But the spirit of Slavery was too strong, making haste to speak out by its representatives of every degree.

If the principle now announced here is to prevail, let us come armed for the combat; and although you are four to one, I am here to meet you.

God knows a man can die in no better cause than in vindicating the rights of debate on this floor; and I have only to ask, that, if the principle is to be approved by the majority, and to become part and parcel of the law of Congress, it…

I characterized, on the floor of the Senate, the assault upon my colleague as ‘brutal, murderous, and cowardly.’ I thought so then: I think so now: I have no qualification whatever to make in regard to those words.

I have always regarded duelling as the lingering relic of a barbarous civilization, which the law of the country has branded as crime.

While, therefore, I religiously believe in the right of self-defence in its broadest sense, the law of my country and the matured convictions of my whole life alike forbid me to meet you for the purpose indicated in your letter.

Brutus stabbed Cæsar in the Capitol, and, whatever we may now think of the wisdom and justice of the deed, the world has ever since approved and applauded it.

It is idle to think of union or peace or truce with Sumner or Sumner’s friends.

Catiline was purity itself, compared to the Massachusetts Senator, and his friends are no better than he.

They are all (we mean the leading and conspicuous ones) avowed and active traitors.… Sumner and Sumner’s friends must be punished and silenced.

Government which cannot suppress such crimes as theirs has failed of its purpose.

Either such wretches must be hung or put in the penitentiary, or the South should prepare at once to quit the Union.

Let us tell the North at once, If you cannot suppress the treasonable action, and silence the foul, licentious, and infidel propagandism of such men as Stephen Pearl Andrews, Wendell Phillips, Beecher, Garrison, Sumner, and their negro and…

He had just avowed his complicity in designs far more diabolical than those of Catiline or Cethegus,--nay, transcending in iniquity all that the genius of a Milton has attributed to his fallen angels.

We are not surprised that he should be hailed as hero and saint, for his proposed war on everything sacred and divine, by that Pandemonium where the blasphemous Garrison, and Parker, and Andrews, with their runaway negroes and masculine…

Now, they are a low, mean, scurvy set, with some little book-learning, but as utterly devoid of spirit or honor as a pack of curs.

Intrenched behind ‘privilege,’ they fancy they can slander the South and insult its representatives with impunity.

The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars.

These men are perpetually abusing the people and representatives of the South, for tyrants, robbers, ruffians, adulterers, and what not.

Texts like these might be multiplied; but here are more than enough to exhibit the brutal spirit of Slavery, and the extent of its sympathy with the assault.

What will be the verdict of posterity upon him will depend upon the question of power between the North and South.

Here is a plain and most interesting recognition of the assault as belonging to the glories of Slavery, while the author is one of its heroes.

The moral sentiment of the country has been outraged, grossly outraged, by this wanton assault, in the person of a Senator, on the freedom of debate.

The intelligence of this transaction has flown over the land, and is now flying abroad over the civilized world; and wherever Christianity has a foothold, or civilization a resting-place, that act will meet the stern condemnation of…

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