Speech of Hon. John U. Pettit, of Indiana
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| Partner: | buecher.de |
| Hersteller: | Forgotten Books (Pettit, John Upfold) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
Produktbeschreibung
Excerpt from Speech of Hon. John U. Pettit, of Indiana: On the Restoration of the Missouri Compromise; Delivered in the House of Representative, August 2, 1856 The House being in the Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union - Mr. Pettit said: Mr. Chairman: I propose referring - and for the reason, only, that it has a direct and immediate connection with the most pressing exigency of legislation - to the means and motives that moved the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas bill; to the mischievous consequences, without a single benefit to any one, that have flowed from it, without intermission and with steady augmentation; and to express, with much respect to the differing opinions of others, my own opinion in favor of repealing so much of it as shall restore the Missouri compromise, as the sure means of bringing back the national peace and happiness. In speaking of the Nebraska-Kansas bill, and in my present condemnation of it, I do not mean to embrace the provisions of it that are confined, though with many details, to establishing territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska, creating functions and officers of government, and clothing their inhabitants with certain limited privileges of making and administering their own laws. In all these things the provisions of the law are well enough, or only of questionable expediency. All persons alike, whether friendly to the repeal of the Missouri compromise or not, accede, in the main, to the propriety of this legislation. We have all long felt an honest national pride at seeing our civilization, rejoicing in conscious freedom and strength, going steadily West, and at length beginning to occupy the unpeopled and almost illimitable plains that stretch away beyond the Missouri. The time was ripe for establishing territorial governments there. All were agreed in this; and it has been no matter of objection to that law that it ordained governments for Kansas and Nebraska. Nor has it been an objection that, during the territorial condition, which is only the infancy of a State, and when, according to Burke´s nervous expression, the State has not yet hardened into the bone and gristle of manhood, two of the departments of the Government, the executive and the judicial, were wholly lodged in the appointment of the President of the United States, without any consent of the people of the Territories; for, by maintaining so much of sovereignty over the Territories, after their being erected into governments, the Federal authority has been able to repress such anomalies of condition, as that gross and barbarian one in Utah that now shocks the national sense so much, and to cultivate their assimilation to the States preparatory to admission. And, especially, it has been no objection to the law from the people of the free States, where the sovereignty of the people is so much a principle and a fact, that it delegated limited powers of government to the people of the Territories, who are best acquainted with their own conveniences and wants. If, in organizing the territorial governments, it had any fault, it was that it gave the people too little power. In all these respects, just such territorial governments had been established, - and just such powers of legislation had been conveyed to the inhabitants of the Territories, by every law creating a territorial government since the Constitution. There was no novelty - in this nothing that inculcated any new principle or adopted any new practice. The Nebraska-Kansas bill, in the framework of territorial government it established in its functions and offices - in its executive, judiciary, and Legislature - did for Kansas and Nebraska what the ordinance of July 13, 1787, reaffirmed, in all its parts, by the first Congress under the Constitution, did for the Northwest Territory - what the act of June 12, 1838, establishing the Territory of Iowa, did for that Territory
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