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1 Reverdy Johnson, Speech of Hon. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, in Support of the Resolutions to Amend the Constitution So as to Abolish Slavery 1 (1864)

handle is hein.slavery/shrvjma0001 and id is 1 raw text is: SPEECH or HON. REVERI)Y JOHNSON, OF MARYLAND, IN, SUPPORT OF THE RESOLUTION TO AMEND THE CONSTI- TUTION SO AS TO ABOLISH SLAVERY. DELIVERED IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, APRIL 5, 1864. MR. PRESIDENT: In rising to Address the Senate I am fully con- scious of the great importance.of the measure on which I am about to speak. In that particular, indeed, it cannot be exaggerated. To manumit at once nearly four nillfons of slaves, who have been such by hereditary descent during their lives, and who because they were such, it being one consequence of their condition, have been kept in a state of almost absolute ignorance, is an event of which the world's history furnishes no parallel. Whether it will be attended by weal or by woe, the future must decide. That it will not be followed by unmixed good or by unmixed evil, is perhaps certain; and the only questions in my view for statesmen to consider are, first, whether the measure be right, independent of its possible consequences, and sec- ondly, whether those consequences may be such as to render it im- proper to do what is right? There was a period when upon the point of right there prevailed but one opinion, or almost but one opinion. The men who fought through the Revolution and survived its perils and shared inits glory, and were called to the Convention by which the Constitution of the United States was formed and recommended to the adoption of the American people, with scarcely an exception, considered slavery not only as an evil to any people among whom it might exist, but an evil which it was the duty of all Christian people, if possible, to re- move because of its being a sin, as well As an evil. I think the history of the present times will bear me out in the opinion that if those great and good men, and the people by whom the Constitution was adopted had anticipated the now conditionof the country, they would have provided by constitutional enactment that that evil and that sin should at a comparatively unremote day be removed. During our colonial dependence, and immediately pre- ceding the epoch when our fathers found it necessary to claim for themselves the political freedom which was their right, one of tLIr complaints against the government from which they disengaged themselves was, that that government had, by its own power, and to gratify the avarice of its own people, and against the will of the coi onies, imported froma Africa Africans as slaves, and settled them as such amongst us. Reproduced with permission from the University of Illinois at Chicago

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