the immortal Declaration "a self-evident lie"; while at the birth-place of freedom in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the "cradle of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis Choate,1 from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a string of glittering generalities"; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with pro-slavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories practical. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element in slavery, solemnly declared that he "trembled for his country when he remembered that God is just"; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant wave of the hand, "don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down." Now, if slavery is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in this trifling manner.

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But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all Christendom considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt to spread and fortify it? [Applause.]

9. But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a negative, or merely neutral,

Senate from Indiana, 1853-1855; in 1859 he was appointed by President Buchanan Chief Justice of Kansas. Benton (1782-1858) of Missouri was a prominent Democratic statesman who opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill; however, he supported Buchanan for the presidency in 1856 against his own son-in-law, Frémont, the Republican candidate.

1 Rufus Choate (1799-1859), the United States Senator from Massachusetts, 1841-1845, opposed the annexation of Texas but supported Buchanan in 1856.

2 This was the attitude of Senator Douglas. His indifference toward the moral question involved in the slavery issue was attacked by Lincoln in the joint debates of 1858.

position on this question; and, accordingly, he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their descendants. As a matter of fact, the first branch of the proposition is historically true; the government was made by white men, and they were and are the superior race. This I admit. But the corner-stone of the government, so to speak, was the declaration that "all men are created equal," and all entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." [Applause.]

10. And not only so, but the framers of the Constitution were particular to keep out of that instrument the word "slave," the reason being that slavery would ultimately come to an end, and they did not wish to have any reminder that in this free country human beings were ever prostituted to slavery. [Applause.] Nor is it any argument that we are superior and the negro inferior that he has but one talent while we have ten. Let the negro possess the little he has in independence; if he has but one talent, he should be permitted to keep the little he has. [Applause.] But slavery will endure no test of reason or logic; and yet its advocates, like Douglas, use a sort of bastard logic, or noisy assumption, it might better be termed, like the above, in order to prepare the mind for the gradual, but none the less certain, encroachments of the Moloch 1 of slavery upon the fair domain of freedom. But however much you may argue upon it, or smother it in soft phrases, slavery can only be maintained by force.

1 A Canaanite idol to which children were sacrificed.

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-by violence. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise was by violence. It was a violation of both law and the sacred obligations of honor, to overthrow and trample underfoot a solemn compromise, obtained by the fearful loss to freedom of one of the fairest of our Western domains.1 Congress violated the will and confidence of its constituents in voting for the bill; and while public sentiment, as shown by the elections of 1854,2 demanded the restoration of this compromise, Congress violated its trust by refusing, simply because it had the force of numbers to hold on to it. And murderous violence is being used now, in order to force slavery on to Kansas; for it cannot be done in any other way. [Sensation.]

11. The necessary result was to establish the rule of violence force, instead of the rule of law and reason; to perpetuate and spread slavery, and, in time, to make it general. We see it at both ends of the line. In Washington, on the very spot where the outrage was started, the fearless Sumner is beaten to insensibility,

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1 Missouri, which, in accordance with the Compromise of 1820, entered the Union as a slave State.

2 Lincoln's interpretation of such elections as those held in Connecticut in April, 1864, when the Democrats failed to elect the State Legislature and the governor.

3 Charles Sumner (1811-1874) made his first anti-slavery speech In Faneuil Hall, Boston, on November 4, 1845; opposed the Mexican War; helped to organize the Free Soil Party in Massachusetts in 1848; was elected to the United States Senate by Free Soilers and Democrats in January, 1851; made a speech on "Freedom National, Slavery Sectional' on August 20, 1852; opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854. On May 19-20, 1856, he made his famous "Crime against Kansas" speech. Two days later Representative Preston Smith Brooks of South Carolina brutally beat him into

and is now slowly dying; while senators who claim to be gentlemen and Christians stood by, countenancing the act, and even applauding it afterward in their places in the Senate. Even Douglas, our man, saw it all and was within helping distance, yet let the murderous blows fall unopposed. Then, at the other end of the line, at the very time Sumner was being murdered, Lawrence was being destroyed for the crime of Freedom. It was the most prominent stronghold of liberty in Kansas, and must give way to the all-dominating power of slavery. Only two days ago, Judge Trumbull found it necessary to propose a bill in the Senate to prevent a general civil war and to restore peace in Kansas.

12. We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read. Are we in a healthful political state? Are not the tendencies plain? Do not the signs of the times point plainly the ways in which we are going? [Sensation.]

13. In the early days of the Constitution slavery was recognized, by South and North alike, as an evil, and

unconsciousness while he was sitting at his desk in the Senate. The House did not expel Brooks; he resigned and was unanimously reelected. As a result of his injuries, Sumner was absent from his seat in the Senate for nearly four years. During the Civil War he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs.

1 United States Senator from Illinois, chosen in 1855 by the State Legislature. He was elected on the tenth ballot, though on the first ballot the vote stood: Lincoln 44, Shields (Democrat) 41, Trumbull (Anti-Nebraska) 5. Previously Trumbull had been a member of the Democratic Party. See also the first Lincoln-Douglas Debate.

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the division of sentiment about it was not controlled by geographical lines or considerations of climate, but by moral and philanthropic views. Petitions for the abolition of slavery were presented to the very first Congress by Virginia and Massachusetts alike.1 To show the harmony which prevailed, I will state that a fugitive-slave law was passed in 1793,2 with no dissenting voice in the Senate, and but seven dissenting votes in the House. It was, however, a wise law, moderate, and, under the Constitution, a just one. Twenty-five years later, a more stringent law was proposed and defeated; and thirty-five years after that, the present law, drafted by Mason of Virginia, was passed by Northern votes. I am not, just now, complaining of this law, but I am trying to show how the current sets; for the proposed law of 1817 was far less offensive than the present one. In 1774 the Continental Congress pledged itself, without a dissenting vote, to wholly discontinue the slave trade, and to neither purchase nor import any slave: and less than three months before the passage of the Declaration of Independence, the same Congress which adopted that declaration unanimously resolved "that no slave be imported into any of the thirteen United Colonies." [Great applause.]

14. On the second day of July, 1776, the draft of a Declaration of Independence was reported to Congress by the committee, and in it the slave trade was char

1 The Quakers presented a similar petition to the first Congress. 2 This law was operative until the Clay Compromise of 1850.