Its whole success, from its distant beginning down to this hour, has been from our timidity.

The whole opposition had its root in Slavery,--as also had the earlier resistance to Republican Government.

Even in the first Congress under the Constitution, at the presentation of that famous petition where Benjamin Franklin simply called upon Congress to step to the verge of its power to discourage every species of traffic in the persons of…

With kindred lawlessness it early embraced that extravagant dogma of State Rights which has been ever since the convenient cloak of treason and conspiracy.

At the Missouri Question, in 1820, it openly menaced dissolution of the Union.

Instead of throttling the monster, we submitted to feed it with new concessions.

The Tariff was only the pretext, and Disunion and a Southern Confederacy the real object.

The conspiracy, thus exposed by Jackson, and confessed by recent parties to it, was quickened by the growing passion for Slavery throughout the Slave States.

Slavery itself is a constant conspiracy; and its supporters, whether in the Slave States or elsewhere, easily become indifferent to all rights and principles by which it may be constrained.

This rage for Slavery was quickened by two influences, which have exhibited themselves since the formation of our Union,--one economical, and the other political.

The first was the unexpected importance of the cotton crop, which, through the labor of slaves and the genius of a New England inventor, passed into an extraordinary element of wealth and of imagined strength, so that we have all been…

Thus, through two strong appetites, one for gain and the other for power, was Slavery stimulated; but the conspiracy was strong only through Slavery.

Even this conspiracy, thus supported and nurtured, would have been more wicked than strong, if it had not found perfidious aid in the very Cabinet of the President.

Never before, in any country, was there a similar crime which embraced so many persons in the highest places of power, or took within its grasp so large a theatre of human action.

Thus, even before its outbreak, the conspiracy contrived to degrade and despoil the Government, so as to secure free course for the projected rebellion.

Ay, more; instead of instant lightnings, smiting and blasting in their fiery crash, which an indignant patriotism would have hurled, he nodded sympathy and acquiescence.

No page of history is more melancholy, because nowhere do we find a ruler who so completely abandoned his country: not Charles the First in his tyranny, not Louis the Sixteenth in his weakness.

Buchanan was advanced to power by Slave-Masters, who knew well that he could be used for Slavery.

The Slaveholding conspirators were encouraged to sit in his Cabinet, where they doubly betrayed their country, first by evil counsels, and then by disclosing what passed to distant Slaveholding confederates.

The forms of the Constitution are seized by the conspirators, as they have already seized everything else, and wrested to the purposes of treason.

It is audaciously declared, that, under the existing Constitution, each State, in the exercise of its own discretion, may withdraw from the Union; and this asserted right of secession is invoked as cover for Rebellion begun in conspiracy.

The pretended right of secession is not less monstrous than the pretext or the occasion; and this, too, is born of Slavery.

It belongs to that brood of assumptions and perversions of which Slavery is prolific parent.

Wherever Slavery prevails, this pretended right is recognized, and generally with an intensity proportioned to the prevalence of Slavery,--as, for instance, in South Carolina and Mississippi more intensely than in Tennessee and Kentucky.

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