Historical voices

They are the props that hold up the house and sustain the Union.

They don't make the house a house divided against itself.

I have no doubt that it would become extinct for all time to come, if we had but readopted the policy of the fathers by restricting it to the limits it has already covered--restricting it from the new Territories.

All I have asked or desired anywhere is that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of our government originally placed it upon.

I say when this government was first established, it was the policy of its founders to prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United States where it had not existed.

I say in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the institution was in the course of ultimate extinction.

I say that Judge Douglas and his friends have changed it from the position in which our fathers originally placed it.

Another form of his question is, "Why can't we let it stand as our fathers placed it?" That is the exact difficulty between us.

I hold myself under constitutional obligations to allow the people in all the States, without interference, direct or indirect, to do exactly as they please, and I deny that I have any inclination to interfere with them, even if there were…

If I should never be elected to any office, I trust I may go down with no stain of falsehood upon my reputation, notwithstanding the hard opinions Judge Douglas chooses to entertain of me.

I do not ask for the vote of any one who supposes that I have secret purposes or pledges that I dare not speak out....

And I say here to you, if any one expects of me in the case of my election, that I will do anything not signified by our Republican platform and my answers here to-day, I tell you very frankly, that person will be deceived.

When he says he "cares not whether slavery is voted down or voted up,"--that it is a sacred right of self-government,--he is, in my judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this…

When he invites any people, willing to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights around us.

Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return.

To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that the negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence.

Consequently he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything.

I am fighting it upon these "original principles"--fighting it in the Jeffersonian, Washingtonian, Madisonian fashion....

It is just as fatal to the country, if I have any influence in producing it, whether I intend it or not.

But I must say, in all fairness to him, if he thinks I am doing something which leads to these bad results, it is none the better that I did not mean it.

Now, I believe if we could arrest the spread, and place it where Washington and Jefferson and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in…

I leave it for you to say, whether in the history of our government, this institution of slavery has not always failed to be a bond of union, and, on the contrary, been an apple of discord and an element of division in the house.