repeal or modification of the Fugitive Slave law. I meant not to ask for
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. I meant not to
resist the admission of Utah and New Mexico, even should they ask to come
in as slave States. I meant nothing about additional Territories,
because, as I understood, we then had no Territory whose character as to
slavery was not already settled. As to Nebraska, I regarded its character
as being fixed by the Missouri Compromise for thirty years--as
unalterably fixed as that of my own home in Illinois. As to new
acquisitions, I said, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." When
we make new acquisitions, we will, as heretofore, try to manage them
somehow. That is my answer; that is what I meant and said; and I appeal
to the people to say each for himself whether that is not also the
universal meaning of the free States.

And now, in turn, let me ask a few questions. If, by any or all these
matters, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was commanded, why was not
the command sooner obeyed? Why was the repeal omitted in the Nebraska
Bill of 1853? Why was it omitted in the original bill of 1854? Why in the
accompanying report was such a repeal characterized as a departure from
the course pursued in 1850 and its continued omission recommended?

I am aware Judge Douglas now argues that the subsequent express repeal is
no substantial alteration of the bill. This argument seems wonderful to
me. It is as if one should argue that white and black are not different.
He admits, however, that there is a literal change in the bill, and that
he made the change in deference to other senators who would not support
the bill without. This proves that those other senators thought the
change a substantial one, and that the Judge thought their opinions worth
deferring to. His own opinions, therefore, seem not to rest on a very
firm basis, even in his own mind; and I suppose the world believes, and
will continue to believe, that precisely on the substance of that change
this whole agitation has arisen.

I conclude, then, that the public never demanded the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise.

I now come to consider whether the appeal with its avowed principles, is
intrinsically right. I insist that it is not. Take the particular case. A
controversy had arisen between the advocates and opponents of slavery, in
relation to its establishment within the country we had purchased of
France. The southern, and then best, part of the purchase was already in
as a slave State. The controversy was settled by also letting Missouri in
as a slave State; but with the agreement that within all the remaining
part of the purchase, north of a certain line, there should never be
slavery. As to what was to be done with the remaining part, south of the
line, nothing was said; but perhaps the fair implication was, it should
come in with slavery if it should so choose. The southern part, except a
portion heretofore mentioned, afterward did come in with slavery, as the
State of Arkansas. All these many years, since 1820, the northern part
had remained a wilderness. At length settlements began in it also. In due
course Iowa came in as a free State, and Minnesota was given a
territorial government, without removing the slavery restriction.
Finally, the sole remaining part north of the line--Kansas and
Nebraska--was to be organized; and it is proposed, and carried, to blot
out the old dividing line of thirty-four years' standing, and to open the
whole of that country to the introduction of slavery. Now this, to my
mind, is manifestly unjust. After an angry and dangerous controversy, the
parties made friends by dividing the bone of contention. The one party
first appropriates her own share, beyond all power to be disturbed in the
possession of it, and then seizes the share of the other party. It is as
if two starving men had divided their only loaf, the one had hastily
swallowed his half, and then grabbed the other's half just as he was
putting it to his mouth.

Let me here drop the main argument, to notice what I consider rather an
inferior matter. It is argued that slavery will not go to Kansas and
Nebraska, in any event. This is a palliation, a lullaby. I have some hope
that it will not; but let us not be too confident. As to climate, a
glance at the map shows that there are five slave States--Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and also the District of
Columbia, all north of the Missouri Compromise line. The census returns
of 1850 show that within these there are eight hundred and sixty-seven
thousand two hundred and seventy-six slaves, being more than one fourth
of all the slaves in the nation.

It is not climate, then, that will keep slavery out of these Territories.
Is there anything in the peculiar nature of the country? Missouri adjoins
these Territories by her entire western boundary, and slavery is already
within every one of her western counties. I have even heard it said that
there are more slaves in proportion to whites in the northwestern county
of Missouri than within any other county in the State. Slavery pressed
entirely up to the old western boundary of the State, and when rather
recently a part of that boundary at the northwest was moved out a little
farther west, slavery followed on quite up to the new line. Now, when the
restriction is removed, what is to prevent it from going still farther?
Climate will not, no peculiarity of the country will, nothing in nature
will. Will the disposition of the people prevent it? Those nearest the
scene are all in favor of the extension. The Yankees who are opposed to
it may be most flumerous; but, in military phrase, the battlefield is too
far from their base of operations.

But it is said there now is no law in Nebraska on the subject of slavery,
and that, in such case, taking a slave there operates his freedom. That
is good book-law, but it is not the rule of actual practice. Wherever
slavery is it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we
find concerning it are not laws introducing it, but regulating it as an
already existing thing. A white man takes his slave to Nebraska now. Who
will inform the negro that he is free? Who will take him before court to
test the question of his freedom? In ignorance of his legal emancipation
he is kept chopping, splitting, and plowing. Others are brought, and move
on in the same track. At last, if ever the time for voting comes on the
question of slavery the institution already, in fact, exists in the
country, and cannot well be removed. The fact of its presence, and the
difficulty of its removal, will carry the vote in its favor. Keep it out
until a vote is taken, and a vote in favor of it cannot be got in any
population of forty thousand on earth, who have been drawn together by
the ordinary motives of emigration and settlement. To get slaves into the
Territory simultaneously with the whites in the incipient stages of
settlement is the precise stake played for and won in this Nebraska
measure.

The question is asked us: "If slaves will go in notwithstanding the
general principle of law liberates them, why would they not equally go in
against positive statute law--go in, even if the Missouri restriction
were maintained!" I answer, because it takes a much bolder man to venture
in with his property in the latter case than in the former; because the
positive Congressional enactment is known to and respected by all, or
nearly all, whereas the negative principle that no law is free law is not
much known except among lawyers. We have some experience of this
practical difference. In spite of the Ordinance of '87, a few negroes
were brought into Illinois, and held in a state of quasi-slavery, not
enough, however, to carry a vote of the people in favor of the
institution when they came to form a constitution. But into the adjoining
Missouri country, where there was no Ordinance of '87,--was no
restriction,--they were carried ten times, nay, a hundred times, as fast,
and actually made a slave State. This is fact-naked fact.

Another lullaby argument is that taking slaves to new countries does not
increase their number, does not make any one slave who would otherwise be
free. There is some truth in this, and I am glad of it; but it is not
wholly true. The African slave trade is not yet effectually suppressed;
and, if we make a reasonable deduction for the white people among us who
are foreigners and the descendants of foreigners arriving here since
1808, we shall find the increase of the black population outrunning that
of the white to an extent unaccountable, except by supposing that some of
them, too, have been coming from Africa. If this be so, the opening of
new countries to the institution increases the demand for and augments
the price of slaves, and so does, in fact, make slaves of freemen, by
causing them to be brought from Africa and sold into bondage.

But however this may be, we know the opening of new countries to slavery
tends to the perpetuation of the institution, and so does keep men in
slavery who would otherwise be free. This result we do not feel like
favoring, and we are under no legal obligation to suppress our feelings
in this respect.

Equal justice to the South, it is said, requires us to consent to the
extension of slavery to new countries. That is to say, inasmuch as you do
not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object
to your taking your slave. Now, I admit that this is perfectly logical if
there is no difference between hogs and negroes. But while you thus
require me to deny the humanity of the negro, I wish to ask whether you
of the South, yourselves, have ever been willing to do as much? It is
kindly provided that of all those who come into the world only a small
percentage are natural tyrants. That percentage is no larger in the slave
States than in the free. The great majority South, as well as North, have
human sympathies, of which they can no more divest themselves than they
can of their sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms
of the Southern people manifest, in many ways, their sense of the wrong
of slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in
the negro. If they deny this, let me address them a few plain questions.
In 1820 you (the South) joined the North, almost unanimously, in
declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the
punishment of death. Why did you do this? If you did not feel that it was
wrong, why did you join in providing that men should be hung for it? The
practice was no more than bringing wild negroes from Africa to such as
would buy them. But you never thought of hanging men for catching and
selling wild horses, wild buffaloes, or wild bears.

Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native
tyrants known as the "slavedealer." He watches your necessities, and
crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help
it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your
door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or
even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may
rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's
children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the
job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands
with the men you meet, but with the slave-dealer you avoid the
ceremony--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows
rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up
the ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now, why is this? You
do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cotton, or tobacco.

And yet again: There are in the United States and Territories, including
the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks. At five hundred dollars
per head they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars. How comes
this vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do
not see free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this? All
these free blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves
themselves; and they would be slaves now but for something which has
operated on their white owners, inducing them at vast pecuniary sacrifice
to liberate them. What is that something? Is there any mistaking it? In
all these cases it is your sense of justice and human sympathy
continually telling you that the poor negro has some natural right to
himself--that those who deny it and make mere merchandise of him deserve
kickings, contempt, and death.

And now why will you ask us to deny the humanity of the slave, and
estimate him as only the equal of the hog? Why ask us to do what you will
not do yourselves? Why ask us to do for nothing what two hundred millions
of dollars could not induce you to do?

But one great argument in support of the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise is still to come. That argument is "the sacred right of
self-government." It seems our distinguished Senator has found great
difficulty in getting his antagonists, even in the Senate, to meet him
fairly on this argument. Some poet has said:

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

At the hazard of being thought one of the fools of this quotation, I meet
that argument--I rush in--I take that bull by the horns. I trust I
understand and truly estimate the right of self-government. My faith in
the proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all
which is exclusively his own lies at the foundation of the sense of
justice there is in me. I extend the principle to communities of men as
well as to individuals. I so extend it because it is politically wise, as
well as naturally just; politically wise in saving us from broils about
matters which do not concern us. Here, or at Washington, I would not
trouble myself with the oyster laws of Virginia, or the cranberry laws of
Indiana. The doctrine of self-government is right,--absolutely and
eternally right,--but it has no just application as here attempted. Or
perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends
upon whether a negro is or is not a man. If he is not a man, in that case
he who is a man may as a matter of self-government do just what he
pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent a
total destruction of self-government to say that he too shall not govern
himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but
when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than
self-government--that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why, then, my
ancient faith teaches me that "all men are created equal," and that there
can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of
another.

Judge Douglas frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm, paraphrases our
argument by saying: "The white people of Nebraska are good enough to
govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable
negroes!"

Well, I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are and will continue to be
as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary.
What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without
that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle, the
sheet-anchor of American republicanism. Our Declaration of Independence
says:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to
secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, DERIVING THEIR
JUST POWERS PROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED."

I have quoted so much at this time merely to show that, according to our
ancient faith, the just powers of government are derived from the consent
of the governed. Now the relation of master and slave is pro tanto a
total violation of this principle. The master not only governs the slave
without his consent, but he governs him by a set of rules altogether
different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow all the
governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is
self-government.

Let it not be said that I am contending for the establishment of
political and social equality between the whites and blacks. I have
already said the contrary. I am not combating the argument of necessity,
arising from the fact that the blacks are already among us; but I am
combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken
where they have never yet been--arguing against the extension of a bad
thing, which, where it already exists, we must of necessity manage as we
best can.

In support of his application of the doctrine of self-government, Senator
Douglas has sought to bring to his aid the opinions and examples of our
Revolutionary fathers. I am glad he has done this. I love the sentiments
of those old-time men, and shall be most happy to abide by their
opinions. He shows us that when it was in contemplation for the colonies
to break off from Great Britain, and set up a new government for
themselves, several of the States instructed their delegates to go for
the measure, provided each State should be allowed to regulate its
domestic concerns in its own way. I do not quote; but this in substance.
This was right; I see nothing objectionable in it. I also think it
probable that it had some reference to the existence of slavery among
them. I will not deny that it had. But had it any reference to the
carrying of slavery into new countries? That is the question, and we will
let the fathers themselves answer it.

This same generation of men, and mostly the same individuals of the
generation who declared this principle, who declared independence, who
fought the war of the Revolution through, who afterward made the
Constitution under which we still live--these same men passed the
Ordinance of '87, declaring that slavery should never go to the Northwest
Territory.

I have no doubt Judge Douglas thinks they were very inconsistent in this.
It is a question of discrimination between them and him. But there is not
an inch of ground left for his claiming that their opinions, their
example, their authority, are on his side in the controversy.

Again, is not Nebraska, while a Territory, a part of us? Do we not own
the country? And if we surrender the control of it, do we not surrender
the right of self-government? It is part of ourselves. If you say we
shall not control it, because it is only part, the same is true of every
other part; and when all the parts are gone, what has become of the
whole? What is then left of us? What use for the General Government, when
there is nothing left for it to govern?

But you say this question should be left to the people of Nebraska,
because they are more particularly interested. If this be the rule, you
must leave it to each individual to say for himself whether he will have
slaves. What better moral right have thirty-one citizens of Nebraska to
say that the thirty-second shall not hold slaves than the people of the
thirty-one States have to say that slavery shall not go into the
thirty-second State at all?

But if it is a sacred right for the people of Nebraska to take and hold
slaves there, it is equally their sacred right to buy them where they can
buy them cheapest; and that, undoubtedly, will be on the coast of Africa,
provided you will consent not to hang them for going there to buy them.
You must remove this restriction, too, from the sacred right of
self-government. I am aware you say that taking slaves from the States to
Nebraska does not make slaves of freemen; but the African slave-trader
can say just as much. He does not catch free negroes and bring them here.
He finds them already slaves in the hands of their black captors, and he
honestly buys them at the rate of a red cotton handkerchief a head. This
is very cheap, and it is a great abridgment of the sacred right of
self-government to hang men for engaging in this profitable trade.

Another important objection to this application of the right of
self-government is that it enables the first few to deprive the
succeeding many of a free exercise of the right of self-government. The
first few may get slavery in, and the subsequent many cannot easily get
it out. How common is the remark now in the slave States, "If we were
only clear of our slaves, how much better it would be for us." They are
actually deprived of the privilege of governing themselves as they would,
by the action of a very few in the beginning. The same thing was true of
the whole nation at the time our Constitution was formed.

Whether slavery shall go into Nebraska, or other new Territories, is not
a matter of exclusive concern to the people who may go there. The whole
nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these
Territories. We want them for homes of free white people. This they
cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within
them. Slave States are places for poor white people to remove from, not
to remove to. New free States are the places for poor people to go to,
and better their condition. For this use the nation needs these
Territories.

Still further: there are constitutional relations between the slave and
free States which are degrading to the latter. We are under legal
obligations to catch and return their runaway slaves to them: a sort of
dirty, disagreeable job, which, I believe, as a general rule, the
slaveholders will not perform for one another. Then again, in the control
of the government--the management of the partnership affairs--they have
greatly the advantage of us. By the Constitution each State has two
senators, each has a number of representatives in proportion to the
number of its people, and each has a number of Presidential electors
equal to the whole number of its senators and representatives together.
But in ascertaining the number of the people for this purpose, five
slaves are counted as being equal to three whites. The slaves do not
vote; they are only counted and so used as to swell the influence of the
white people's votes. The practical effect of this is more aptly shown by
a comparison of the States of South Carolina and Maine. South Carolina
has six representatives, and so has Maine; South Carolina has eight
Presidential electors, and so has Maine. This is precise equality so far;
and of course they are equal in senators, each having two. Thus in the
control of the government the two States are equals precisely. But how
are they in the number of their white people? Maine has 581,813, while
South Carolina has 274,567; Maine has twice as many as South Carolina,
and 32,679 over. Thus, each white man in South Carolina is more than the
double of any man in Maine. This is all because South Carolina, besides
her free people, has 384,984 slaves. The South Carolinian has precisely
the same advantage over the white man in every other free State as well
as in Maine. He is more than the double of any one of us in this crowd.
The same advantage, but not to the same extent, is held by all the
citizens of the slave States over those of the free; and it is an
absolute truth, without an exception, that there is no voter in any slave
State but who has more legal power in the government than any voter in
any free State. There is no instance of exact equality; and the
disadvantage is against us the whole chapter through. This principle, in
the aggregate, gives the slave States in the present Congress twenty
additional representatives, being seven more than the whole majority by
which they passed the Nebraska Bill.

Now all this is manifestly unfair; yet I do not mention it to complain of
it, in so far as it is already settled. It is in the Constitution, and I
do not for that cause, or any other cause, propose to destroy, or alter,
or disregard the Constitution. I stand to it, fairly, fully, and firmly.

But when I am told I must leave it altogether to other people to say
whether new partners are to be bred up and brought into the firm, on the
same degrading terms against me, I respectfully demur. I insist that
whether I shall be a whole man or only the half of one, in comparison
with others is a question in which I am somewhat concerned, and one which
no other man can have a sacred right of deciding for me. If I am wrong in
this, if it really be a sacred right of self-government in the man who
shall go to Nebraska to decide whether he will be the equal of me or the
double of me, then, after he shall have exercised that right, and thereby
shall have reduced me to a still smaller fraction of a man than I already
am, I should like for some gentleman, deeply skilled in the mysteries of
sacred rights, to provide himself with a microscope, and peep about, and
find out, if he can, what has become of my sacred rights. They will
surely be too small for detection with the naked eye.

Finally, I insist that if there is anything which it is the duty of the
whole people to never intrust to any hands but their own, that thing is
the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions.
And if they shall think as I do, that the extension of slavery endangers
them more than any or all other causes, how recreant to themselves if
they submit The question, and with it the fate of their country, to a
mere handful of men bent only on seif-interest. If this question of
slavery extension were an insignificant one, one having no power to do
harm--it might be shuffled aside in this way; and being, as it is, the
great Behemoth of danger, shall the strong grip of the nation be loosened
upon him, to intrust him to the hands of such feeble keepers?

I have done with this mighty argument of self-government. Go, sacred
thing! Go in peace.

But Nebraska is urged as a great Union-saving measure. Well, I too go for
saving the Union. Much as I hate slavery, I would consent to the
extension of it rather than see the Union dissolved, just as I would
consent to any great evil to avoid a greater one. But when I go to
Union-saving, I must believe, at least, that the means I employ have some
adaptation to the end. To my mind, Nebraska has no such adaptation.

"It hath no relish of salvation in it."

It is an aggravation, rather, of the only one thing which ever endangers
the Union. When it came upon us, all was peace and quiet. The nation was
looking to the forming of new bends of union, and a long course of peace
and prosperity seemed to lie before us. In the whole range of
possibility, there scarcely appears to me to have been anything out of
which the slavery agitation could have been revived, except the very
project of repealing the Missouri Compromise. Every inch of territory we
owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question, by which
all parties were pledged to abide. Indeed, there was no uninhabited
country on the continent which we could acquire, if we except some
extreme northern regions which are wholly out of the question.

In this state of affairs the Genius of Discord himself could scarcely
have invented a way of again setting us by the ears but by turning back
and destroying the peace measures of the past. The counsels of that
Genius seem to have prevailed. The Missouri Compromise was repealed; and
here we are in the midst of a new slavery agitation, such, I think, as we
have never seen before. Who is responsible for this? Is it those who
resist the measure, or those who causelessly brought it forward, and
pressed it through, having reason to know, and in fact knowing, it must
and would be so resisted? It could not but be expected by its author that
it would be looked upon as a measure for the extension of slavery,
aggravated by a gross breach of faith.

Argue as you will and long as you will, this is the naked front and
aspect of the measure. And in this aspect it could not but produce
agitation. Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's
nature--opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are at
eternal antagonism, and when brought into collision so fiercely as
slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must
ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all
compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past
history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It still will be the
abundance of man's heart that slavery extension is wrong, and out of the
abundance of his heart his mouth will continue to speak.

The structure, too, of the Nebraska Bill is very peculiar. The people are
to decide the question of slavery for themselves; but when they are to
decide, or how they are to decide, or whether, when the question is once
decided, it is to remain so or is to be subject to an indefinite
succession of new trials, the law does not say. Is it to be decided by
the first dozen settlers who arrive there, or is it to await the arrival
of a hundred? Is it to be decided by a vote of the people or a vote of
the Legislature, or, indeed, by a vote of any sort? To these questions
the law gives no answer. There is a mystery about this; for when a member
proposed to give the Legislature express authority to exclude slavery, it
was hooted down by the friends of the bill. This fact is worth
remembering. Some Yankees in the East are sending emigrants to Nebraska
to exclude slavery from it; and, so far as I can judge, they expect the
question to be decided by voting in some way or other. But the
Missourians are awake, too. They are within a stone's-throw of the
contested ground. They hold meetings and pass resolutions, in which not
the slightest allusion to voting is made. They resolve that slavery
already exists in the Territory; that more shall go there; that they,
remaining in Missouri, will protect it, and that abolitionists shall be
hung or driven away. Through all this bowie knives and six-shooters are
seen plainly enough, but never a glimpse of the ballot-box.

And, really, what is the result of all this? Each party within having
numerous and determined backers without, is it not probable that the
contest will come to blows and bloodshed? Could there be a more apt
invention to bring about collision and violence on the slavery question
than this Nebraska project is? I do not charge or believe that such was
intended by Congress; but if they had literally formed a ring and placed
champions within it to fight out the controversy, the fight could be no
more likely to come off than it is. And if this fight should begin, is it
likely to take a very peaceful, Union-saving turn? Will not the first
drop of blood so shed be the real knell of the Union?

The Missouri Compromise ought to be restored. For the sake of the Union,
it ought to be restored. We ought to elect a House of Representatives
which will vote its restoration. If by any means we omit to do this, what
follows? Slavery may or may not be established in Nebraska. But whether
it be or not, we shall have repudiated--discarded from the councils of
the nation--the spirit of compromise; for who, after this, will ever
trust in a national compromise? The spirit of mutual concession--that
spirit which first gave us the Constitution, and which has thrice saved
the Union--we shall have strangled and cast from us forever. And what
shall we have in lieu of it? The South flushed with triumph and tempted
to excess; the North, betrayed as they believe, brooding on wrong and
burning for revenge. One side will provoke, the other resent. The one
will taunt, the other defy; one aggresses, the other retaliates. Already
a few in the North defy all constitutional restraints, resist the
execution of the Fugitive Slave law, and even menace the institution of
slavery in the States where it exists. Already a few in the South claim
the constitutional right to take and to hold slaves in the free States,
demand the revival of the slave trade, and demand a treaty with Great
Britain by which fugitive slaves may be reclaimed from Canada. As yet
they are but few on either side. It is a grave question for lovers of the
union whether the final destruction of the Missouri Compromise, and with
it the spirit of all compromise, will or will not embolden and embitter
each of these, and fatally increase the number of both.

But restore the compromise, and what then? We thereby restore the
national faith, the national confidence, the national feeling of
brotherhood. We thereby reinstate the spirit of concession and
compromise, that spirit which has never failed us in past perils, and
which may be safely trusted for all the future. The South ought to join
in doing this. The peace of the nation is as dear to them as to us. In
memories of the past and hopes of the future, they share as largely as
we. It would be on their part a great act--great in its spirit, and great
in its effect. It would be worth to the nation a hundred years purchase
of peace and prosperity. And what of sacrifice would they make? They only
surrender to us what they gave us for a consideration long, long ago;
what they have not now asked for, struggled or cared for; what has been
thrust upon them, not less to their astonishment than to ours.

But it is said we cannot restore it; that though we elect every member of
the lower House, the Senate is still against us. It is quite true that of
the senators who passed the Nebraska Bill a majority of the whole Senate
will retain their seats in spite of the elections of this and the next
year. But if at these elections their several constituencies shall
clearly express their will against Nebraska, will these senators
disregard their will? Will they neither obey nor make room for those who
will?

But even if we fail to technically restore the compromise, it is still a
great point to carry a popular vote in favor of the restoration. The
moral weight of such a vote cannot be estimated too highly. The authors
of Nebraska are not at all satisfied with the destruction of the
compromise--an indorsement of this principle they proclaim to be the
great object. With them, Nebraska alone is a small matter--to establish a
principle for future use is what they particularly desire.

The future use is to be the planting of slavery wherever in the wide
world local and unorganized opposition cannot prevent it. Now, if you
wish to give them this indorsement, if you wish to establish this
principle, do so. I shall regret it, but it is your right. On the
contrary, if you are opposed to the principle,--intend to give it no such
indorsement, let no wheedling, no sophistry, divert you from throwing a
direct vote against it.

Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration, lest they be
thrown in company with the abolitionists. Will they allow me, as an old
Whig, to tell them, good-humoredly, that I think this is very silly?
Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right,
and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand with the abolitionist in
restoring the Missouri Compromise, and stand against him when he attempts
to repeal the Fugitive Slave law. In the latter case you stand with the
Southern disunionist. What of that? You are still right. In both cases
you are right. In both cases you oppose the dangerous extremes. In both
you stand on middle ground, and hold the ship level and steady. In both
you are national, and nothing less than national. This is the good old
Whig ground. To desert such ground because of any company is to be less
than a Whig--less than a man--less than an American.

I particularly object to the new position which the avowed principle of
this Nebraska law gives to slavery in the body politic. I object to it
because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one
man by another. I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for a free
people--a sad evidence that, feeling prosperity, we forget right; that
liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere. I object to it because
the fathers of the republic eschewed and rejected it. The argument of
"necessity" was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery;
and so far, and so far only, as it carried them did they ever go. They
found the institution existing among us, which they could not help, and
they cast blame upon the British king for having permitted its
introduction.

The royally appointed Governor of Georgia in the early 1700's was
threatened by the King with removal if he continued to oppose slavery in
his colony--at that time the King of England made a small profit on every
slave imported to the colonies. The later British criticism of the United
States for not eradicating slavery in the early 1800's, combined with
their tacit support of the 'Confederacy' during the Civil War is a prime
example of the irony and hypocrisy of politics: that self-interest will
ever overpower right.

Before the Constitution they prohibited its introduction into the
Northwestern Territory, the only country we owned then free from it. At
the framing and adoption of the Constitution, they forbore to so much as
mention the word "slave" or "slavery" in the whole instrument. In the
provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a
"person held to service or labor." In that prohibiting the abolition of
the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as "the
migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now
existing shall think proper to admit," etc. These are the only provisions
alluding to slavery. Thus the thing is hid away in the Constitution, just
as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer which he dares not cut out
at once, lest he bleed to death,--with the promise, nevertheless, that
the cutting may begin at a certain time. Less than this our fathers could
not do, and more they would not do. Necessity drove them so far, and
farther they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress
under the Constitution took the same view of slavery. They hedged and
hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794 they prohibited an outgoing slave trade--that is, the taking of
slaves from the United States to sell. In 1798 they prohibited the
bringing of slaves from Africa into the Mississippi Territory, this
Territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and
Alabama. This was ten years before they had the authority to do the same
thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the Constitution. In
1800 they prohibited American citizens from trading in slaves between
foreign countries, as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they
passed a law in aid of one or two slave-State laws in restraint of the
internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the
law, nearly a year in advance,--to take effect the first day of 1808, the
very first day the Constitution would permit, prohibiting the African
slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties. In 1820, finding
these provisions ineffectual, they declared the slave trade piracy, and
annexed to it the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in
the General Government, five or six of the original slave States had
adopted systems of gradual emancipation, by which the institution was
rapidly becoming extinct within their limits. Thus we see that the plain,
unmistakable spirit of that age toward slavery was hostility to the
principle and toleration only by necessity.

But now it is to be transformed into a "sacred right." Nebraska brings it
forth, places it on the highroad to extension and perpetuity, and with a
pat on its back says to it, "Go, and God speed you." Henceforth it is to
be the chief jewel of the nation the very figure-head of the ship of
state. Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we
have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we
began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that
beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to
enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles
cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and who
ever holds to the one must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection
with his support of the Nebraska Bill, called the Declaration of
Independence "a self-evident lie," he only did what consistency and
candor require all other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty-odd Nebraska
senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I
apprised that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the
whole nation has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among
Marion's men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the
man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured Andre, the
man who said it would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If
it had been said in old Independence Hall seventy-eight years ago, the
very doorkeeper would have throttled the man and thrust him into the
street. Let no one be deceived. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit
of Nebraska are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly
displaced by the latter.

Fellow-countrymen, Americans, South as well as North, shall we make no
effort to arrest this? Already the liberal party throughout the world
express the apprehension that "the one retrograde institution in America
is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the
noblest political system the world ever saw." This is not the taunt of
enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it--to
despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself in discarding the
earliest practice and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy
chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware lest we "cancel and tear
in pieces" even the white man's charter of freedom.

Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify
it. Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit, if not the blood, of the
Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of "moral right," back
upon its existing legal rights and its arguments of "necessity." Let us
return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in
peace. Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the
practices and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South, let
all Americans--let all lovers of liberty everywhere join in the great and
good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but we
shall have so saved it as to make and to keep it forever worthy of the
saving. We shall have so saved it that the succeeding millions of free
happy people the world over shall rise up and call us blessed to the
latest generations.

At Springfield, twelve days ago, where I had spoken substantially as I
have here, Judge Douglas replied to me; and as he is to reply to me here,
I shall attempt to anticipate him by noticing some of the points he made
there. He commenced by stating I had assumed all the way through that the
principle of the Nebraska Bill would have the effect of extending
slavery. He denied that this was intended or that this effect would
follow.

I will not reopen the argument upon this point. That such was the
intention the world believed at the start, and will continue to believe.
This was the countenance of the thing, and both friends and enemies
instantly recognized it as such. That countenance cannot now be changed
by argument. You can as easily argue the color out of the negro's skin.
Like the "bloody hand," you may wash it and wash it, the red witness of
guilt still sticks and stares horribly at you.

Next he says that Congressional intervention never prevented slavery
anywhere; that it did not prevent it in the Northwestern Territory, nor
in Illinois; that, in fact, Illinois came into the Union as a slave
State; that the principle of the Nebraska Bill expelled it from Illinois,
from several old States, from everywhere.

Now this is mere quibbling all the way through. If the Ordinance of '87
did not keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory, how happens it that
the northwest shore of the Ohio River is entirely free from it, while the
southeast shore, less than a mile distant, along nearly the whole length
of the river, is entirely covered with it?

If that ordinance did not keep it out of Illinois, what was it that made
the difference between Illinois and Missouri? They lie side by side, the
Mississippi River only dividing them, while their early settlements were
within the same latitude. Between 1810 and 1820 the number of slaves in
Missouri increased 7211, while in Illinois in the same ten years they
decreased 51. This appears by the census returns. During nearly all of
that ten years both were Territories, not States. During this time the
ordinance forbade slavery to go into Illinois, and nothing forbade it to
go into Missouri. It did go into Missouri, and did not go into Illinois.
That is the fact. Can any one doubt as to the reason of it? But he says
Illinois came into the Union as a slave State. Silence, perhaps, would be
the best answer to this flat contradiction of the known history of the
country. What are the facts upon which this bold assertion is based? When
we first acquired the country, as far back as 1787, there were some
slaves within it held by the French inhabitants of Kaskaskia. The
territorial legislation admitted a few negroes from the slave States as
indentured servants. One year after the adoption of the first State
constitution, the whole number of them was--what do you think? Just one
hundred and seventeen, while the aggregate free population was
55,094,--about four hundred and seventy to one. Upon this state of facts
the people framed their constitution prohibiting the further introduction
of slavery, with a sort of guaranty to the owners of the few indentured
servants, giving freedom to their children to be born thereafter, and
making no mention whatever of any supposed slave for life. Out of this
small matter the Judge manufactures his argument that Illinois came into
the Union as a slave State. Let the facts be the answer to the argument.