If I touch Slavery to the quick, and make Slave-Masters see themselves as others see them, I shall do nothing beyond the strictest line of duty in this debate.

Nobody can live with the one without advantage; nobody can live with the other without loss.

According to irresistible law men are fashioned by what is about them, whether climate, scenery, life, or institutions.

Look at the miner, delving low down in darkness, and the mountaineer, ranging on airy heights, and you will see a contrast in character, and even in personal form.

The difference between a coward and a hero may be traced in the atmosphere which each has breathed,--and how much more in the institutions under which each is reared!

If institutions generous and just ripen souls also generous and just, then other institutions must exhibit their influence also.

Violence, brutality, injustice, barbarism, must be reproduced in the lives of all living within their fatal sphere.

The meat eaten by man enters into and becomes part of his body; the madder eaten by the dog changes his bones to red; and the Slavery on which men live, in all its fivefold foulness, must become part of themselves, discoloring the very…

Instead of “ennobling” the master, nothing is clearer than that the slave drags his master down; and this process, beginning in childhood, is continued through life.

Living much in association with his slave, the master finds nothing to remind him of his own deficiencies, to prompt his ambition or excite his shame.

Thus the very inferiority which the Slave-Master attributes to the African explains the melancholy condition of the communities in which his degradation is declared by law.

A single false principle or vicious thought may debase a character otherwise blameless; and this is practically true of the Slave-Master.

Accustomed to regard men as property, the sensibilities are blunted and the moral sense is obscured.

He consents to acts from which Civilization recoils.

Nothing contributes to violence so much as wearing the instruments of violence, thus having them always at hand to obey a lawless instinct.

A barbarous standard is established; the duel is not dishonorable; a contest peculiar to our Slave-Masters, known as a “street fight,” is not shameful; and modern imitators of Cain have a mark set upon them, not for reproach and…

I wish to keep within bounds; but unanswerable facts, accumulating in fearful quantities, attest that the social system so much vaunted by honorable Senators, which we are now asked to sanction and extend, takes its character from this…

And this is aggravated by the prevailing ignorance in the Slave States, where one in five of the adult white population of native birth is unable to read and write.

Elsewhere violence shows itself in spite of law, whether social or statute; in the Slave States it is because of law, both social and statute.

Elsewhere it is pursued and condemned; in the Slave States it is adopted and honored.

Elsewhere it is hunted as a crime; in the Slave States it takes its place among the honorable graces of society.

We long to see the day when the law will assert its majesty, and stop the wanton destruction of life which almost daily occurs within the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth.

Men slaughter each other with almost perfect impunity.

A species of Common Law has grown up in Kentucky, which, were it written down, would, in all civilized countries, cause it to be re-christened, in derision, the Land of Blood.

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