The noblest impulses of the human soul, the most sacred affections of the human heart, will die out, when every sphere is closed against their exercise.

When such a dreadful work is doing, or threatens to be done, can any one stand listlessly by, see it perpetrated, and then expect to excuse himself, under the false, impious pretext of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?

Not believing in political pledges, I should have had the honor to decline giving any to you, had you not had the first and greater honor of asking none from me.

After what I have said above in favor of liberty for all mankind, it would be a strange contradiction did I consent to be myself a slave of party.

I must add, in closing, that so far as personal preferences are concerned, I infinitely prefer remaining in my present position, with all its labor and its thanklessness, to any office in the gift of the people.

I had hoped and intended, either in a public or private capacity, to spend my life in advancing the great cause of the people’s education.

As are the institutions which we form and establish there, so will be the men whom these institutions, in their turn, will form.

Nature works by fixed laws; but we can bring this or that combination of circumstances under the operation of her laws, and thus determine results.

Hence their futurity is to depend upon our present action.

Hence the acts we are to perform seem to partake of the nature of creation, rather than of legislation.

If, then, the power to acquire exists, it exists by implication and inference; and if the power to acquire be an implied one, the power to govern what is acquired must be implied also.

For, for what purpose does any man acquire property but to govern and control it?

What does a buyer pay for, if it be not the right to “dispose of”?

Such is the doctrine of the Supreme Court of the United States: “The right to govern,” says Chief Justice Marshall, “may be the inevitable consequence of the right to acquire.” Amer.

Inseparable from the right to sell is the right to define the terms of sale.

I want, therefore, no better foundation for legislating over the territories than the fact of ownership in the United States.

If I own a farm, or a shop, I may, as owner, prescribe the conditions of its transfer to another.

They well know how essential is the sobriety of workmen to the profitableness of their work; they know, too, how wasteful and destructive is inebriety.

In disposing of their land, therefore, to the men whom they would gather about them and employ, they incorporate the provision, as a fundamental article in the deed of grant, that ardent spirits shall never be sold upon the premises; and…

Would any judge or lawyer doubt the validity of such a condition; or would any sensible man ever doubt its wisdom or humanity?

Whence, but from this right of sovereignty, does the government obtain its power of saying that no man shall purchase land of the natives, or aborigines; and that, if you wish to buy land in the territories, you shall come to the…

Is there any express power in the constitution authorizing Congress to say to all the citizens of the United States, “If you wish to buy ungranted land in the territories, you must come to us, for no one else can sell, or shall sell”?

Congress has legislated on the subject of slavery in the territories all the way up from the adoption of the constitution to the present time; and this legislation has been sustained by the judiciary of both the general and state…

So far as the uniform practice of sixty years can settle a doubtful, or confirm an admitted right, this power of legislating over the territories has been taken from the region of doubt, and established upon the basis of acknowledged…

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.