The joint resolution from the Senate authoriz ing the President of the United States to cause rations to be distributed to suffering fugitives from Indian hostilities in Alabama and Georgia, being under debate Mr. ADAMS asked that the resolution should be read; it was accordingly read, and was as follows: Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States be authorized to cause rations to be delivered from the public stores to the unfortunate sufferers, who are unable to provide for themselves, and who have been driven from their homes by Indian depredations, En Alabama and Georgia, until they can be re-established in their possessions, or so long as the President shall consider it necessary. Mr. ADAMS, after observing that there was no appropriation annexed to the resolution, which, if there had been, the resolution must, by the Constitution of the United States, have been made to assume the form of a bill, proceeded to address the chairman of the Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, in substance, as fol lows: Mr. Chairman: There is no appropriation annexed to this resolution. We are called to vote upon it without knowing how deep it will dive into the public purse. We have no estimate from any Executive Department; no statement of the numbers of the distressed and unfortunate persons whom we are called upon to relieve, not with our own moneys, but with the moneys of our constituents. By an exception to the ordinary rules of the House, especially established to guard the public Treasury against the danger of rash and inconsiderate expenditures, we are to drive this resolution through all its stages in a single day. And it is, I believe, the first example of a system of gratuitous donations to our own countrymen, infinitely more formidable by its consequences as a precedent, than from any thing appearing upon its face. I shall, nevertheless, vote for it. But answerable to my constituents, as I am in this as in all other cases for voting away their money, I seek for a principle which may justify me, to their judgment and my own, in this lavish disposal of the public funds. It is but one, sir, of a class of legislative enactments now upon the pages of our statute book, introduced first, I believe during the present session of Congress; but with which we are already becoming familiar, and which I greatly fear will, ere long, grow voluminous. I shall take the liberty to denominate them the scalping knife and tomahawk laws. They are all urged through by the terror of those instruments of death, under the most affecting and pathetic appeals from the constituents of the sufferers, to all the tender and benevolent sympathies of our nature. It is impossible for me to withhold from those appeals a responsive and yielding voice. I have voted for all those bills devoting million after million from the public chest, for the relief and defence of these the suffering fellow-citizens of my constituents. I will vote for this resolution. I will vote again and again for drafts from the Treasury for the same purpose, should they become necessary, till the Treasury itself shall be drained; but, for so doing, I must seek for a principle which may be satisfactory, first, to my own mind, and secondly, to my constituents. And here, sir, the gentlemen who call upon us for these bountiful contributions from the public treasure, are compelled to resort to that common defence and general welfare declared by the Constitution of the United States to be among the purposes for which the Constitution itself was ordained by the People. I admit their claim. There ar indeed, two grounds upon which some of them think the claim sustainable. One of them produces precedent f this exercise of power, and yet disclaims the authority o the precedent itself. You have already, by a resolution in the same words with those of the resolution now before this committee, extended this same relief to the inhabitants of Florida. But Florida is one of your Territories, and you are under obligations of protection more comprehensive to its inhabitants than those which bind you to the People of the States. These receive and are entitled to the protection of their State Government, and you are bound to extend that species of protection to the inhabitants of the Territories, besides the protection which the inhabitant of the several States are entitled to, as members of the great confederation. The precedent, therefore, of the resolution of relief to the inhabitants of Florida, does not cover the case. We are reminded, however, that some twenty years or more ago,the people of Caraccas were visited at once with a tremendous earthquake, with famine, and with the still more heavy misfortune of a civil war. The convulsions of nature by earthquakes, the ravages of famine, and the raging passions of man in the desolations of civil war, are as destruc tive to human life, and as calamitous to multitudes whor they do not absolutely destroy as the tomahawk and th scalping knife. But whatever may have been the motives the justifying authority of Congress, more than twenty yea ago, for appropriating any portion of the public moneys 1 the relief of the inhabitants of Caraccas, it could not e tablish the principle that Congress have the constitutiona power to appropriate money for the relief of all human suf fering, whether by earthquake, famine, civil war, or Indiar ferocity. And the gentleman from Alabama himself, whe so ardently urges the adoption of this resolution, tells you that he should have voted against that measure of relief to the wretched sufferers in Caraccas. Mere commiseration, though one of the most amiable impulses of our nature, gives us no power to drain the Treasury of the People for the relief of the suffering object. You must, therefore, seek another, an additional source of power, for authority to pass this resolution; and where will you, where can you. find it but in the war power, and its limitation, not its en largement, in that very declaration of the transcender purposes for which the People of the United States ordain ed their Constitution-the common defence and genera welfare. Step one hair's breadth out of the circle bounding the true intent and meaning of these words, and you have no more authority to pass this resolution,than you have, b an act of Congress, to saddle the People of the Unite States with the insupportable burden of the whole syster. of the poor laws of England. Sir, in the authority given to Congress by the Constit tion of the United States to declare war, all the powers i cidental to war are, by necessary implication, conferred u on the Government of the United States. Now, the po ers incidental to war, are derived, not from the intern municipal sources. but from the laws and usages of nation In your relations with the Indian tribes, you never decla war, though you do make and break treaties with then whenever either to make or to break treaties with then happens to suit the purposes of the President and a majori ty of both Houses of Congress. For, in this matter, you have set aside the judiciary department of the Government as effectually as if there were none such in the Constitution. There are, then, Mr. Chairman, in the authority of Congress and of the Executive two classes of powers, altoge ther different in their nature, and often incompatible with each other-the war power and the peace power. Th peace power is limited by regulations, and restricted by pro visions, prescribed within the Constitution itself. The wa power is limited only by the laws and usages of nation the power is tremendous: it is strictly constitutional, but t breaks down every barrier so anxiously erected for the protection of liberty, of property, and of life. This, sir, is the power which authorizes you to pass the resolution now before you, and, in my opinion, there is no other. And this, sir, is the reason which I was not permitted to give this morning for voting with only eight associates against the first resolution reported by the committee on he abolition petitions; not one word of discussion had been permitted on either of those resolutions. When call ed to vote upon the first of them, I asked only five minutes of the time of the House to prove that it was utterly unfounded. It was not the pleasure of the House to grant me those five minutes. Sir, I must say that, in all the proceedings of the House upon that report, from the previous question, moved and inflexibly persisted in by a member of the committee itself which reported the resolutions, (Mr. OWENS, of Georgia,) to the refusal of the Speaker, sustained Speaker, sustained by the majority of the House, to permit the other gentleman from Georgia, (Mr. GLASCOCK,) to record upon the journal his reasons for asking to be excused from voting on that same resolution, the freedom of debate has been stifled in this Houseto a degree far beyond any thing that ever has happened since the existence of the Constitution of the United States; nor is it a consolatory reflection to me how intensely we have been made to feel, in the process of that operation, that the Speaker of this House is a slaveholder. And, sir, as I was not then permitted to assign my reasons for voting against that resolution before I gave the vote, I rejoice that the reason for which I shall vote for the resolution now before the committee is identically the same with that for which I voted against that. [Mr. ADAMS at this, and at many other passages of this peech, was interrupted by calls to order. The chairman f the committee, (Mr. A. H. SHEPPERD, of North Caroli12,) in every instance decided that he was not out of order, ut at this passage intimated that he was approaching very lose upon its borders; upon which Mr. ADAMS said, Then I am to understand, sir, that I am yet within the bounds of order, but that I may transcend them hereafter. ter, which may warrant him to arrest me in my argument, because I say that the reason for which I shall vote for the resolution now before the committee, levying a heavy contribution upon the property of my constituents, is identically the same with the reason for which I voted against the resolution reported by the slavery committee, that Congress has no authority to interfere, in any way, with slavery in any of the States of this Union? Sir, I was not allowed to give my reasons for that vote, and a majority of my constituents, perhaps proportionably as large as that of this House, in favor of that resolution, may, and probably will, disapprove of my vote against it, unless my reasons for so voting should be explained to them. I asked but five minutes of the House to give those reasons, and was refused. I shall, therefore, take the liberty to give them now, as they are strictly applicable to the measure now before the committee, and are my only justification for voting in favor of this resolution.] that I return, then, to my first position, that there are two classes of powers vested by the Constitution of the United States in their Congress and Executive Government: the powers to be exercised in time of peace, and the powers incidental to war. That the powers of peace are limited by provisions within the body of the Constitution itself; but that the powers of war are limited and regulated only by the laws and usages of nations. There are, indeed, powers of peace conferred upon Congress which also come within the scope and jurisdiction of the laws of nations, such as the negotiation of treaties of amity and commerce, the interchange of public ministers and consuls, and all the personal and social intercourse between the individual inhabitants of the United States and foreign nations, and the Indian tribes, which require the interposition of any law. But the powers of war are all regulated by the laws of nations, and are subject to no other limitation. It is by this power that I am justified in voting the money of my constituents for the immediate relief of their fellow-citizens suffering with extreme necessity even for subsistence, by the direct consequence of an Indian war. Upon the same principle, your consuls in foreign ports are authorized to Mr. Chairman, I claim the privilege of speech accorded provide for the subsistence of seamen in distress, and even to every other member of this House. I will not advert to for their passage to their own country. the latitude in which that privilege has been, throughout this session, enjoyed in Committee of the Whole by every member of the House who has chosen to exercise it. I will appeal only to what happened no longer ago than the sitting of yesterday and of this morning, when, at the hour of one, the Speaker adjourned the House, not in the usual form of ten o'clock to-morrow morning, but to ten o'clock of Wednesday morning, that is, of this day. Is it not with the recollection of every one who hears me, that two genlemen, both distinguished members of the House, from the State of Maryland, from the hour of seven to that of ten, or little short of that time, last evening, entertained and instructed the Committee of the Whole House with a controversial disquisition upon the Constitution of the State of Maryland, and upon the very important question whether he voice of the Legislature of that State was or was not an exponent of the popular will? Is it not remembered hat this disquisition was held in the form of a dialogue so imated, that the retort courteous, the quip modest, the During the late war with Great Britain, the military and unter-check quarrelsome, and almost the lie circumstan- naval commanders of that nation issued proclamations inl, passed between those gentlemen, without interruption viting the slaves to repair to their standards, with promises om the chairman, and without call to order, till at last an of freedom and of settlement in some of the British colonial ɔnorable member from Tennessee proposed that the diffe- establishments. This, surely, was an interference with nce between the two members should be settled by arbi- the institution of slavery in the States. By the treaty of ration? And what was the question before the commit- peace, Great Britain stipulated to evacuate all the forts and ee, sir, upon which this spirited and eloquent conference places in the United States, without carrying away any vas held? Was it upon an appropriation of seven hun- slaves. If the Government of the United States had no Ired thousand dollars for arming the fortifications of the authority to interfere, in any way, with the institution of United States? or upon an amendment to that proposal, by a reduction of the salaries of all your principal executive officers, and of the compensation of members of Congress? Sir, it was upon one of these two propositions, so exceedingly relevant to each other, that the colloquy between the wo gentlemen from Maryland, upon the Constitution, Legislature, and People of that highly respectable State, was held, for hours, without interruption or call to order. And now, sir, am I to be disconcerted and silenced, or admoned by the Choir that I am approaching to irrelevant mat And it was upon that same principle that I voted against the resolution reported by the slavery committee, Congress possess no constitutional authority to interfere, in any way, with the institution of slavery in any of the States of this Confederacy," to which resolution most of those with whom I usually concur, and even my own colleagues in this House, gave their assent. I do not admit that there is, even among the peace powers of Congress, such authority; but in war there are many ways by which Congress not only have the authority, but are bound to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States. The existing law prohibiting the importation of slaves into the United States from foreign countries, is itself an interference with the institution of slavery in the States. It was so considered by the founders of the Constitution of the United States, in which it was stipulated that Congress should not interfere, in that way, with the institution, prior to the year 1808. slavery in the States, they would not have had the authority to require this stipulation. It is well known that this engagement was not fulfilled by the British naval and military commanders; that, on the contrary, they did carry away all the slaves whom they had induced to join them, and that the British Government inflexibly refused to restore any of them to their masters; that a claim of indemnity: was consequently instituted in behalf of the owners of the slaves, and was successfully maintained. All that series of transactions was an interference by Congress with the institution of slavery in the States in one way-in the way of protection and support. It was by the institution of slavery alone that the restitution of slaves enticed by proclamations into the British service could be claimed as property. But for the institution of slavery, the British commanders could neither have allured them to their standard, nor restored them otherwise than as liberated prisoners of war. But for the institution of slavery, there could have been no stipulation that they should not be carried away as property, nor any claim of indemnity for the violation of that engagement. But the war power of Congress over the institution of slavery in the States is yet far more extensive. Suppose the case of a servile war, complicated, as to some extent it is even now with an Indian war; suppose Congress were called to raise armies, to supply money from the whole Union to suppress a servile insurrection: would they have no authority to interfere with the institution of slavery? The issue of a servile war may be disastrous. By war the slave may emancipate himself; it may become necessary for the master to recognise his emancipation by a treaty of peace; can it for an instant be pretended that Congress, in such a contingency, would have no authority to interfere with the institution of slavery, in any way, in the States? Why, it would be equivalent to saying that Congress have no constitutional authority to make peace. I suppose a more portentous case, certainly within the bounds of possibility--I would to God I could say not with in the bounds of probability. You have been, if you are not now, at the very point of a war with Mexico-a war, I am sorry to say, so far as public rumor may be credited, stimulated by provocations on our part from the very commencement of this Administration down to the recent authority given to General Gaines to invade the Mexican territory. It is said that one of the earliest acts of this Administration was a proposal, made at a time when there was already much ill-humor in Mexico against the United States, that she should cede to the United States a very large portion of her territory-large enough to constitute nine States equal in extent to Kentucky. It must be confessed that a device better calculated to produce jealousy, suspicion, ill-will, and hatred, could not have been contrived. It is further affirmed that this overture, offensive in itself, was made precisely at the time when a swarm of colonists from these United States were covering the Mexican border with land-jobbing, and with slaves, introduced in defiance of the Mexican laws, by which slavery had been abolished throughout that Republic. The war now raging in Texas is a Mexican civil war, and a war for the re-establishment of slavery where it was abolished. It is not a servile war, but a war between slavery and emancipation, and every possible effort has been made to drive us into the war, on the side of slavery. the component parts of your own Southern population, be It is, indeed, a circumstance eminently fortunate for us that this monster, Santa Ana, has been defeated and taken, though I cannot participate in that exquisite joy with which we have been told that every one having AngloSaxon blood in his veins must have been delighted on hearing that this ruffian has been shot, in cold blood, when a prisoner of war, by the Anglo-Saxon leader of the victorious Texian army. Sir, I hope there is no member of this House, of other than Anglo-Saxon origin, who will deem it uncourteous that I, being myself in part Anglo-Saxon, must, of course, hold that for the best blood that ever circulated in human veins. Oh! yes, sir! far be it from me to depreciate the glories of the Anglo-Saxon race; although there have been times when they bowed their necks and submitted to the law of conquest, beneath the ascendency of the Norman race. But, sir, it has struck me as no inconsiderable evidence of the spirit which is spurring us into this war of aggression, of conquest, and of slave-making, that all the fires of ancient, hereditary national hatred are to be kindled, to familiarize us with the ferocious spirit of rejoicing at the massacre of prisoners in cold blood. Sir, is there not yet hatred enough between the races which compose your Southern population and the population of Mexico, their next neighbor, but you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to another hemisphere, for the fountains of bitterness between you and them? What is the temper of feeling between And this is the nation with which, at the instigation of your Executive Government, you are now rushing into war-into a war of conquest; commenced by aggression on your part, and for the re-establishment of slavery, where it has been abolished, throughout the Mexican Republic. For your war will be with Mexico-with a Republic of twenty-four States, and a population of eight or nine millions of souls. It seems to be considered that this victoryover twelve hundred men, with the capture of their commander, the President of the Mexican Republic, has already achieved the conquest of the whole Republic. That it may have achieved the independence of Texas, is not impossible. But Texas is to the Mexican Republic not more nor so much as the State of Michigan is to yours. That State of Michigan, the People of which are in vaini claiming of you the performance of that sacred promise you made them, of admitting her as a State into the Union that State of Michigan, which has greater grievances and heavier wrongs to allege against you for a declaration of her independence, if she were disposed to declare it, than the People of Texas have for breaking off their union with the Republic of Mexico. Texas is an extreme boundary portion of the Republic of Mexico; a wilderness inhabited only by Indians till after the Revolution which separated Mexico from Spain; not sufficiently populous at the organization of the Mexican Confederacy to form a State bv itself, and therefore united with Coahuila, where the greatest part of the indigenous part of the population reside. Sir, the history of all the emancipated Spanish American colonies has been, ever since their separation from Spain, a history of convulsionary wars; of revolutions, accomplished by single, and often very insignificant battles; of chief tains, whose title to power has been the murder of their immediate predecessors. They have all partaken of the character of the first conquest of Mexico by Cortez, and of Peru by Pizarro; and this, sir, makes me shudder at the thought of connecting our destinies indissolubly with theirs It may be that a new revolution in Mexico will follow up on this captivity or death of their President and commanding general; we have rumors, indeed, that such a revolution had happened even before his defeat; but I cannot yet see my way clear to the conclusion that either the independence of Texas, or the capture and military execution of Santa Ana, will save you from war with Mexico. Santa Ana was but one of a breed of which Spanish America for the last twenty-five years has been a teeming mother--soldiers of fortune, who, by the sword or the musket ball, have risen to supreme power, and by the sword or the musket ball have fallen from it. That breed is not extinct; the very last intelligence from Peru tells of one who has fallen there as Yturbide, and Mina, and Guerrero, and Santa Ana have fallen in Mexico. The same soil which produced them is yet fertile to produce others. They reproduce themselves, with nothing but a change of the name and of the man. Your war, sir, is to be a war of races--the Anglo-Saxon American pitted against the Moorish-Spanish Mexican American; a war between the Northern and Southern halves of North America; from Passamaquoddy to Panama. Are you prepared for such a war? And again I ask, what will be your cause in such a war? Aggression, conquest, and the re-establishment of slavery where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery. Sir, in considering these United States and the United Mexican States as mere masses of power coming to collision against each other, I cannot doubt that Mexico will be the greatest sufferer by the shock. The conquest of all Mexico would seem to be no improbable result of the conflict, especially if the war should extend no farther than to the two mighty combatants. But will it be so confined? Mexico is clearly the weakest of the two Powers; but she is not the least prepared for action. She has the more recent experience of war. She has the greatest number of veteran warriors; and although her highest chief has just suffered a fatal and ignominious defeat, yet that has happened often before to leaders of armies too confident of success and contemptuous of their enemy. Even now, Mexico is better prepared for a war of invasion upon you, than you are for a war of invasion upon her. There may be found a successor to Santa Ana, inflamed with the desire, not only of avenging his disaster, but what he and his nation will consider your perfidious hostility. The national spirit may go with him. He may not only turn the tables upon the Texian conquerors, but drive them for refuge within your borders, and pursue them into the heart of your own territories. Are you in a condition to resist him? Is the success of your whole army, and all your veteran generals, and all your militia-calls, and all your mutinous volunteers against a miserable band of five or six hundred invisible Seminole Indians, in your late campaign, an earnest of the energy and vigor with which you are ready to carry on that far otherwise formidable and complicated war?-complicated, did I say? And how complicated? Your Seminole war is already spreading to the Creeks, and, in their march of desolation, they sweep along with them your negro slaves, and put arms into their hands to make common cause with them against you; and how far will it spread, sir, should a Mexican invader, with the torch of liberty in his hand, and the standard of freedom floating over his head, proclaiming emancipation to the slave and revenge to the native Indian, as he goes, invade your soil? What will be the condition of your States of Louisiana, of Mississippi, of Alabama, of Arkansas, of Missouri, and of Georgia? Where will be your negroes? Where will be that combined and concentrated mass of Indian tribes, whom, by an inconceivable policy, you have expelled from their widely distant habitations, to embody them within a small compass on the very borders of Mexico, as if on purpose to give that country a nation of natural allies in their hostilities against you? Sir, you have a Mexican, an Indian, and a negro war upon your hands, and you are plunging yourself into it blindfold; you are talking about acknowledging the independence of the Republic of Texas, and you are thirsting to annex Texas, ay, and Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, and Santa Fe, from the source to the mouth of the Rio Bravo, to your already over-distended dominions. Five hundred thousand square miles of the territory of Mexico would not even now quench your burning thirst for aggrandizement. But will your foreign war for this be with Mexico alone? No, sir. As the weaker party, Mexico, when the contest shall have once begun, will look abroad, as well as among your negroes and your Indians, for assistance. Neither Great Britain nor France will suffer you to make such a conquest from Mexico; no, nor even to annex the independent State of Texas to your Confederation, without their interposition. You will have an Anglo-Saxon intertwined with a Mexican war to wage. Great Britain may have no serious objection to the independence of Texas, and may be willing enough to take her under her protection, as a barrier both against Mexico and against you. But, as aggrandizement to you, she will not readily suffer t; and, above all, she will not suffer you to acquire it by conquest and the re-establishment of slavery. Urged on by the irrisistible, overwhelming torrent of public opinion, As to the annexation of Texas to your Confederation, the 42d degree of latitude from the source of the Arkansas river to the South sea. Such was our claim; and you may judge how much confidence Mr. Monroe could have in its validity. The great object and desire of the country then was to obtain the Floridas. It was Gen. Jackson's desire; and in that conference with me to which I have heretofore alluded, and which it is said he does not recollect, he said to me that so long as the Florida rivers were not in our possession, there could be no safety for our whole Southern country. But, sir, suppose you should annex Texas to these United States; another year would not pass before you would have to engage in a war for the conquest of the Island of Cuba. What is now the condition of that island? Still under the nominal protection of Spain. And what is the condition of Spain herself? Consuming her own vitals in a civil war for the succession to the crown. Do you expect, that whatever may be the issue of that war, she can retain even the nominal possession of Cuba? After having lost all her continental colonies in North and South America, Cuba will stand in need of more efficient protection; and above all, the protection of a naval power. Suppose that naval power should be Great Britain. There is Cuba at your very door; and if you spread yourself along a naked coast, from the Sabine to the Rio Bravo, what will be your relative position towards Great Britain, with not only Jamaica, but Cuba, and Porto Rico in her hands, and abolition for the motto to her union cross of St. George and Saint Andrew? Mr. Chairman, do you think I am treading on fantastic grounds? Let me tell you a piece of history, not far remote. Sir, many years have not passed away since an internal revolution in Spain subjected that country and her king for a short time to the momentary government of the Cortes. That revolution was followed by another, by which, under the auspices of a French army with the Duke d'Angouleme at their head, Ferdinand the Seventh was restored to a despotic throne; Cuba had followed the fortunes of the Cortes when they were crowned with victory; and when the counter revolution came, the inhabitants of the island, uncertain what was to be their destination, were for some time in great perplexity what to do for themselves. Two considerable parties arose in the island, one of which was for placing it under the protection of Great Britain, and another was for annexing it to the confederation of these United States. By one of these parties I have reason to believe that overtures were made to the Government of Great Britain. By the other I know that overtures were made to the Government of the United States. And I further know that secret, though irresponsible assurances were communicated to the then President of the United States, as coming from the French Government, that they were secretly informed that the British Government had determined to take possession of Cuba. Whether similar overtures were made to France herself, I do not undertake to say; but that Mr. George Canning, then the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was under no inconsiderable alarm, lest under the pupilage of the Duke d'Angouleme, Ferdinand the Seventh might commit to the commander of a French naval squadron the custody of the Moro Castle, is a circumstance also well known to me. It happened that just about that time a French squadron of considerable force was fitted out and received sailing orders for the West Indies, without formal communication of the fact to the British Government; and that as soon as it was made known to him, he gave orders to the British Ambassador at Paris to demand, in the most peremptory tone, what was the destination of that squadron, and a special and positive disclaimer that it was intended even to visit the Havana; and this was made the occasion of mutual explanations, by which Great Britain, France, and the United States, not by the formal solemnity of a treaty, but by the implied engagement of mutual assurances of intention, gave pledges of honor to each other, that neither of them should in the then condition of the island take it, or the Moro Castle, as its citadel, from the possession of Spain. This engagement was on all sides faithfully performed; but, without it, who doubts that from that day to this either of the three Powers might have, taken the island and held it in undisputed possession? curbed the spirit of conquest in Great Britain, and Franc Mr. Chairman, are you ready for all these wars? A At this time circumstances have changed-popular revolutions both in France and Great Britain have perhaps Sir, it is by virtue of this same war power, as now brought into exercise by this Indian war in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, that I vote for the resolution before the committee. By virtue of this, I have already voted in the course of this session to increase your standing army by a second regiment of dragoons, to authorize your President to accept the services of ten thousand volunteers, and to appropriate millions of the public money to suppress these Indian hostilitics-all for the common defence, all for the general welfare. And if, on this occasion, I have been compelled to avail myself of the opportunity to assign my reasons for voting against the first resolution reported by the slavery committee, it is because it was the pleasure of the majority of the House this morning to refuse me |