the area of freedom gluttonized on slavery. A man self made mad, and then self destroyed -A Lear in rages, and not in robes- having lost the sceptre by the weakness of folly, clutches the flying air, and seeks to mount again to power and influence. Vanity of vanities! there is no restitution for fallen greatness.

A few material inquiries may possibly present themselves, when we come to consider the propriety of the purchase of the vain and much praised "Queen of the Antilles," and of bringing her into our loving and lecherous embrace. In what way, by what mysterious means, with what magic key will you draw the thirty golden millions, demanded by the President as earnest money, and the hundreds of millions afterwards, from a strong box, empty as the heart of its keeper, and which is more secure in locking treasure out than locking it in? How far will a well regulated prudence determine us to go in entrusting such vast amounts in the hands of one who has already deceived us -in whom we have no confidence? By what legal secret will we be able to consummate a purchase of Spain, who has determined not to sell? And how can we better secure ourselves against those who, in league with the President, have sought to humiliate us, by giving them the control of the Gulf of Mexico as they may have it over the Mississippi?

I think I can school myself to love my enemies; but not better than myself. I can willingly admit my brother to an equal enjoyment of a common inheritance; but I cannot, when he does me violence and injustice, strengthen his arm so as to enable him forcibly to take it all. So, I can and will love my Southern neighbor. I will freely allow him an equal participation of all the fruits of our generous system. I will divide with him the temple of Liberty. I will shield him from the evil doer. But when he denies to me what I am willing to grant to him, and that which my title covers, I will not stultify myself and place weapons in his hand for my destruction; and I will never pay tribute for either his kindness or forbearance. Cuba may be important to the Union; I will admit that it will be so when we have just and equal laws, and honest officer; but before we acquire it, I desire to be informed whether any legislation can possibly be had as beneficial to Pennsylvania as the purchase would be to Tennessee of Georgia; and above all shall I seek to know how, thenceforward, we are to be treated. For if I am a traitor, an unconscious and unrewarded one, to either thirty-three or fifteen states I will not add to the enormity of my offence by extending the number of States against which my guilt must operate.

I have stated as concisely as I could, my judgement of the management of the government for the last two years. I trust I have made it plain and distinct. I have not descended to minute particulars; the proof of my declarations having become matter of enduring record has rendered it unneccessary to do so. I leave it before you and the country, as a full justification for our present course, and as the reason for our settled determination to refuse to be indentified with movements we both deplore and despise. Desiring to be fair, we cannot tolerate deception. Sustaining right, we must denounce usurpation. Asking justice, we cannot inflict a wrong. Economy is not presented to us as a choice, it is force upon us as a necessity; and having been trained in a system of politics that we love, and taught to regard purity as essential to power, it is too late in our lives to turn demagogues to maintain majorities, or to barter for smiles from rotten rule. It is true that renewed and continues denunciation and proscription are likely to be our reward for the choice we make, but I cannot avoid hinting to those who suppose they have throttled the wolf, that may have only caught him by the ears.

It is told when the Belvidere Apollo was in the Louvre, a ray of gushing and fascinating beauty came with each returning sun to look upon and love it, wreathing it with selected flowers, and clasping it in all the ardor of her youthful heart. Days and weeks and months rolled on, until at last the cold and stony figure turned her warm blood to ice, and she was found dead, with her face buried in her hand, and leaning against it. Sir, we may be too ideal, and look for a perfection which nature does not furnish. Like the daughter of the Baron, we may bestow the jewels of the heart where their value can never be appreciated, and our last pulse may beat as we kneel in absorbing and silent adoration before the symbol of a god. If such must be, we may well claim, at least, a generous sympathy, for that form once had brain, and heart, and life and power. In the days of Jefferson it was wise and creative; in the days of Madison brave and benevolent, and in the days of Jackson commanding and resistless. then it was the awe inspiring guardian of Liberty -American Democracy- inviting championship, and holding in its hands the olive branch of peace and the thunderbolt of war.

But, sir, we will not die, but live. We have Aristotle's hope the dreams of waking men and their appaling interpretations shall be written out in letters of fire upon walls of adamant. It shall be read of all men, from the Aroostook to the Golden Gate. You have it -truth in a whisper shall confound the lie from a trumpet; and a naked child shall tread upon the armored giant leading the hosts marshalled against the advancing civilization and righteous government of man.

Look not back, we have learned the past but onward, onward, with steady eye and unwavering step. The goal is before you! You will remember then when Orpheus lost Eurydice, he followed her even into the abode of Hades, where by the power of his lyre he won her back, but it was enjoined upon him that he should not look upon her until he had arrived in the upper air. At the very moment they were passing the fatal bounds, it is said his love overcame him, and looking around to know that she was following him, she was caught back into the infernal regions: The story embodies a pregnant moral. If you would regain the loved and the lost, then forward! forward!!

I am done. If I have been dull, you will pardon me. If I have inspired a single patriotic thought or feeling, I have my reward.

Last week we gave an extract from the Charleston (S.C.) Mercury, which entirely ignores the claims of Northern sycophantic Locofocos to Nationalism (?) and fraternity with their Southern masters.--That paper speaks out boldly, declaring all, except Southerners, without the pale of the great National Democratic party.--This is almost too bad. The dough-faces of the North have, for years, been stooping to every kind of debasement to propitiate the good-will of these petty tyrants -picayune monarchs- of slavedom; and now, after the people in the North have nearly everywhere repudiated them for their truckling meanness, for the nabobs of the South, in whose behalf they have sacrificed so much, to turn their backs up on them also, is the very height of ingratitude.

The base subserviency to Southern dictation which has hitherto characterized the movements of Nothern locofocos, in order to curry favor with their allies of the South, has long been a matter of astonishment to outsiders. How thirteen millions of white men, living in and breathing the air of the free North, could voluntarily submit to be brow-beaten into supporting any measure they knew to be wrong, or be compelled to denounce principles of eternal justice and truth, -for condemning which, their consciences smote them- at the command of a handful (less than the half of one million) of Southern slave holders, has been a fruitful source of amazement to every person not bound by the independence-destroying rules of a tyranizing party. Many of the people, and a few of the leaders of the locofoco party in the North are beginning to get their eyes open to the disreputable condition to which they have been reduced by the ever-exacting, never-satisfied oligarchy.

Doubtless many members of the liberty crushing party were no little astounded by the announcement of the Charleston Mercury; but what do they think of the following from another Southern locofoco:

"It is not enough that they (the Northern democracy) should sanction slavery in its most objectionable aspect, by aiding in the recapture of the fugitive negro -it is not enough that they should admit slavery into the Territories under cover of the Constitution-it is not enough that they should consent to reverse the traditionary policy of the Government and to accept the illimitable extension of Southern institutions- it is not enough that they should fetter the arm of Congress, hitherto so active and efficient in the restriction of slavery, and wake the dormant energies of the judiciary for its protection in the Federal domain -all these the Northern Democracy have yielded; but their Southern associates are not yet content. They must agree to employ the power of Government for the propagation of slavery. It is a condition they can not accept."

What a humiliating picture of their own hitherto uniform practices for free men to behold, and for others to view as the line of conduct pursued by the party which claims to possess all the democracy in the land. All the imperious exactions which the privileged few saw fit to make at the hands of the time serving locofoco party have been readily granted. From gaining one unrighteous demand they (the power grasping lords-of-the lash) hastened to require larger concessions from those who were constantly disgracing themselves in the eyes of all honorable men, for granting any of the wicked claims of the South; for the haughty arrogance was but fattening on that upon which it fed. The opposition have for a great while charged home upon the truckling party of the North the very conduct which the Washington States now candidly admits to have been their policy; yet they invariably denied the "soft impeachment," and declared themselves to be opposed to forcing slavery into the territories "under cover of the constitution;" opposed to granting any greater or larger favors to one portion of the country than the other, and declared that their motto was "equal and exact justice to all." Now, however, the truth of the case is made to appear by a competent witness taking the stand, and we find, to our satisfaction and their chagrin, that the allegations we made against the lackey democracy are fully substanciated. We may well ask, what next?

After fettering the strong arm of Congress so as to prevent its interference to restrict the illimitable spread of the gangrened ulcer on our body politic, the pliable democracy of the North then proceeded to wake up the sleeping powers of the judiciary, and compelled grey headed Judges to trail the ermine of their official station in the dust of political filth; decend from the proud and noble position of enders of truth and justice, and become decruel champions of oppression and wrong. There is not another body of men to be found in the known world who can be prevailed upon to stultify themselves without receiving any return; their own consciences also condemning them, and all high-minded men loudly rebuking them for their puerility. The American Judiciary once occupied an exalted position in the opinion of the enlightened world; now, however, it is becoming a byword of derision and scorn. The Marshals, the Jays, the Storys and the Gibsons have all taken their departure from the scenes of earth, and the places which once were occupied by those giant intellects are now filled by dwarfed pigmies.

The horrible dogma uttered by Roger B. Taney, that "negroes have no rights which white men are bound to respect," seems to pervade our whole judicial system. Had that monstrous doctrine never been pronounced, by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, as a part of the genius of our laws, no such hellish sentiment would ever have proceeded from Judge Crawford, (a native of this town, to our shame be it said) as that which he declared recently to be the law of the land, i.e. that slaves cannot contract marriage and, therefore, cannot commit adultery. Another just reason for the interrogatory, what next?

Can these things last forever? Will cruelty, oppression and wrong, ever hold the ascendency in the Republican America? Well did Jefferson say:--"I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." A day of retribution is hastening on. The Egyptians thought that the God of Moses was not able to deliver the Israelites out of their hands, and they tightened their hold upon them, instead of hearkening to his appeals for their liberation. The deliverance, came, however, and with it a fearful reckoning to their taskmasters. May we not profit by this Bible lesson?