The reason for denying to Congress the power to legislate for the territories, is the fear that Congress will prevent slavery in them.

The reason for claiming the supreme right of legislation for the territorial inhabitants, is the hope that they will establish slavery within their borders.

Must not that democracy be false which begets slavery as its natural offspring?

Here, on the threshold, we are confronted with the claim that the gates shall be thrown wide open to the admission of slavery into the broad western world; because, otherwise, the southern or slave states would be debarred from enjoying…

If, on the one hand, the consecration of this soil to freedom will exclude the slaveholders of the south, it is just as true, on the other hand, that the desecration of it to slavery will exclude the freemen of the north.

We, at the north, know too well the foundations of worldly prosperity and happiness; we know too well the sources of social and moral welfare, ever voluntarily to blend our fortunes with those of a community where slavery is tolerated.

If our demand for free territory, then, excludes them, their demand for slave territory excludes us.

Not one in five hundred of the freemen of the north could ever be induced to take his family and domicile himself in a territory where slavery exists.

Nature never made such a distinction, or established such a relation.

Man, when forced to substitute the will of another for his own, ceases to be a moral agent; his title to the name of man is extinguished; he becomes a mere machine in the hands of his oppressor.

No empire is so valuable as the empire of one’s self.

No right is so inseparable from humanity, and so necessary to the improvement of our species, as the right of exerting the powers which nature has given us in the pursuit of any and of every good which we can obtain without doing injury to…

The influence of slavery on the whites is almost as fatal as on the blacks themselves.

But the sentiments he expressed on this subject, at the close of the last century, are now the prevalent, deep-seated feelings of northern men, excepting, perhaps, a few cases where these feelings have been corrupted by interest.

I repeat, then, that the north cannot shut out the south from the new territories by a law for excluding slavery, more effectually than the south will shut out the north by the fact of introducing slavery.

Even admitting, then, that the law is equal for both north and south, I will show that all the equity is on the side of the north.

Jefferson should have the honor of it; and would to Heaven that our southern friends, who kneel so devoutly at his shrine, could be animated by that lofty spirit of freedom, that love for the rights of man, which alone can make their acts…

But a minority of seven from the slaveholding states controlled a majority of sixteen from the free states,--ominous even at that early day of a fate that has now relentlessly pursued us for sixty years.

But there is another fact, which shows that the slaveholders have already had their full share of territory, however wide the boundaries of this country may hereafter become.

And, in addition to this, it is to be considered that the non-slaveholding population of the slave states have as direct and deep an interest as any part of the country, adverse to the extension of slavery.

If all our new territory be doomed to slavery, where can the non-slaveholders of the slaveholding states emigrate to?

I now proceed to consider the nature and effects of slavery, as a reason why new-born communities should be exempted from it.

Though slaves are said to be property, they are the preventers, the wasters, the antagonists of property.

Other things being equal, a free people will thrive and prosper, in a mere worldly sense, more than a people divided into masters and slaves.

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