"We never will consent to allow any foreign Power to control the mouth of that great highway of commerce"

Isaac Newton Morris was a two-term Democratic Representative from Illinois (1857-1861). I can find no picture of him, but I imagine that he must have looked very much like his father, Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio – a fearless bulldog of a man – for that is certainly the impression conveyed in a remarkable speech that Isaac Morris delivered in the House on January 16, 1861. His denunciations of and imprecations against the sinners and traitors against Union ring out like those of a Biblical prophet. The Republicans, Buchanan, the secessionists – no one is spared. He demands that Union men of all parties awaken and take action:

It is time, sir, that we should arouse. Men of America, why stand ye still? Arouse! Shake off your lethargy! All considerations of party should be lost with us, when our country is in danger. I am with every man who is for the Union, and against every man who is against it; and I am ready now to march up to our national altar, and swear: “The Union: it must be and shall be preserved, by the Eternal!” If its enemies bring war out of it, it must be so, though none would regret it more than myself.

And judgment, he warns, is coming:

Let disunion be consummated, and some of us will live to see the dark pall of death settle upon the “cotton states.” I wish the direful calamity could be averted, and pray it may be; but it will come as inevitably as destiny itself. When they venture into the Red sea, like Pharoah [sic] and his hosts, they will be overthrown; and instead of reaching the promised land, flowing with milk and honey, will only find bitter waters and the stinging of serpents.

But the most interesting part of his speech is his discussion of the pivotal importance of the Mississippi River to the northwest. The upper midwest, he warns, will never tolerate loss of its access to the sea. If a “foreign Power” takes control of the lower Mississippi, millions of northerners will rise, “and blood will flow like water:”

I live, sir, in the heart of the valley of the Upper Mississippi, and on the banks of that mighty river which rises in the far latitude of the north, and moves on with slow and silent grandeur to the sea, bearing upon its placid bosom our surplus productions. I live where the Democratic masses love the Union, and are conservative, and where the rights of all are respected.

But I tell the South, especially the inhabitants of the Lower Mississippi, that we already have, in its upper valley, ten million people, and that we never can, and we never will, consent to allow any foreign Power – and they will be foreign when they leave us – to retain possession and control of the mouth of that great highway of commerce. We do not wish to boast; we do not intend to threaten; but we do mean to protect ourselves.

Mr. Jefferson, in a letter to Mr. Livingston, when the latter was minister to France, upon that country repurchasing the Louisiana territory, in 1802, from Spain, instructed him to say to the French Government that it would never be allowed to occupy the mouth of the Mississippi. All trouble, however, of the ownership and occupancy by France was fortunately obviated by the purchase of the territory from Napoleon I, in 1803.

We of the upper valley view the matter just as Mr. Jefferson did; and will permit none others than ourselves to exercise ownership over that gateway to the oceans. The enemy that shall attempt to keep it from us will find an army opposing him far more numerous than any that ever besieged imperial Rome, and blood will flow like water.

This will be one of the results of disunion. Civil war between the North and the South will be another; and soon the whole land will be convulsed with discord and deadly strife, and clothed in the habiliments of woe.

"Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil"

Having posted several quibbles concerning minor inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Jonathan H. Earle’s Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854, I thought I should make sure that the record is clear: this is an eye-opening book.

The growth of the anti-slavery (or more properly anti-slavery extension) movement in the north in the decades before the Civil War is generally thought of as a Whiggish phenomenon. Whiggish types, absorbing via the Second Great Awakening the evangelical morality that also gave rise to the temperance campaign, increasingly came to regard slavery as a sin and moral blot on the body of the Republic. Yes, there may have been a few oddball Democrats who saw the light and ultimately tagged along, but for the most part northern Democrats seemed to be amoral at best: Lewis Cass inventing popular sovereignty, Franklin Pierce, Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan generally toadying to the south and the southern wing of their party.

Professor Earle sets out to correct this misimpression. In fact, a number of Democrats led the way in identifying slavery and the slave power as enemies. One of the delights of the book lies in meeting and getting to know previously unknown or indistinct political figures: Thomas Morris of Ohio and Preston King of New York (both of whom I have discussed before); John P. Hale, who unexpectedly precipitated a dramatic political realignment in New Hampshire, previously the “South Carolina of the North”; Marcus Morton of Massachusetts; and even David Wilmot, otherwise a vague figure who in most narratives mysteriously appears out of nowhere, only to disappear again into the mist.

More importantly, Professor Earle explores why there seems to have been a correlation between radical, hard-money, anti-Bank Democrats and opposition to the expansion of slavery. One key, he argues, was the tendency of radical democrats to perceive conspiratorial coalitions of interests that threatened to dominate yeoman farmers and urban proletariat: manufacturers who clamored for high tariffs, monopolistic corporations that shielded capitalists from ordinary rules of individual liability, and most famously the Monster Bank.

With a little squinting, Professor Earle suggests, slaveholders could look a lot like an aristocratic special interest. In an earlier post, I quoted from an 1839 speech by Senator Thomas Morris (Dem – Ohio), in which he not only drew the parallel but argued that the Bank Power and the Slave Power had joined forces:

But all will not do; these two powers must now be united; an amalgamation of the black power of the South with the white power of the North must take place, as either, separately, cannot succeed in the destruction of the liberty of speech and the press and the right of petition. Let me tell gentlemen that both united will never succeed. As I said on a former day, God forbid that they should ever rule this country. I have seen this billing and cooing between these different interests for some time past; I informed my private friends . . . that these powers were forming a union to overthrow the present [Van Buren] Administration . . ..

* * *

[T]he assertion has gone forth that we have twelve hundred millions of slave property at the South; and can any man so close his understanding here as not plainly to perceive tht the power of this vast amount of property at the South is now uniting itself to the banking power of the North, in order to govern the destinies of this country? Six hundred millions of banking capital is to be brought into this coalition, and the slave power and the bank power are thus to unite in order to break down the present Administration. There can be no mistake, as I believe, in this matter. The aristocracy of the North, who, by the power of a corrupt banking system, and the aristocracy of the South, by the power of the slave system, both fattening upon the labor of others, are now about to unite in order to make the reign of each perpetual. Is there an independent American to be found who will become the recreant slave to such an unholy combination? Is this another compromise to barter the liberties of the country for personal aggrandizement? “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Almost ten years later, Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot spoke in similar terms:

“The gallant and true men who fought the battle of popular rights against privilege and monopoly – who aided in crushing the monster bank, and wresting from the grasp of eastern capital the hard earnings of labor, will never fight the battles of slavery propagandism” [Wilmot declared]. Again investing the rhetoric of antislavery with an older brand derived from the pen of William Leggett, Wilmot insisted that since southern capital had “a thousand millions of dollars invested in slaves,” the current struggle, like the bank war in the 1830s, was best viewed as one between “capital and labor.”

But what seems to given urgency to the threat presented by the Slave Power was the concept of Free Soil, which Professor Earle asserts is the crucial and overlooked component of the “free soil, free labor, free men” trilogy. Free Soil was not, Professor Earle argues, simply a “synonym for [the] more developed concept of free labor, an ideology . . . closely linked with the rise of capitalism in the North. . . . [M]any Free Soilers . . . came from remote rural areas or radical labor backgrounds and felt nothing but contempt for Whiggish free-labor views.”

The term originally referred to land reform: “the free distribution of the public lands to poor settlers, in the form of inalienable homesteads.” Although containing slavery was an incidental benefit, the scheme also enhanced democracy (more of those Jeffersonian yeoman farmers), reduced unemployment and raised wages, and attacked privileged land monopolists and speculators.

In time, however, “the Free Soil ideology [evolved] from a program for land reform to a bulwark against slavery expansion.” It was precisely the elusiveness of the phrase that made Free Soil so politically potent:

During the 1840s and 1850s, homesteads became unalterably fused with the issue of slavery expansion . . .. This link underscored Free Soil’s rhetorical elusiveness and ambiguity. The potent term was appropriated by a host of other groups, movements, and political parties, including the Free Soil Party and, later, the Republicans. No matter who appropriated it, however, Free Soil always potentially implied the double meaning . . .: land free of charge and at the same time free of slavery. Free Soil managed to speak directly to the anxieties of poor or vulnerable northern whites, creating a new source of support for limiting slavery’s expansion.

The radical Democratic critique of slavery was thus very different from the moral and religious foundations of abolitionism and abolition-based political organizations such as the Liberty Party. The emphasis on Free Soil and the Slave Power also focused the political debate squarely on the territories.

The genius of the Free Soil and Republican parties was to incorporate the double meaning of Free Soil – and its radical Democratic message – into their platforms. By doing so they were able to broaden their base to include large numbers of Democrats who became convinced that their former party had become “a tool of the slaveholding oligarchy.” These Democrats, moreover, often came from hardscrabble rural districts that had consistently resisted the lure of the Whigs -- areas such as New York's "Passed-Over District" and the Wilmot District of Pennsylvania. It is no accident that in 1862 the Republican Party produced the Homestead Act as well as the Emancipation Proclamation.

Quibbles and all, Professor Earle's book is excellent. Highly recommended.

About the illustration:

An election-year satire favoring Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren in the 1848 presidential contest. A long-legged John Van Buren carries his father piggyback through Salt River, heading toward the White House on the far shore. "Matty" says, "Thanks to your long legs, John, I believe that I shall pass over this Jordan dry shod." The younger Van Buren assures his father, "Hold on Dad & I'll put you through." Meanwhile, abolitionist editor Horace Greeley and candidates Taylor and Clay are having a more difficult time fording the river. Clay is immersed head first, leaving only his legs visible. Taylor is neck-deep in the water. Greeley yells to Kentucky Whig leader Cassius M. Clay, seated on the near bank, "Help, Cassius, or I Sink." Clay replies, "Can't come there, Horace, I risked my life in Mexico, & I don't like to do it again." (Cassius Clay was a hero of the recent Mexican War).

Thomas Morris: "They are attempting to overwhelm us by the power of this Government"

Jonathan H. Earle’s Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 contains an excellent sketch of the life and career of Thomas Morris. Professor Earle identifies an April 1836 speech by Morris as containing “one of the first uses of a Slave Power conspiracy to condemn the South and slavery.”

The occasion was the debate over in the United States Senate over a bill proposed by John C. Calhoun to bar “incendiary” materials concerning slavery from the U.S. mails.

On April 13, 1836 – almost three years before the February 9, 1839 speech I discussed in earlier posts – Senator Morris rose in opposition “upon the broad principle that its passage would be an abuse of the legitimate power of Congress.” Morris “turn[ed] the tables” on Calhoun by posing a hypothetical:

He [Calhoun], too, has had within his State a proceeding which caused much excitement both within and without the State; I mean the attempt to nullify acts of Congress on the subject of the tariff. I assure the gentleman I do not mention this with any unkind feelings whatever. If, in that excitement, societies had been formed, and publications made within the State, for instance, in which I reside [Ohio], in aid of the doctrine contended for by the gentleman and his friends in South Carolina, I ask the gentleman what he would have thought and said, if an act of Congress had been passed to prevent the proceedings of those societies, and such publications in newspapers, from being sent by the mail to any citizen of South Carolina? Sir, I would have no doubt he would have condemned the Government in the most strong and emphatic manner, for the bare attempt thus to embargo public opinion; but we are now called on, in the most impressive manner, to sustain a like measure . . ..

Morris complained that the bill violated a number of provisions of the Constitution, including the First Amendment. The slaveholding states were trying to use the federal government to “gag” the free states and their citizens:

[W]e, the free States I mean, are called on to put the gag into the mouths of our citizens, to declare that they have no right to talk, to preach, or to pray, on the subject of slavery; that we must put down societies who meet for such purposes; that we shall not be permitted to send abroad our thoughts or our opinions upon the abstract question of slavery; that the very liberty of thought, of speech, and of the press, shall be so embarrassed as to be in many instances denied us, and, if not entirely prohibited, rendered in a great degree useless. All this is required to be done by an act of this Government, out of respect to laws of one or more of the slaveholding States.

But what really angered Morris was an assumption and argument underlying the bill: that slave property was guaranteed by the Constitution. Morris conceded that the Constitution permitted slavery, but the creation of slave property was exclusively a matter of state law. The distinction was crucial, Morris believed, because the idea of a constitutional guarantee threatened the destruction of the free states:

[I]f it [Calhoun’s “guaranty” theory] be true, and can be maintained, the honorable Senator from South Carolina, or any other gentleman, may bring his hundreds or thousands of slaves into the State of Ohio, cause them to labor there as long as it shall suit his convenience, and withdraw them at pleasure, and no law or regulation of my State – no, not even the constitutional prohibition against slavery [in the Ohio Constitution] – could reach his case, or afford us any security against this innovation . . .. It seems to me that the free States have a thousand times more just cause for fear and alarm . . . that [slaveholding States] will attempt to introduce slavery into the free States, than the slaveholding States have that we shall attempt to interfere in any manner with the question of slavery, as settled by the laws of their own States.

The “slaveholding States,” Morris warned darkly, “are attempting to overwhelm us by the power of this Government.”

Thomas Morris: "What have you to do with slavery?"

Sorry, but I can’t help giving you a bit more of Thomas Morris’s February 9, 1839 speech on slavery and the slave power.

During the course of speech, Morris addressed the contention, made by Henry Clay in his speech of February 7, 1839, and others, that northerners had no cause to agitate about slavery because it did not concern or affect them. Morris’s response demonstrates moral revulsion for the institution itself. But what is really interesting is that, using Jacksonian analysis, he in effect condemns his own party and winds up describing the domination of the federal government by the “slave interest” in terms remarkably similar to that of modern historians:

We who are opposed to, and deplore the existence of, slavery in our country, are frequently asked, both in public and private, what have you to do with slavery? It does not exist in your State; it does not disturb you! Ah, sir, would to God it were so – that we had nothing to do with slavery, nothing to fear from its power or action within our own borders, that its name and its miseries were unknown to us.

But this is not our lot; we live upon its borders, and in hearing of its cries; yet we are unwilling to acknowledge, that if we enter its territories and violate its laws, that we should be punished at it pleasure. We do not complain of this, though it might well be considered just ground of complaint. It is our firesides, our rights, our privileges, the safety of our friends, as well as the sovereignty and independence of our State, that we are now called upon to protect and defend.

The slave interest has at this moment the whole power of the country in its hands. It claims the President [Martin Van Buren, a Democrat] as a northern man with southern feelings, thus making the Chief Magistrate the head of an interest, or a party, and not of the country and the people at large, It has the cabinet of the President, three members of which are from slave States . . ..

Here, then, is a decided majority in favor of the slave interest. It was [sic, presumably “has”] five out of nine judges of the Supreme Court; here, also, is a majority of from the slave States. It has, with the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the clerks of both Houses, the Army and the Navy; and the bureaus have, I am told, about the same proportion.

One would suppose that, with all this power operating in this Government, it would be content to permit – yes, I will use the permit – it would be content to permit us, who live in the free States, to enjoy our firesides and our homes in quietness; but this is not the case. The slaveholders and slave laws claim that as property which the free States know only as persons, a reasoning property, which, of its own will and mere motion, is frequently found in our States; and upon which THING we sometimes bestow food and raiment if it appear hungry and perishing, believing it to be a human being; this perhaps is owing to our want of vision to discover the process by which a man is converted into a THING.

For this act of ours, which is not prohibited by our laws, but prompted by every feeling, Christian and humane, the slaveholding power enters our territory, tramples under foot the sovereignty of our State, violates the sanctity of private residence, seizes our citizens, and, disregarding the authority of our laws, transports them into its own jurisdictions, casts them into prison, confines them in fetters, and loads them with chains, for pretended offenses against their own laws, found by willing grand juries upon the oath (to use the language of the late Governor of Ohio) of a perjured villain. . . .

* * *

Slave power is seeking to establish itself in every State, in defiance of the constitution and laws of the States within which it is prohibited. In order to secure its power beyond the reach of the States, it claims its parentage from the Constitution of the United States. It demands of us total silence as to its proceedings, denies to our citizens the liberty of speech and the press, and punishes them by mobs and violence for the exercise of these rights. It has sent its agents into free States for the purpose of influencing their Legislatures to pass laws for the security of its power within such State, and for the enacting new offenses and new punishments for their own citizens, so as to give additional security to its interest. It demands to be heard in its own person in the Hall of our Legislature, an mingle in debate there. . . .

A power, whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to rule over a free people. In our sufferings and our wrongs we have besought our fellow-citizens to aid us in the preservation of our constitutional rights, but, influenced by the love of gain or arbitrary power, they have sometimes disregarded all the sacred rights of man, and answered in violence, burnings, and murder.

After all these transactions, which are now of public notoriety and matter of record, shall we of the free States tauntingly be asked what we have to do with slavery?

Thomas Morris: The Conspiracy of the Bank Power with the Slave Power

Thomas Morris’s speech of February 9, 1839 displays tremendous power and moral passion. But it is also remarkable for the insight it gives into the connection between hard-money, anti-monopoly Democracy and Free Soil.

The Democracy tended to identify evil concentrations of power that, it contended, were bent on destroying liberty, and then sought to destroy them. Andrew Jackson’s campaign against the “Monster Bank” is, of course, the paradigm.

Thomas Morris thought in precisely those terms, and identified such a monster: “the slave power.” Henry Clay, in his speech of February 7, 1839, had estimated that the value of slave property in the nation was $12 Billion. Here, Morris contended, was a monstrous concentration of power whose tentacles stretched across the country and into the Senate, resulting, for example, in the grotesque Gag Rule:

[L]et the Senator from Kentucky reflect that the petition which he offered against our right was . . . received and ordered to be printed without a single dissenting voice; and I call on the Senate and the country to remember that the resolutions which I have offered on the same subject have not only been refused the printing, but have been laid upon the table without being debated or referred.

Posterity, which shall read the proceedings of this time, may well wonder what power could induce the Senate of the United States to proceed in such a strange and contradictory manner. Permit me to tell the country now what this power behind the throne, greater than the throne itself, is. It is the power of SLAVERY. It is a power, according to the calculations of the Senator from Kentucky, which owns $1,200,000,000 in human beings as property; and if money is power, this power is not to be conceived or calculated; a power which claims human property more than double the amount which the whole money of the world could purchase.

Morris drew precise parallels between the Bank Power and the Slave Power, and the remedy was the same: expose it and destroy it:

What can stand before this power? Truth, everlasting truth, will yet overthrow it. This power is aiming to govern the country, its constitution nad laws; but it is not certain of success, tremendous as it is . . .. Let it be borne in mind that the bank power some years since . . . had influence sufficient in this body, and upon this floor, to prevent the reception of petitions against the action of the Senate on their resolutions of censure against the President. The country took instant alarm, and the political complexion of this body was changed as soon as possible.

The same power, though double in means and in strength, is now doing the same thing. This is the array of power that even now is attempting such an unwarrantable course in this country; and the people are also now moving against the slave, as they formerly did against the bank power. It, too, begins to tremble for its safety.

Indeed, Morris warned, the two powers were even now conspiring to unite to destroy liberty:

But all will not do; these two powers must now be united; an amalgamation of the black power of the South with the white power of the North must take place, as either, separately, cannot succeed in the destruction of the liberty of speech and the press and the right of petition. Let me tell gentlemen that both united will never succeed. As I said on a former day, God forbid that they should ever rule this country. I have seen this billing and cooing between these different interests for some time past; I informed my private friends . . . that these powers were forming a union to overthrow the present [Van Buren] Administration . . ..

* * *

[T]he assertion has gone forth that we have twelve hundred millions of slave property at the South; and can any man so close his understanding here as not plainly to perceive tht the power of this vast amount of property at the South is now uniting itself to the banking power of the North, in order to govern the destinies of this country? Six hundred millions of banking capital is to be brought into this coalition, and the slave power and the bank power are thus to unite in order to break down the present Administration. There can be no mistake, as I believe, in this matter. The aristocracy of the North, who, by the power of a corrupt banking system, and the aristocracy of the South, by the power of the slave system, both fattening upon the labor of others, are now about to unite in order to make the reign of each perpetual. Is there an independent American to be found who will become the recreant slave to such an unholy combination? Is this another compromise to barter the liberties of the country for personal aggrandizement? “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

About the illustration:

A rare pro-Jackson satire on the President's campaign to destroy the political power and influence of the Bank of the United States. It was probably issued late in the presidential campaign of 1832, after Jackson's July veto of the bill to re-charter the Bank. (Weitenkampf tentatively dated the print 1833, but the Library's impression was deposited for copyright on September 12, 1832.) Jackson is portrayed as a cat (with a tail marked "Veto") defending the corn cribs in "Uncle Sam's Barn" from rats "which had burrow'd through the floor, to get at his capital Corn Crib: While Uncle Sam, and his active laborers, stand at the door, enjoying the sport." The cat has one rat in his mouth, possibly Henry Clay, who says, "My case is desperate." Under his paws is another (possibly the Bank's president Nicholas Biddle) who says, "Them d'd Clay-Bank Rats brought me to this." In the lower left a rat with a cape and his paw on a Bible says, "My Cloak does not cover me, as well as I could wish, but this Book with it, will be a good passport to the Corn Crib." Other rats creeping from holes in the floor say, "I'l keep in my hole while he's in sight" and "No chance for me whie he's in the Barn." At the upper right two rats (possibly influential pro-Bank newspaper editors James Watson Webb and Charles King) nibble corn, remarking, "The U.S. Bank Rats are very liberal to us Editor Rats, we must stick to them at all risks." From an open doorway three men, "Uncle Sam and his active laborers," survey the scene. First man: "Bravo my Boys! keep him in the Barn; and no doubt, but he will keep the Rats away." Second: "What a tail he carries! I guess he is of the Kilkenny breed." Third: "How he nicks them." The use of rats to symbolize corruption was commonplace in cartoons of the 1830s, particularly with respect to the Bank of the United States. See ""This is the house that Jack built"" (no. 1833-6). For their use in another context see ".00001. The value of a unit..." and "The Rats Leaving a Falling House" (nos. 1831-1 and 1831-2).

Thomas Morris and Democratic Antislavery

Jonathan H. Earle has introduced me to a man I hadn’t heard of, and a truly remarkable speech that man gave in 1839.

The man is Thomas Morris, a loyal Jacksonian Democrat who served as Senator from Ohio for a single term from 1833 to 1839. Professor Earle describes him as the man who “introduced the phrase and concept of the Slave Power into American political culture.” Now that, I thought, was interesting.

Professor Earle’s footnotes referred to a speech that Morris gave on the Senate floor on February 9, 1839.

By way of background, on February 7, 1839, Henry Clay delivered a famous speech on slavery and abolitionism. The speech was Clay at his worst. In an attempt to position himself for a run at the presidency in 1840, Clay courted southern votes by presenting a petition from residents of the District of Columbia, in which they protested against efforts in Congress to outlaw slavery in the District. The decision whether to outlaw slavery in the District, the petitioners maintained, belonged solely to the residents of the District. Congress did not have power, they contended, to interfere.

Clay used the introduction of the petition as the basis for accusing “abolitionists” of disrupting the harmony of the country. It was “abolitionists” – into which category Clay lumped essentially everyone who sought to limit slavery in any way – who were the problem. By unnecessarily complaining about slavery, the “abolitionists” were responsible for the regrettable, but entirely understandable, reactions of southerners determined to resist encroachments on their rights and institutions. If some overzealous southerners reacted by imposing the Gag Rule, or threatening disunion, well Clay regretted it, but the “abolitionists” had only themselves to blame.

Two days later, on February 9, 1839, Mr. Morris rose to present his own slavery-related petition, and to deliver one of the most remarkable speeches I have read – both for its power and for the insights it gives into the origins of Democratic antislavery.

The petitions that Morris presented opposed slavery:

These petitions, sir, are on the subject of slavery, the slave trade as carried on within and from this District, the slave trade between the different states of this Confederacy, between this country and Texas, and against the admission of that country into the Union; and also against that of any other State whose constitution and laws recognize or permit slavery.

Morris’s denunciation of slavery was passionate. “In my infant years I learned to hate slavery,” he announced. The Declaration of Independence, the words of Thomas Jefferson, and the free state in which he was born “taught me it was wrong.”

I also, in early life, saw a slave kneel before his master, and hold up his hands with as much apparent submission, humility, and adoration, as man would have done before his Maker, while his master, with outstretched rod, stood over him. This, I thought, is slavery – one man subjected to the will and power of another, and the laws affording him no protection; and he has to beg pardon of man, because he has offended man, (not the laws,) as if his master were a superior and all powerful being.

It was this certainty that his petitioners’ cause was just that gave Morris the courage to oppose “the very lions of debate in this body, who are cheered on by an applauding gallery and surrounding interests.”

What, sir, can there be to induce me to appear on this public arena, opposed by such powerful odds? Nothing, sir, nothing but a strong sense of duty, and a deep conviction that the cause I advocate is just.

Henry Clay had labeled anyone who objected to slavery an “abolitionist.” In that case, Morris’s petitioners were “abolitionists,” and he would defend them to the last:

I charge gentlemen, when they use the word Abolitionists, they mean petitioners here such as I now present – men who love liberty, and are opposed to slavery – that in behalf of these citizens I speak; and, by whatever name they may be called, it is those who are opposed to slavery whose cause I advocate. I make no war upon the rights of others. I do not act but what is moral, constitutional, and legal, against the peculiar institutions of any State; but acting only in defense of my own rights, of my fellow-citizens, and, above all, of my State, I shall not cease while the current of life shall continue to flow.