The pending question was upon the follow-
ing amendment, submitted by Mr. BROWN :
Add to the 23d Article, the following :
"And the Legislature shall make provision
from the Treasury of the State for the com-
fortable support and maintenance of the help-
less and paupers hereby emancipated."
Mr. STOCKBRIDGE, Mr. President, I ap-
proach the discussion of the question now be-
fore this Convention with something of reluc-
tance, and with unfeigned diffidence. It has
already, at least in many of the speeches,
been ably and amply discussed. Besides
which, I cannot flatter myself that I can say
anything which is adequate to the occasion,
and to the question before us.
It is a question of paramount importance ;
one which is not to be reckoned, as it has
been, by dollars and cents alone, going as it
does to the very foundation of the social and
industrial systems of our State, and shaping
as it must in no slight degree the whole future
of our State. Yet the question is here before
us, and it must be met.
It has come here through the action, not of
the enemies of the institution, but of its
friends. By them has the issue been precipi-
tated upon Maryland and upon the country.
For though it is true that there had long been
here many who believed that slavery was
an evil socially, politically, morally, reli-
giously; in the language of a distinguished
slaveholder, "evil in its inception, in its du-
ration, and doomed to be such in its catas-
trophe;" an unmixed, unmitigated evil,
without palliation or defence save in necessity,
yet the men who entertained those sentiments,
being persuaded that its extinction could only
be wrought by the slow processes of the Great
Innovator, or the earthquake throes of bloody
revolution, were content to pray and wait.
For the sake of peace, they scarcely protested
against that which in their very hearts they
believed to be "the sum of all villainies,"
For the sake of peace, they were for long
years dumb in the presence of the continued
infractions of the principles of the great char-
ter of American freedom, and the constant
violations of the principles and teachings of
the Great Author of our religion. For the
sake of peace, they silently saw iniquity,
what they believed, what they knew to be
iniquity, framed into law. For the sake of
peace, they saw a giant edifice of wrong built
up amid scoffs, and sneers, and unmeasured
denunciations of all who believed that there
was any higher law than theirs; or who
deemed 'that that law which was traced deep
in the stone by the finger of infinite Majesty,
amid the lightnings and the thunderings of
Sinai, had a more sacred sanction than that
which was concocted in the conclave of dema-
gogues, and lobbied through these halls in
Annapolis.
So it might long have continued to be, if
this power, the slave power, could have been |
content to sit as absolute monarch. But even
that did not content it. In its citadel of
wrong it plotted to add the extinction of
national existence to that of individual free-
dom. But in its plotting it broke the wand
of enchantment; and its victims sprang from
their unnatural sleep to the assertion of their
life and their manhood. And now the world
recognizes the band of manifest destiny writ-
ing upon its crumbling palace walls, these
words of ill omen to it, but of good cheer
to the nations: "Mene, Mene," GOD hath
numbered thy kingdom and finished it;
"Tekel," weighed and found wanting, and
palsied and dumb, in the presence of this un-
expected blazing forth of Divine wrath, and
the seconding of that wrath by the people, it
interposes one feeble barrier after another, to
stay the inexorable course of events; but in
vain. And the question comes before us, as
I said betore, not because its enemies brought
it here, but because it is brought here by its
friends, and God.
It is submitted to us, the equal represen-
tatives of the sovereign power of Maryland—I
say the equal representatives—for an effort
has been made, persistently made, with sin-
gularly bad taste it seems to me, (to call it
by no harsher name than that,) to draw a
distinction between principles and men upon
this floor. Some have been called " exotic,"
and some "native and to the manor born,"
and that, with some gentlemen, has been the
ultima ratio; nothing more was to be said.
They have—
" Asked not, cared not what the scheme might
be,
But if it savored of geography :
Not, does the plan to good or ill incline ?
But, was the mover born within the line?"
Such gentlemen from my heart I pity. Lack-
ing either the ability or the courage, or at
least the inclination to grapple with the great
questions before us, and to decide them upon
principle, by their intrinsic merits, they tall
back tor the support of their measures and
pride themselves upon that in which the most
degraded slave upon the worst managed
plantation in the State; the goose that wad-
dles through the street; the terrapin or the
oyster is their equal; for they are "native
and to the manor born."
But we are here as men, equals, citizens of
the United States, residents of Maryland.
Some of us are resident here by the acci-
dent of birth; some are resident here by our
own act of choice. Some of us were born
here; some elsewhere, it may be in Massa-
chusetts, the old Bay State. God bless her.
Here rest the ashes of the honored ancestry
of some of us, and some of us remember
with the tenderest emotions that within the
bosom of Massachusetts rest the ashes of
father and mother, and ancestors for succes-
sive generations back almost to the days of |
