If this is not the abrogation of a treaty, I do not see what can be.

I submit to Senators opposite, who have maintained their views with so much constancy, that their position is not tenable; I say this frankly, but with entire respect for their learning and ability.

By the usage of most countries, the war-making power, the treaty-making power, and the treaty-abrogating power are all lodged in one and the same body.

In our opinion the people of the Free States are never better satisfied with their representatives than when they see them repelling indignantly and manfully the arrogant insults of the slave-driving aristocracy.

The treatment of these petitions illustrates the tyranny of the Slave Power to the very eve of its fall.

We have a Platform of noble principles, and candidates, each of whom, through his well-known principles and integrity of character, is a Platform in himself.

Thou art a slave, whom Fortune’s tender arm With favor never clasped, but bred a dog.

A universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things.

A system of concubinage was practised among them worse than the loose polygamy of the savages: the savage had as many women as consented to become his wives; the colonist as many as he could enslave.

There is an ineffaceable stigma upon the Europeans in their intercourse with those whom they treat as inferior races; there is a perpetual contradiction between their lust and their avarice.

The planter will one day take a slave for his harlot, and sell her the next as a being of some lower species, a beast of labor.

I had observed much, and heard more, of the cruelty of masters towards their negroes; but now I received an authentic account of some horrid instances thereof.

Is slavery less slavery in a Christian than in a Mahometan country?

I entreat your attention, while I plead the general cause of humanity.

In such a cause it is right to appeal to your sensibility as well as your reason.

I visited our State Penitentiary a short time since, and from my own personal observation I am led to the inevitable conclusion that the plan of sending our slaves to the Penitentiary, as a punishment for crime, is exactly the reverse: it…

I would ask any reasonable man, Is the sending a slave of any of our farms to the Penitentiary a punishment?

The white man is punished by being deprived of his liberty for that length of time: what liberty is the slave deprived of?

He has as much, and oftentimes more, liberty within the walls of the Penitentiary than on any of those large sugar or cotton plantations.

We send white men there, and the dread of going is a stain on his character: what character has the negro to lose?

Hence we must come to the conclusion that sending negro slaves to the Penitentiary is not a punishment.

He stands up to the mark well, for a politician; but we want one who believes a Man is greater than a President, and who would not lift his finger to obtain the best office in the gift of our nation, to raise this question above the…

When last I entered into this debate, it became my duty to expose the Crime against Kansas, and to insist upon the immediate admission of that Territory as a State of this Union, with a Constitution forbidding Slavery.

I have no personal griefs to utter: only a vulgar egotism could intrude such into this Chamber.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.