and Penn!-Coadjutors and pupils of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin!Advocates of freedom and the sacred "rights of man!"-Will you longer shut your eyes, and slumber in apathy, while the demon of oppression is thus stalking over the plains consecrated to the genius of liberty, and fertilized by the blood of her numerous martyrs?-Will you permit the authors of this gigantic project of national aggression, interminable slavery, and Heaven-daring injustice, to perfect their diabolical schemes through your supineness, or with the sanction of your acquiescence? If they succeed in the accomplishment of their object, where will be your guarantee for the liberty which you, yourselves enjoy? When the advocates of slavery shall obtain the balance of power in this confederation; when they shall have corrupted a few more of the aspirants to office among you, and opened an illimitable field for the operations of your heartless land-jobbers and slave-merchants, (to secure their influence in effecting the unholy purposes of their ambition,) how long will you be able to resist the encroachments of their tyrannical influence, or prevent them from usurping and exercising authority over you? ARISE IN THE MAJESTY OF MORAL POWER, and place the seal of condemnation upon this flagrant violation of national laws, of human rights, and the eternal, immutable principles of justice.-National Enquirer of Philadelphia.

JOHN Q. ADAMS.

Sir, in the authority given to congress by the constitution of the United States to declare war, all the powers incidental to war are, by necessary implication, conferred upon the government of the United States. Now, the powers incidental to war, are derived, not from internal municipal sources, but from the laws and usages of nations. In your relations with the Indian tribes, you never declare war, though you do make and break treaties with them, whenever either to make or to break treaties with them, happens to suit the purposes of the President and a majority of both houses of congress. For, in this matter, you have set aside the judiciary department of the government as effectually as if there were none such in the constitution.

There are, then, Mr. Chairman, in the authority of congress and of the Executive, two classes of powers, altogether different in their nature, and often incompatible with each other; the war power and the peace power. The peace power is limited by regulations, and restricted by provisions, prescribed within the constitution itself. The war power is limited only by the laws and usages of nations. The power is tremendous: it is strictly constitutional, but it breaks down every barrier so anxiously erected for the protection of liberty, of property, and of life. This, sir, is the power which authorizes you to pass the resolution now before you, and, in my opinion, there is no other.

And it was upon that same principle, that I voted against the resolution reported by the slavery committee, "that congress possess no constitutional authority to interfere, in any way, with the institution of slavery in any of the states of this confederacy," to which resolution most of those with whom I usually concur, and even my own colleagues in this House, gave their assent. I do not admit that there is, even among the peace powers of congress, no such authority; but in war there are many ways by which congress not only have the authority, but are bound to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states. The existing law prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States from foreign countries, is itself an interference with the institution of slavery in the states. It was so considered by the founders of the constitution of the United States, in which it was stipulated that congress should not interfere, in that way, with the institution, prior to 1808.

During the late war with Great Britain, the military and naval commanders of that nation, issued proclamations inviting the slaves to repair to their standards, with promises of freedom and of settlement in some of the British colonial establishments. This, surely, was an interference with the institution of slavery in the states. By the treaty of peace, Great Britain stipulated to evacuate all the forts and places in the United States, without carrying away any slaves. If the government of the United States had no authority to interfere, in any way, with the institution

of slavery in the states, they would not have had the authority to require this stipu lation. It is well known that this engagement was not fulfilled by the British naval and military commanders; that, on the contrary, they did carry away all the slaves whom they had induced to join them, and that the British government inflexibly refused to restore any of them to their masters; that a claim of indemnity was consequently instituted in behalf of the owners of the slaves, and was successfully maintained. All that series of transactions was an interference by congress with the institution of slavery in the states in one way-in the way of protection and support. It was by the institution of slavery alone, that the restitution of slaves enticed by proclamations into the British service could be claimed as property. But for the institution of slavery, the British commanders could neither have allured them to their standard, nor restored them otherwise than as liberated prisoners of war. But for the institution of slavery, there could have been no stipulation that they should not be carried away as property, nor any claim of indemnity for the violation of that engagement.

But the war power of congress over the institution of slavery in the states is yet far more extensive. Suppose the case of a servile war, complicated, as to some extent it is even now, with an Indian war; suppose congress were called to raise armies; to supply money from the whole Union to suppress a servile insurrection : would they have no authority to interfere with the institution of slavery? The issue of a servile war may be disastrous. By war, the slave may emancipate himself; it may become necessary for the master to recognise his emancipation, by a treaty of peace; can it, for an instant, be pretended that congress, in such a contingency, would have no authority to interfere with the institution of slavery, in any way, in the states? Why, it would be equivalent to saying, that congress have no constitutional authority to make peace.

I suppose a more portentous case, certainly within the bounds of possibility.-I would to God I could say not within the bounds of probability. You have been, if you are not now, at the very point of a war with Mexico-a war, I am sorry to say, so far as public rumor is credited, stimulated by provocations on our part from the very commencement of this Administration down to the recent authority given to General Gaines to invade the Mexican territory. It is said, that one of the earliest acts of this Administration, was a proposal made at a time when there was already much ill-humor in Mexico against the United States, that she should cede to the United States a very large portion of her territory-large enough to constitute nine states equal in extent to Kentucky. It must be confessed, that, a device better calculated to produce jealousy, suspicion, ill-will, and hatred, could not have been contrived. It is further affirmed, that this overture, offensive in itself, was made precisely at the time when a swarm of colonists from these United States were covering the Mexican border with land-jobbing, and with slaves, introduced in defiance of the Mexican laws, by which slavery had been abolished throughout that republic. The war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war, and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished. It is not a servile war, but a war between slavery and emancipation, and every possible effort has been made to drive us into the war, on the side of slavery.

Sir, far be it from me to depreciate the glories of the Anglo-Saxon race; although there have been times when they bowed their necks and submitted to the law of conquest, beneath the ascendancy of the Norman race. But, sir, it has struck me as no inconsiderable evidence of the spirit which is spurring us into this war of aggression, of conquest, and of slave-making, that all the fires of ancient, hereditary national hatred are to be kindled, to familiarize us with the ferocious spirit of rejoicing at the massacre of prisoners in cold blood. Sir, is there not yet hatred enough, between the races which compose your southern population, and the population of Mexico, their next neighbor, but you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to another hemisphere, for the fountains of bitterness between you and them? What is the temper of feeling between the component parts of your own southern population, between your Anglo-Saxon, Norman-French, and MoorishSpanish inhabitants of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri? between them all and the Indian savage, the original possessor of the land from which you are scourging him already back to the foot of the Rocky Mountains? What between them all and the American negro, of African origin, whom they are holding in cruel bondage? Are these elements of harmony, concord, and patriotism between

the component parts of a nation starting upon a crusade of conquest? And what are the feelings of all this motley compound equally heterogeneous of the Mexican population? Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slaveholding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves, and abolisher of slavery? And do you think that your hatred is not with equal cordiality returned? Go to the city of Mexico, ask any one of your fellowcitizens who have been there for the last three or four years, whether they scarcely dare show their faces, as Anglo-Americans, in the streets. Be assured, sir, that, however heartily you detest the Mexican, his bosom burns with an equally deepseated detestation of you.

And this is the nation with which, at the instigation of your Executive Government, you are now rushing into war-into a war of conquest; commenced by aggression on your part, and for the re-establishment of slavery, where it has been abolished, throughout the Mexican republic. For your war will be with Mexicowith a republic of twenty-four states, and a population of eight or nine millions of souls. It seems to be considered that this victory over twelve hundred men, with the capture of their commander, the President of the Mexican republic, has already achieved the conquest of the whole republic. That it may have achieved the independence of Texas, is not impossible. But Texas is to the Mexican republic not more nor so much as the state of Michigan is to yours. That state of Michigan, the people of which are in vain claiming of you the performance of that sacred promise you made them, of admitting her as a state into the 'Union; that state of Michigan, which has greater grievances and heavier wrongs to allege against you for a declaration of her independence, if she were disposed to declare it, than the people of Texas have for breaking off their union with the republic of Mexico.

And again I ask, what will be your cause in such a war? Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery, where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery.

Sir, in considering these United States and the Mexican States as mere masses of power coming to collision against each other, I cannot doubt that Mexico will be the greatest sufferer by the shock. The conquest of all Mexico would seem to be no improbable result of the conflict, especially if the war should extend no further than to the two mighty combatants. But will it be so confined? Mexico is clearly the weakest of the two powers, but she is not the least prepared for action. She has the more recent experience of war. She has the greatest number of veteran warriors; and although her highest chief has just suffered a fatal and ignominious defeat, yet that has happened often before to leaders of armies too confident of success and contemptuous of their enemy.-Even now, Mexico is better prepared for a war of invasion upon her. There may be found a successor to Santa Anna, inflamed with the desire, not only of avenging her disaster, but what he and his nation will consider your perfidious hostility. The national spirit may go with him. He may not only turn the tables upon the Texian conquerors; but drive them for refuge within your borders, and pursue them into the heart of your own territories. Are you in a condition to resist him? Is the success of your whole army, and all your veteran generals, and all your militia-calls, and all your mutinous volunteers against a miserable band of five or six hundred invisible Seminole Indians, in your late campaign, an earnest of the energy and vigor with which you are ready to carry on that, far otherwise formidable and complicated war?-complicated, did I say? And how complicated? Your Seminole war is already spreading to the Creeks, and, in their march of desolation, they sweep along with them your negro slaves, and put arms into their hands to make common cause with them against you, and how far will it spread, sir, should a Mexican invader, with the torch of liberty in his hand, and the standard of freedom floating over his head, proclaiming emancipation to the slave, and revenge to the native Indian, as he goes, invade your soil? What will be the condition of your states of Louisiana, of Mississippi, of Alabama, of Arkansas, of Missouri, and of Georgia? Where will be your negroes! Where will be that combined and concentrated mass of Indian tribes, whom, by an inconsiderate policy, you have expelled from their widely distant habitations, to embody them within a small compass on the very borders of Mexico, as if on purpose to give that country a nation of natural allies in their hostilities against you? Sir, you have a Mexican, an Indian, and a negro war upon your hands, and you are plunging

yourself into it blindfold; you are talking about acknowledging the independence of the republic of Texas, and you are thirsting to annex Texas, ay, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, and Santa Fe, from the source to the mouth of the Rio Bravo, to your already over-distended dominions. Five hundred thousand square miles of the territory of Mexico would not even now quench your burning thirst for aggrandizement. But will your foreign war for this be with Mexico alone? No, sir. As the weaker party, Mexico, when the contest shall have once begun, will look abroad, as well as among your negroes, and your Indians, for assistance. Neither Great Britain nor France will suffer you to make such a conquest from Mexico; no, nor even to annex the independent state of Texas to your confederation, without their interposition. You will have an Anglo-Saxon intertwined with a Mexican war to wage. Great Britain may have no serious objection to the independence of Texas, and may be willing enough to take her under her protection, as a barrier both against Mexico and against you. But, as aggrandizement to you she will not readily suffer it; and, above all, she will not suffer you to acquire it by conquest and the re-establishment of slavery. Urged on by the irresistible, overwhelming torrent of public opinion, Great Britain has recently, at a cost of one hundred millions of dollars, which her people have joyfully paid, abolished slavery throughout all her colonies in the West Indies. After setting such an example, she will not--it is impossible that she should -stand by and witness a war, for the re-establishment of slavery; where it had been for years abolished, and situated thus in the immediate neighborhood of her islands. She will tell you, that if you must have Texas as a member of your confederacy, it must be without the trammels of slavery, and if you will wage a war to handcuff and fetter your fellow-man, she will wage the war against you to break his chains. Sir, what a figure, in the eyes of mankind, would you make, in deadly conflict with Great Britain: she fighting the battles of emancipation, and you the battles of slavery; she the benefactress, and you the oppressor, of human kind! In such a war, the enthusiasm of emancipation, too, would unite vast numbers of her people in aid of the national rivalry, and all her natural jealousy against our aggran dizement. No war was ever so popular in England, as that war would be against slavery, the slave-trade, and the Anglo-Saxon descendant from her own loins.

As to the annexation of Texas to your confederation, for what do you want it? Are you not large and unwieldy enough already? Do not two millions of square miles cover surface enough for the insatiate rapacity of your land-jobbers? I hope there are none of them within the sound of my voice. Have you not Indians enough to expel from the land of their fathers' sepulchres, and to exterminate? What, in a prudential and military point of view, would be the addition of Texas to your domain? It would be weakness, and not power. Is your southern and southwestern frontier not sufficiently extensive? not sufficiently feeble? not suf ficiently defenceless? Why are you adding regiment after regiment of dragoons to your standing army? Why are you struggling, by direction and by indirection, to raise per saltum that army from less than six to more than twenty thousand men? Your commanding general, now returning from his excursion to Florida, openly recommends the increase of your army to that number. Sir, the extension of your seacoast frontier from the Sabine to the Rio Bravo would add to your weakness enfold; for it is only weakness with reference to Mexico. It would then be weakness with reference to Great Britain, to France, even perhaps to Russia, to every naval European power, which might make a quarrel with us for the sake of settling a colony; but above all, to Great Britain. She, by her naval power, and by her American colonies, holds the keys of the Gulf of Mexico. What would be the condition of your frontier from the mouth of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Rio del Norte, in the event of a war with Great Britain. Sir, the reasons of Mr. Monroe for accepting the Sabine as the boundary were three. First, he had no confidence in the strength of our claim as far as the Rio Bravo; secondly, he thought it would make our Union so heavy that it would break into fragments by its own weight; thirdly, he thought it would protrude a long line of seacoast, which, in our first war with Great Britain, she might take into her own possession, and which we should be able neither to defend nor recover. At that time, there was no question of slavery or of abolition involved in the controversy. The country belonged to Spain; it was a wilderness, and slavery was the established law of the land. There was then no project for carving out nine slave states, to hold eighteen seats in the other wing of this capitol, in the triangle between the mouths and the sources of

the Mississippi and Bravo rivers. But what was our claim? Why it was that La Salle, having discovered the mouth of the Mississippi, and France having made a settlement at New Orleans, France had a right to one half the seacoast from the mouth of the Mississippi to the next Spanish settlement, which was Vera Cruz. The mouth of the Rio Bravo was about half way from the Balize to Vera Cruz; and so as grantees, from France of Louisiana, we claimed the Rio del Norte, though the Spanish settlement of Santa Fe was at the head of that river. France, from whom we had received Louisiana, utterly disclaimed ever having even raised such a pretension. Still we made the best of the claim that we could, and finally yielded it for the Floridas, and for the line of the forty-second degree of latitude from the source of the Arkansas river to the South Sea. Such was our claim; and you may judge how much confidence Mr. Monroe could have in its validity. The great object and desire of the country then was to obtain the Floridas. It was General Jackson's desire; and in that conference with me to which I have hereto fore alluded, and which it is said he does not recollect, he said to me that so long as the Florida rivers were not in our possession, there could be no safety for our whole southern country.

But, sir, suppose you should annex Texas to these United States; another year would not pass before you would have to engage in a war for the conquest of the island of Cuba. What is now the condition of the island?-Still under the nominal protection of Spain. And what is the condition of Spain herself? Consuming her own vitals in a civil war for the succession of the crown. Do you expect, that whatever may be the issue of that war, she can retain even the nominal possession of Cuba? After having lost all her continental colonies in North and South America, Cuba will stand in need of more efficient protection; and above all, the protection of a naval power. Suppose that naval power should be Great Britain. There is Cuba at your very door; and if you spread yourself along a naked coast, from the Sabine to the Rio Bravo, what will be your relative position towards Great Britain, with not only Jamaica, but Cuba, and Porto Rico in her hands, and abolition for the motto to her union cross of St. George and St. Andrew? If by the utter imbecility of the Mexican confederacy, this revolt of Texas should lead immediately to its separation from that republic, and its annexation to the United States, I believe it impossible that Great Britain should look on, while this operation is performing, with indifference. She will see that it must shake her own whole colonial power on this continent, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Carrib bean seas, like an earthquake; she will see, too, that it endangers her own abolition of slavery in her own colonies. A war for the restoration of slavery, where it has been abolished, if successful in Texas, must extend over all Mexico; and the example will threaten her with imminent danger of a war of colors in her own islands. She will take possession of Cuba and of Porto Rico, by cession from Spain, or by the batteries from her wooden walls; and if you ask her by what authority she has done it, she will ask you, in return, by what authority you have extended your seacoast from the Sabine to the Rio Bravo. She will ask you a question more perplexing, namely—by what authority you, with freedom, independence, and democracy upon your lips, are waging a war of extermination to forge new manacles and fetters, instead of those which are falling from the hands and feet of man. She will carry emancipation and abolition with her in every fold of her flag; while your stars, as they increase in numbers, will be overcast with the murky vapors of oppression, and the only portion of your banners visible to the eye, will be the blood-stained stripes of the task master!

Mr. Chairman, are you ready for all these wars? A Mexican war? a war with Great Britain, if not with France? a general Indian war? a servile war? and as an inevitable consequence of them all, a civil war? For it must ultimately terminate in a war of colors as well as of races. And do you imagine that while with your eyes open you are wilfully kindling, and then closing your eyes and blindly rushing into them; do you imagine that while, in the very nature of things, your own southern and southwestern states must be the Flanders of these complicated wars, the battle-field upon which the last great conflict must be fought between slavery and emancipation; do you imagine that your congress will have no constitutional authority to interfere with the institution of slavery, in any way, in the states of this confederacy? Sir, they must and will interfere with it-perhaps to sustain it by war; perhaps to abolish it by treaties of peace; and they will not only