Caleb Cushing Quotes
If there be any plausible reason for supposing that we have the right to legislate on the slave interests of the District, you cannot put down the investigation of the subject out of doors, by refusing to receive petitions.
Cushing, Caleb. Speech of Mr. Cushing, of Massachusetts, on the Right of Petition, as Connected with Petitions for the Abolition of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the District of Columbia: In the House of Representatives, January 25, 1836. Gales and Seaton, 1836, p. 13.
In WWI Congress had passed a law that prohibited anyone from undermining or interfering with the war effort. The defendants had passed out anti-war literature to young men heading for military service. The court then overlooked the First Amendment and came up with a strange logic where the “clear and present danger” was the test of whether the First Amendment would apply. The anti war pamphleteers went to jail. Today, we look back on this and find it very surprising but this is yet another example of erosion of freedom and civil liberties when the nation is at war. By the 1950s, the Supreme Court had reversed itself and the First Amendment was restored to its original intent.
In this quotation Lincoln got out of the rhetorical trap that Douglas had set for him by disclosing his personal preferences as opposed to the positions that Douglas had accused him of being pledged to. See {615827}.
What was particularly interesting about this quotation is that Pinkney was a political leader of Maryland, a slave state. He saw the injustice and immorality of slavery but like many others of our founding fathers assumed that ending slavery would infringe on the property rights of the slave holders. Others argued that there can be no right to deny others their basic rights—property and wealth are subordinate to natural rights. See {632258} and {632259} for more on this point.
What was to become the 14th Amendment was being discussed. Several of the most radical Republicans drafted language that would allow Congress to make any law regarding life, liberty or property, so that they could be sure that the States would not make their laws in a discriminatory manner. However, Hotchkiss and the majority wanted to be sure the laws were not discriminatory but they didn’t want Congress to have the power to make any law regarding life, liberty and property for every state. The current version of the 14th Amendment just prohibited discrimination in laws, not empowering the Federal Government to override the state governments in most important areas.
In this famous case the unanimous court allowed the conviction of pacifists who wrote a pamphlet saying that the military draft was unconstitutional and wrong. The logic was that there was an immediate “clear and present danger” to the nation and therefore the usual Constitutional protections did not apply.
This is a memorable historical quotations because it shows the extreme level of hypocrisy and lack of logic of which man is capable of when his way of life and world view is threatened. In this case Gordon sees the right to own slaves as a basic civil right. He does not see that the right of possessing slaves totally denies virtually all civil rights to the slave. In his and other Southern views, to assure a man’s liberty he had to have the right and freedom to deny freedom to others, torture others at will, destroy families and remove all hope and aspiration of some people.
His logic conflates the right of an individual to health care with the right of the healthcare provider in a zero sum game. Voting is a right, but that does not imply that the voting machine maker must supply them for free. The obligation of the state is to provide for and facilitate rights—to either provide the health care directly or pay a provider to provide it.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
Caleb Cushing was an American Democratic politician and diplomat who served as a Congressman from Massachusetts and Attorney General under President Franklin Pierce. He was an eager proponent of territorial and commercial expansion, especially regarding the acquisition of Texas, Oregon and Cuba. He believed that enlarging the American sphere would fulfill "the great destiny reserved for this exemplar American Republic." Cushing secured the first American treaty with China, the Treaty of Wangxia of 1844; it gave American merchants trading rights in five Chinese ports. After the Civil War, Cushing negotiated a treaty with Colombia to give the United States a right-of-way for a trans-oceanic Canal. He helped obtain a favorable settlement of the Alabama Claims, and as the ambassador to Spain in 1870s defused the troublesome Virginius Affair.
