JAMES DIXON (1814-1873) was a United States Senator who frequently corresponded with President Abraham Lincoln. Dixon was a staunch abolitionist. Known as a brilliant orator, Dixon made many speeches before Congress, including the one offered here “Against The Extension of Slave Territory,” delivered on February 9, 1847, in the U.S. House of Representatives. printed by J. & G.S. Gideon in Washington. 16 pp, 6 ½ x 9 ½, is uncut, pamphlet, printed on one large sheet. James Polk was President when this speech was delivered, just a little over a decade before the Civil War began. At the time, the nation was engaged in the Mexican-American War, which resulted from the annexation of Texas and contributed to the Civil War. Texas was another slave state and the North adamantly opposed its admission to the Union, while the South supported it.
The text of Dixon’s speech, in very small part, includes: “Discussion
of a certain ‘peculiar institution’ is no longer suppressed on this floor, and
it is now too late for gentlemen to alarm us for the safety of the Union,
unless slavery, which even in this Hall, no longer holds despotic sway, shall
be extended to the plains and mountains of Mexico…While by a refusal to extend
the limits of slave territory, our Union cannot be endangered, there is great
cause for alarm in an opposite policy…Enemies are far more dangerous than any
foreign foe are in our midst. They are laboring to subvert the foundations of our
free institutions; they are swelling the already gigantic power of the Executive;
they are perverting the strength of the Republic to the vile purpose of
extending and perpetuating slavery, and this burying the nation in guilt, which
years of punishment cannot expiate. I
cannot look upon their attempts in silence…”
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