Amid the storms of freedom were we cradled; in the struggles of freedom have our joints been knit; on the rich aliment of freedom have we grown to our present stature.

With a somewhat too boastful spirit, perhaps, have we challenged the admiration of the world for our devotion to liberty; but an enthusiasm for the rights of man is so holy a passion, that even its excesses are not devoid of the beautiful.

We have not only won freedom for ourselves, but we have taught its sacred lessons to others.

But in the divine face of our liberty there has been one foul, demoniac feature.

Whenever her votaries would approach her to worship, they have been fain to draw a veil over one part of her visage, to conceal its hideousness.

Whence came this deformity on her otherwise fair and celestial countenance?

Hence this unsightly wound, that affrights whoever beholds it.

One wants the plain, sinewy, Saxon tongue to tell of deeds that should have shamed devils.

She made its people her prey, and the unwilling colonies her market-place.

She broke into the Ethiop’s home, as a wolf into a sheepfold at midnight.

She set the continent a-flame, that she might seize the affrighted inhabitants as they ran shrieking from their blazing hamlets.

Thousands and thousands of corpses, which she plunged into the ocean from the decks of her slave ships, she counted only as the tare of commerce.

The blue monsters of the deep became familiar with her pathway, and, not more remorseless than she, they shared her plunder.

And there, monsters of the land, fiercer and feller than any that roam the watery plains, rewarded the robber by purchasing his spoils.

During all those years, the clock of eternity never counted out a minute that did not witness the cruel death, by treachery or violence, of some son or daughter, some father or mother, of Africa.

The three millions of slaves that now darken our southern horizon are the progeny of these progenitors,--a doomed race, fated and suffering from sire to son.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to…

This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain.

Determined to keep a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.

Now, if the King of Great Britain prostituted his negative that slavery might not be restricted, what, in after times, shall be said of those who prostitute their affirmative that it may be extended?

Yet it is now proposed, in some of the state legislatures, and in this Capitol, to do precisely the same thing, in regard to the Territory of Oregon, which was done by Great Britain to her transatlantic possessions; not merely to legalize…

Great Britain annulled our laws for prohibiting slavery; we propose to annul an existing law of Oregon prohibiting slavery.

If the execrations of mankind are yet too feeble and too few to punish Great Britain for her wickedness, what scope, what fulness, what eternity of execration and anathema will be a sufficient retribution upon us, if we volunteer to copy…

It is in the nineteenth century that we propose to reënact, and on an ampler scale, the same execrable villany,--a time when liberty is the rallying cry of all Christendom.

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