Shortly afterwards, a committee of five, appointed by this Convention, all leading Democrats, issued a circular, “under the authority of the delegates of the County of Wayne,” recommending that the voters throughout Michigan should meet and elect delegates to a Convention to give the necessary assent to the Act of Congress. In pursuance of this call, the Convention met; and as it originated in an exclusively party recommendation, so it was of an exclusively party character. And it was the action of this Convention that was submitted to Congress, and, after discussion in both bodies, on solemn votes, approved.
The precedent of Michigan has another feature, which is entitled to gravest attention, especially at this moment, when citizens exerting themselves to establish a State Government in Kansas are openly arrested on the charge of treason, and we are startled by tidings of maddest efforts to press this procedure of preposterous Tyranny. No such madness prevailed under Andrew Jackson,--although, during the long pendency of the Michigan proceedings, for more than fourteen months, the Territorial Government was entirely ousted, and the State Government organized in all its departments. One hundred and thirty-seven different legislative acts and resolutions were passed, providing for elections, imposing taxes, erecting corporations, and organizing courts of justice, including a Supreme Court and a Court of Chancery. All process was issued in the name of the People of the State of Michigan. And yet no attempt was made to question the legal validity of these proceedings, whether legislative or judicial. Least of all did any menial Governor, “dressed in a little brief authority,” play the fantastic tricks now witnessed in Kansas; nor did any person wearing the robes of justice shock high Heaven with the mockery of injustice now enacted by emissaries of the President in that Territory. No, Sir: nothing of this kind then occurred. Andrew Jackson was President.
Again I say, do you require a precedent? I give it. But I will not stake this cause on any precedent. I plant it firmly on the fundamental principle of American Institutions, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, by which government is recognized as deriving its just powers only _from the consent of the governed_, who may alter or abolish it, when it becomes destructive of their rights. In the debate on the Nebraska Bill, at the overthrow of the Prohibition of Slavery, the Declaration of Independence was denounced as “a self-evident lie.” It is only by similar effrontery that the fundamental principle which sustains the proceedings in Kansas can be assailed. Nay, more: you must disown the Declaration of Independence, and adopt the Circular of the Holy Alliance, which declares that “useful or necessary changes in legislation and in the administration of states _ought to emanate only from the free will and the deliberate and enlightened impulse of those whom God, has rendered responsible for power_.”[121] Face to face I put the principle of the Declaration of Independence and the principle of the Holy Alliance, and bid them grapple. “The one places the remedy in the hands which _feel_ the disorder; the other places the remedy in those hands which _cause_ the disorder”; and when I thus truthfully characterize them, I but adopt a sententious phrase from the Debates in the Virginia Convention on the adoption of the National Constitution.[122] And now these two principles, embodied in the rival propositions of the Senator from New York and the Senator from Illinois, must grapple on this floor.