"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"
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Cushing’s sentence is a scalpel aimed at a familiar dodge: if lawmakers admit they might have authority over slavery in Washington, D.C., they cannot pretend the issue is too improper to even discuss. The line is built as a conditional trap. “If there be any plausible reason” sounds modest, almost legalistic, but it’s really a set of handcuffs: concede the smallest jurisdictional foothold and you’ve conceded the duty to hear the public.
The target is Congress’s gag-rule mentality in the 1830s and 1840s, when antislavery petitions were tabled or refused outright to smother debate. Cushing, a diplomat by trade and a lawyer by temperament, treats petitioning not as sentimental activism but as constitutional procedure. He’s not immediately demanding abolition; he’s insisting on the legitimacy of inquiry. That’s the point: make suppression look lawless before arguing the substance. By framing the stakes as “investigation,” he gives antislavery agitation the respectable clothes of governance, not moral panic.
The phrase “out of doors” is doing quiet cultural work. It evokes the fear of politics spilling into the street - mobs, pamphleteers, public meetings. Cushing’s message is that you don’t keep controversy outside by banning it inside; you radicalize it. Refusing petitions doesn’t erase the question of slavery in the capital; it relocates it into a more volatile arena where Congress has less control and more to lose.
In an era when “order” was often code for protecting slavery’s comfort, Cushing leverages institutional etiquette as a weapon against institutional silence.
The target is Congress’s gag-rule mentality in the 1830s and 1840s, when antislavery petitions were tabled or refused outright to smother debate. Cushing, a diplomat by trade and a lawyer by temperament, treats petitioning not as sentimental activism but as constitutional procedure. He’s not immediately demanding abolition; he’s insisting on the legitimacy of inquiry. That’s the point: make suppression look lawless before arguing the substance. By framing the stakes as “investigation,” he gives antislavery agitation the respectable clothes of governance, not moral panic.
The phrase “out of doors” is doing quiet cultural work. It evokes the fear of politics spilling into the street - mobs, pamphleteers, public meetings. Cushing’s message is that you don’t keep controversy outside by banning it inside; you radicalize it. Refusing petitions doesn’t erase the question of slavery in the capital; it relocates it into a more volatile arena where Congress has less control and more to lose.
In an era when “order” was often code for protecting slavery’s comfort, Cushing leverages institutional etiquette as a weapon against institutional silence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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