pose it to be the most essential and
important right: so far from it, he undertook to aver that under our
free and popular system it was among the least of all our political
rights. It had been superseded in a great degree by the far higher right
of general suffrage, and by the practice, now so common, of instruction.
There could be no local grievance but what could be reached by these,
except it might be the grievance affecting a minority, which could be no
more redressed by petition than by them. The truth is, that the right of
petition could scarcely be said to be the right _of a freeman_. It
belongs to despotic governments more properly, and might be said to be
the last right of slaves. Who ever heard of petition in the free States
of antiquity? We had borrowed our notions in regard to it from our
British ancestors, with whom it had a value for their imperfect
representation far greater than it has with us; and it is owing to that
that it has a place at all in our Constitution. The truth is, that the
right has been so far superseded in a political point of view, that it
has ceased to be what the Constitution contemplated it to be,--a shield
to protect against wrongs; and has been perverted into a sword to attack
the rights of others--to cause a grievance instead of the means of
redressing grievances, as in the case of abolition petitions. The
Senator from Ohio [Mr. Tappan] has viewed this subject in its proper
light, and has taken a truly patriotic and constitutional stand in
refusing to present these firebrands, for which I heartily thank him in
the name of my State. Had the Senator from Kentucky followed the
example, he would have rendered inestimable service to the country....

It is useless to attempt concealment. The presentation of these
incendiary petitions is itself an infraction of the Constitution. All
acknowledge--the Senator himself--that the property which they are
presented to destroy is guaranteed by the Constitution. Now I ask: If we
have the right under the Constitution to hold the property (which none
question), have we not also the right to hold it under the same sacred
instrument _in peace and quiet_? Is it not a direct infraction then of
the Constitution, to present petitions here in the common council of the
Union, and to us, the agents appointed to carry its provisions into
effect and to guard the rights it secures, the professed aim of which is
to destroy the property guaranteed by the instrum