Manning, Richard Irvine. Speech of Mr. Manning, of South Carolina, on the Subject of the Reception of Abolition Memorials; House of Representatives, Feb. 23, 1836. Washington : Printed by Blair & Rives, 1836. First Edition. [10357]
Removed, no wrapper, 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches, 11 pp., foxed. "IX" in brown ink on front top corner. Good. Pamphlet.
In February, 1836, the US House of Representatives passed, with an overwhelming majority, a resolution to send to a Select Committee all petitions for the abolition of slavery in Washington, DC, and in any State in the Union. The Select Committee was instructed to squash such petitions and not allow them to come to a floor vote. The Congress, in doing this, sought to disallow the discussion of and voting upon, abolitionist measures.
The Speaker of the House, Jonathan Cilley of Maine, declared the resolution invalid. (In 1838 Cilley was killed in a duel with Congressman William J Graves of Kentucky).
This declaration caused a great debate in Congress over slavery, abolition, and the power usurped by Cilley in overturning the vote of Congress.
The response here, by Richard Irvine Manning, argues that not only did the Speaker not have the power to overturn the majority, also, the Federal government had no right to take away the property of the citizens of the United States, and slaves are property. He states that the US Constitution never would have been ratified by the Southern States if slavery was disallowed or outlawed. He foresees the day when the North would be aligned against the South, and calamity would ensue. Manning predicts the destruction of the blacks in America, if abolitionists prevail, and condemns them for working against the order that God Himself has established.
"If these reckless agitators continue their course, and northern integrity and northern patriotism should not put them down, these melancholy realities will be the result. They will convulse this republic to its centre, and lay bare its massy foundations. Instead of conferring benefits upon the black race, whose exclusive champions they profess to be, they will stay, and perhaps forever, those meliorating causes which have been gradually exercising their influences for the last thirty years upon the condition of the slave population of this country, and will consign it to a necessary and inevitable condition of greater severity. Yes, sir, they may produce that deplorable condition by which their utter destruction may be necessary to ensure the saftey of this country. Was it ever yet known in the history of mankind, that two distinct colors could co-exist on terms of equal civil and political liberty? Sooner than this shall ever be realized, the one or the other will be exterminated.
"When the abolitionists, in their Quixotic notions of general emancipation, press forward to their objects against the arrangements and established order of things under the plans of Divine Providence, they censure the wisdom and virtue of our common ancestors, condemn the usages of the patriarchal ages, disregard the sanctions of the Bible, and arraign the justice and wisdom of God."
Richard Irving Manning I (1789-1836), sometime governor of South Carolina; member of the US House of Representatives 1834-36. Manning was a plantation owner, a Captain during the War of 1812, and a successful politician, working his was through the South Carolina House, Senate, Governorship, and finally to the US House of Representatives. While governor he ended some cruelties inflicted upon slaves, and insisted that all capital cases against slaves be tried properly, by a jury in a courthouse. He was a Jacksonian Democrat at the time he was appointed to fill a vacancy in the US House.
