It wounds our moral and religious sensibilities, because we believe the institution to be cruel towards men, and sinful in the sight of Heaven; and yet we are made apparently to sanction it.

It is like that species of injustice where a man is compelled by a tax to support a religion which he disbelieves, and to pay a hierarchy whom his conscience compels him to denounce.

I have been taught from my earliest childhood that “all men are created equal.” This has become in me not merely a conviction of the understanding, but a sentiment of the heart.

This maxim is my principle of action, whenever I am called upon to act; and it rises spontaneously to my contemplations when I speculate upon human duty.

I would give to every human being the best opportunity I could to develop and cultivate the faculties which God has bestowed upon him, and which, therefore, he holds under a divine charter.

But one thing I could never understand,--why those who are so horror-stricken at the idea of theoretic amalgamation, should exhibit to the world, in all their cities, on all their plantations, and in all their households, such numberless…

Multitudes of the slaves of the south bear about upon their persons a brand as indelible as that of Cain; but the mark has been fastened upon them, not for their own crimes, but for the crimes of their fathers.

In the complexion of the slave, we read the horrid history of the guilt of the enslavers.

They demonstrate that the one race has been to the other, not the object of benevolence, but the victim of licentiousness.

You do not need their color to remind you of their degradation.

I have seen members of this House to whom I have been disposed to give a friendly caution to keep their “free papers” about their persons, lest suddenly, on the presumption from color, they should be seized and sold for runaway slaves.

A yellow complexion here is so common a badge of slavery, that one whose skin is colored by disease is by no means out of danger.

If introduced there at all, it is as a bale of goods is introduced, or as an ox or a horse is brought within their purlieus, for the purpose of trying some disputed question of identity or ownership.

In the courts of law; in the temples with which all our ideas of justice, of right between man and man, are associated; where truth goes to be vindicated, where innocence flies to be avenged,--in these courts, an entire portion of the…

Where, for them, is the Magna Charta that the old barons wrested from King John?

Is a whole race to be forever doomed to this outlawry?

If all the rights of the black race are thus withheld from them, it is just as certain as the progress of time that they, too, will have their Runnymede, their Declaration of Independence, their Bunker Hill, and their Yorktown.

Have they no need of consolation, of faith in the Unseen, to help them bear up under the burdens and anxieties of life?

Is their futurity so uncertain or so worthless that they need no guide to a better country, or that they can be turned off with a guide as ignorant and blind as themselves?

The channels are so cut that all the sacred and healing waters of knowledge flow, not to him, but by him.

Hence, the act of Congress, purporting to continue the Maryland laws respecting slavery in this District, was, and is, and forever must be, until the constitution is altered, null and void.

The word person was chosen, and therefore Congress has no constitutional power to deprive of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, any being embraced in the definition of that word.

By its own selection of words it is debarred not merely from depriving a “freeman,” but from depriving a “person” of this right.

If Congress cannot authorize searches and seizures of houses, papers, and effects, can it get round the constitution, by saying we will create a class of persons who shall have no power of owning any houses, papers, or effects, to be…

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