I believe I have answered the two objections made by the Senator from Ohio. If he made any other, it has escaped my recollection.
Mr. Sherman followed Mr. Sumner, beginning with these words:--
“I will not reply to that part of the speech of the honorable Senator from Massachusetts in which he denounced slaveholders. My opinions on this subject are well known. I think that slaveholders have certain rights under the Constitution of the United States; and while I never could be one myself, and have as deep a repugnance to any law which authorizes the holding of slaves as any other man, yet, while I am here under oath, I will respect their constitutional rights to the fullest extent. We are bound to legislate for them, and they are entitled to the protection of the Constitution of the United States as fully as if they were here, all of them, to speak for themselves; and especially I do not think it proper or courteous to use such language, applied to a whole class of people, when Senators on this floor are with us, associating with us, who are included by the appellation ‘slaveholder,’ so obnoxious to the Senator from Massachusetts. Certainly I cannot characterize so harshly any one who is a member of the same body with myself.”[66]
He then said that he intended “to put the proposition to tax cotton and the proposition to tax slaves against each other,” and that he would “propose to amend the amendment of the Senator from Massachusetts by substituting a modified tax on cotton,”--that “they are connected together, and the Senator cannot disconnect them.” He then spoke of slave-masters again.
“The slaveholders of the Revolution were men of the highest purity, of the greatest patriotism. At that time Slavery was admitted to be an evil. They were men of gentleness, of courtesy, of kindness, good hearts and good heads, nearly all of them; and so are the great body of the slaveholders with whom you are brought in contact in the Border States, men of gentleness and kindness and courtesy.… Many of the most gentlemanly, courteous, kind, and patriotic men that I ever met in the world were slaveholders; and I think, that, taken as a class, the slaveholders of the Border States are men who are deserving of our commiseration, of our kindness, rather than of our reproaches.… I do not choose to select that class of men from among all the population of the Southern States and tax them, and then to apply to them opprobrious epithets.”[67]
