You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.

Our political problem now is, "Can we as a nation continue together permanently--for ever--half slave, and half free?" The problem is too mighty for me.

Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the States adopted systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact that not a single State has done the like since.

On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.

That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution.

The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown and proclaim his subjects free republicans, sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of the lost…

I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

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?

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature,--opposition to it in his love of justice.

The spirit of mutual concession--that spirit which first gave us the Constitution, and has thrice saved the Union--we shall have strangled and cast from us for ever.

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 for ever worthy of the saving.

Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence.

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it.

Let us turn slavery from its claims of moral right, back upon its existing legal rights and its arguments of necessity.

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.

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.

Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit if not the blood of the Revolution.

Our Republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust.

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.

Thus we see the plain, unmistakable spirit of their age towards slavery was hostility to the principle, and toleration only by necessity.

The argument of "necessity" was the only argument they ever admitted in favour of slavery, and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go.

I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for free people--a sad evidence that, feeling over-prosperity, we forget right; that liberty as a principle we have ceased to revere.

I object to it because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another.