On March 4, 1858, Senator James Hammond of South Carolina addressed the United States Senate on an issue concerning the admission of Kansas as a new state of the Union. His speech was in response to a speech given the day before by Senator William Seward of the state of New York. This is a quick summary of that speech along with an analysis of how it is relevant in relation to the upcoming Civil War.
The bulk of the speech by Senator Hammond was devoted to the size and relative strength of the Southern American states, also known as the slave states. He starts with a description of the size of territory held by the South and says it is as large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Spain . With the size of their territory, the vast shore lines, and the neighboring prairies, no nation can hem in the South. He continued by comparing the production and exports of the South with that of the North to demonstrate that the South can out-produce the North and prosper without its support. In addition to their production capabilities, the South could muster a one-million-man army, according to Hammond. He claimed that this is a force that could not be equaled in the world.
However, Hammond declares that the South need not ever go to war. He claimed the commerce is what breeds war. All the South needed to do was open their borders for international trade and all of the other nations would flock to them in order to do business. He also claimed in his speech the no nation would dare go to war against the Southern states because they grow most of the worlds cotton and no nation could afford to cut off their supply of cotton. This is where he got the title for his speech.
Finally, Hammond wrapped up his speech by extolling the virtues of slave ownership. He stated that the South could accomplish anything they wanted because they had the social structure in place to accomplish anything. He claimed that it was right and proper to have slaves, and that they were best fitted to be slaves and were better off as Southern slaves than as freemen. He likened the free workers of the North to slaves because they toiled for little pay and little guarantee of a better life. He wrapped up his speech by addressing the concerns of the North, as expressed by Senator Seward of New York, about the control the South has had in Congress and their efforts to take control from the South.
In order to understand the relevance of this speech, we first need to look at the occasion for the speech. The debate in Congress at the time was whether to grant statehood to the territory of Kansas based on the state constitution they had recently passed. The debate stemmed from the fact that the constitution was drafted by representatives in Kansas that were elected by fraudulent voting practices. It seems that the State of Missouri, a slave state, sent many of its citizens across the border into Kansas to vote for pro-slavery representatives to draft the state constitution, with the hopes of creating another slave state. This process was in place because of the recent Kansas-Nebraska act that declared that new territories seeking statehood would decide the issue of slavery by sovereign vote. While the territory of Kansas was inhabited by a majority of anti-slave people, Missouri, its neighbor, was a slave state and wanted Kansas to also be a slave state. Kansas was quickly becoming a battleground over the slavery issue, both in debate and in actuality, earning it the nickname of “bloody Kansas” . Before long, Kansas had two state governments, one pro-slavery and one anti-slavery. The debate in the Senate that prompted the speech by Hammond was whether to accept Kansas as a state using the Lecompton Constitution, which was the one drafted by the fraudulently elected pro-slavery officials.
The speech by Hammond followed a lengthy speech the day before by Senator William Seward of New York. Senator Seward spend a large amount of time discussing in detail the events that led up to the current debate in the Senate. He discussed the passage of the Missouri Compromise which forbid slavery north of the parallel 36 degrees, 30 minutes north except within the state of Missouri. He also discussed the Kansas-Nebraska act, which negated the Missouri Compromise and allowed new states to decide whether to allow slavery based on the voting of their citizens. This set the two sides against each other, especially in Kansas. Senator Seward detailed the events in Kansas that resulted from the Kansas-Nebraska act and produced the Lecompton constitution that was being disputed by the anti-slavery, majority, population of Kansas. He maintained in his speech that the national government should not intervene in favor of slave labor and slave states . He was arguing that Congress should not accept the Lecompton constitution and should instead honor the wishes of the majority of the residents of Kansas.
The speech by Hammond is relevant to the upcoming Civil War because it made clear the desire of the Southern States to become their own nation with a population of slaves. It demonstrated the resolve of the South to maintain the status of the slaves and a willingness to go to war over the issue of slavery. It provided a clear indication that the Southern States would not compromise on the slavery issue and will continue to do all it could to spread the practice of slavery to the rest of the country. With this speech, Senator Hammond figuratively drew a line in the sand and dared the North to cross it.
References
Garrison, Z. (n.d.). Lecompton Constitution. (T. K. Library, Producer) Retrieved from Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict: http://www.civilwaronthewesternborder.org/content/lecompton-constitution
Hammond, J. H. (n.d.). Cotton is King. Retrieved from TeachingAmericanHistory.org: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cotton-is-king/
Seward, W. (n.d.). Freedom in Kansas: Speech of William H. Seward, in the Senate of the United States, March 3 1858. Retrieved from University of Michigan: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/abe5377.0001.001/4?page=root;size=100;view=image
