dgment may
best promote their interest and their happiness. The demand is just.
Grant it, and you place your prosperity and ours upon a solid
foundation; you perpetuate the Union so necessary to your prosperity;
you solve the problem of republican government. If it be demonstrated
that the Constitution is powerless for our protection, it will then be
not only the right but the duty of the slaveholding States to resume the
powers which they have conferred upon this government and to seek new
safeguards for their future protection.... We took the Constitution and
the Union together. We will have both or we will have neither. This cry
of Union is the masked battery behind which the rights of the South are
to be assaulted. Let the South mark the man who is for the Union at
every hazard and to the last extremity; when the day of her peril comes
he will be the imitator of that character, the base Judas, who for
thirty pieces of silver threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe."

On the 15th of June, 1850, while the compromise measures were shifting
from House to House, the question was put to some of the advocates of
the admission of California, whether they would under any circumstances
admit a slave State into the Union. They declined to say.

Mr. Toombs arose and declared that the South did not deny the right of a
people framing a State constitution to admit or exclude slavery. The
South had uniformly maintained this right.

"The evidence is complete," he said. "The North repudiated this
principle."

"I intend to drag off the mask before the consummation of the act. We do
not oppose California on account of the antislavery clause in her
constitution. It was her right, and I am not even prepared to say she
acted unwisely in its exercise--that is her business: but I stand upon
the great principle that the South has the right to an equal
participation in the Territories of the United States. I claim the right
for her to enter them with all her property and security to enjoy it.
She will divide with you if you wish it: but the right to enter all, or
divide, I will never surrender. In my judgment this right, involving, as
it does, political equality, is worth a dozen such Unions as we have,
even if each were a thousand times more valuable than this. I speak not
for others, but for myself. Deprive us of this right, and appropriate
this common property to yourselves; it is then your government, not
mine. Then I am its enem