ARTICLES SUMMARY

Articles Summary



The Higher Law Speech by William Henry Seward 

William Henry Seward's so-called "Higher Law" talk continues as one of the most important "maiden" talks in the annals of the Senate Seward talks about Southern extremists contended that the Constitution solely supplied adequate administration for the elongation of slavery to the territories; the Senate require not waste its time arguing new regulations on the subject. Seward accepted that the Constitution's framers had identified the reality of slavery and defended it where it lived, but the new territory was ruled by a "higher regulation than the Constitution. (eweb.furman.edu 2010) a lesson regulation established by the Creator of the universe.

The New York member of the senate, resisting all legislative compromise as "radically incorrect and vitally vicious," claimed the unconditional admission of California as a free state. He alerted the South that slavery was condemned and that secession from the Union would be futile.

 I assume the talk must have had a large influence out-of-doors Congress. Seward's clear and convincing contentions, sustained by such administration as Edmund Burke, Montesquieu, and Machiavelli, made this an oration to be taken very seriously. Those highly ranking compromise suggestions hurried to strike Seward as a reckless foe of the Constitution, eager to subvert it for some nebulous "higher law" in the concern of political expediency. Supporters amidst Seward's to the north Whig partners rallied to his defense. Horace Greeley, reviewer of the New York Tribune, discerned that other than subverting the Constitution, the "higher law" doctrine reinforced the vessel for charter with the administration of divine sanction.

The talk hastened the Whig party's partition into proslavery and antislavery factions and alienated numerous of Seward's natural allies.

A ten years subsequent, in 1860 and 1861, as south states started to secede, Seward became more conciliatory in his mind-set in the direction of the South, searching tranquil procedures of settling the confrontation and bypassing war.

The Clay Compromise Measures by John C. Calhoun

On slavery Calhoun states that the agitation has been allowed to advance with nearly no try to oppose it, until it has come to an issue when it can no longer be disguised or refuted that the Union is in danger. You have therefore had compelled upon you the utmost and gravest inquiry that can ever arrive under your consideration. 

The only remedy in his view was to have unquestionable and methodical information of the environment and the feature of the ...