"Mr, Clay many, many years ago . . . told an audience that if they would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, they must go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thundered its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the moral lights around us. ...I call attention to the fact that in a preeminent degree these popular sovereigns are at this work: blowing out the moral lights around us; teaching that the negro is no longer a man, but a brute; that the Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile and the reptile that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and cents. I suggest to this portion of Ohio Republicans, or Democrats , . . that there is now going or among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on this subject."
This government is expressly charged with the duty of providing for the general welfare. We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of slavery impairs the general welfare. . . , I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so. We must not withhold an efficient fugitive-slave law, because the Constitution requires us as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But we must prevent the out spreading of the institution. . . . We must prevent the revival of the Africa slave-trade, and the enacting by Congress of a territorial slave code. We must prevent each of these things being done by either Congresses or courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congresses an courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole con- troversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right. . . .
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fear- lessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contriv- ances wherewith we' are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care, such as the Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, revers- ing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did."
Walt