The New York Times, July 11, 1860
Mr. BRECKINRIDGE accepts the nomination of the Administration-Secessionists “from a sense of public duty,” and, as he thinks, “uninfluenced in any degree by the allurements of ambition.” We presume the country will give him full credit for disinterestedness. Indeed it would be difficult to conceive how any ambitious politician could hope to achieve place and power, by the course which the Vice-President has resolved to pursue. The Presidential office does not lie in that direction. The day has gone by when a public man could command the support and enlist the favor of the American people, by lending himself to the factious schemes of the extreme sectionalists of the Southern States. That game has been played out. Partly through the overbearing exactions of the Pro-Slavery propagandists themselves, and partly from the rapid growth of the North and West in population and relative political power, the South can no longer dictate terms to the Union, or put a veto upon the will of either of the great political parties into which the country is divided.
Mr. BRECKINRIDGE is unquestionably disinterested in his acceptance of the sectional nomination which has been given him. He may count on escaping all charges of selfishness, — on being acquitted from all suspicion of personal and political ambition. Indeed, his conduct challenges a certain degree of admiration from the spirit of self-sacrifice which it indicates. He is deliberately incurring the settled hatred of the great body of the Democratic Party, in order to second the revenge and hatred of President BUCHANAN, and the little knot of Southern ultraists who have made him their tool. He will probably succeed in accomplishing the wish nearest their hearts, — the defeat of DOUGLAS: — but he will thereby treasure up for himself the abiding wrath of that great section of the Democratic Party with whom Mr. DOUGLAS is the favorite candidate.
We published in yesterday’s TIMES Mr. BRECKINRIDGE’s letter of acceptance. It is able, distinct and clear in the positions which it assumes. He declares it to be the plain duty of the Federal Government to secure, when necessary, to slave-owners the possession of their slave-property in the Territories of the United States. Mr. BRECKINRIDGE is quite as explicit in his adherence to this position as Mr. HERSCHEL V. JOHNSON himself; and he thus states the only answer that can be made to the argument in its support:
“The only logical answer to this would seem to be to claim sovereign power for the Territories, or to deny that the Constitution recognizes property in the services of negro slaves, or to deny that such property can exist. Inexorable logic, which works its steady way through clouds and passion, compels the country to meet the issue. There is no evasive middle ground. Already the signs multiply of a fanatical and growing party, which denies that under the Constitution, or by any other law, slave property can exist; and ultimately the struggle must come between this party and the National Democracy, sustained by all the other conservative elements in the Union.”
Mr. BRECKINRIDGE very skillfully confounds the views of two separate and distinct parties in this paragraph. The only party which “denies that under the Constitution or by any other law slave property can exist,” is the Abolition Party, which may be “fanatical,” but which certainly is not “growing.” But there is a party, and a very large one too, which denies that negro slaves are recognized as property by the Constitution of the United States, and which consequently denies the obligation of the Federal Government to protect their owners in the possession of them, in any of the Territories of the United States. This is the real issue between political parties in this country. On the one hand Mr. BRECKINRIDGE, the Administration, the Southern secessionists and their sympathisers throughout the country, assert that slaves are property, — just like horses or oxen, — made so by local State laws, the force and validity of which, ad hoc, are recognized, and virtually guaranteed, by the Constitution of the United States; and that from this results the duty of Congress, under the Constitution, to protect that property wherever its owner may see fit to take it. This is the position which is denied, — not only by the fanatics to whom Mr. B. refers, but by the great mass of the people in the Northern and Western States without distinction of party, and by very many reflecting men in the South also. And this is an issue which must be met. There is, as Mr. BRECKINRIDGE declares, “no evasive middle ground.” If slaves are property in the contemplation of the Federal Constitution, then the Federal Government is bound to protect them.
But upon this point the Constitution itself is perfectly explicit. It has given, in clear and unmistakable terms, its view of the status of negro slaves, — of the law by which that status is established, and of the limits and boundaries of its validity. In one of its clauses the Constitution says, that “no person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor.” It is universally conceded that, in this clause, the Constitution refers to slaves, — and that instead of naming them, it describes them. Its description, therefore, is its definition of the word slave. We find from that description precisely what the Constitution recognizes as being their position. We find, in the first place, that a slave is styled a PERSON, — not only in this clause, but in every other clause of the Constitution in which he is referred to at all. He is not styled property: — he is not recognized or referred to as property: — he is a person, — and the idea of personality excludes the idea of property. A person is a responsible being: — he has a will, a conscience, rights and immunities of his own: — property cannot have any of these things. It is merely the dead instrument of another’s will. When the Constitution, therefore, recognizes slaves as persons, it refuses to recognize them as property.
But we are not left to this inference as to its meaning. It proceeds still further to define the status of a slave. He is “a person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws THEREOF.” Not under any federal law — not by the common law — not by the Constitution, but held to service or labor in one State by the laws thereof. Beyond the boundaries of that “one State,” whose laws hold him to “service or labor,” he stands on the same footing, in the view of the Constitution, as any other “person” except in one single contingency — that of his “escaping into another Slate;” and for that contingency specific provision is made. This is the only case in which the laws of the State where he is held to service, have any operation or effect conferred upon them, or recognized in them, by the Federal Constitution, beyond the limits of the State itself. If they escape from that one State by whose laws they are held, these persons are not to be released from the service to which those laws hold them. That service, in that instance, is still to be considered due. In every other contingency, those laws have no effect whatever. They are not recognized by the Constitution as having the slightest validity of any kind, either in any other State, or in any Territory, or anywhere else outside their own legitimate jurisdiction.
This is the view of the Constitution and its recognition of Slavery held by the great body of the American people, especially throughout the Free States. It is the view which Mr. BRECKINRIDGE and his political friends must expect to meet. They cannot evade it, nor can they cast odium upon those who hold it, by pretending to confound them with those who scout the validity of any law which makes a man a slave. The Republican Party recognizes Slavery as having a legal existence in the Southern States. It regards slaves in Georgia as “persons held to service or labor in Georgia under the laws THEREOF.” It recognizes and respects the full and entire right of Georgia to make its own laws, to alter or maintain them at pleasure, and to insist upon their full force and effect within its legitimate and proper jurisdiction. But beyond its limits it denies to those local laws any validity or effect whatever, except in the single instance for which provision is made in the Constitution. In the Territories of the United States there can be no slave, — no “person held to service or labor,” — except under the laws thereof,” — and the power of a Territory or of Congress to make such laws is open to doubt. But in their absence, Slavery in the Territories cannot exist. The State laws, which alone create it, have no validity there, nor does the Constitution recognize them as having the slightest force.