It attainted, not individuals merely, but a whole race.

A slave is an outlaw; that is, he cannot make a contract; he cannot prosecute and defend in court; property cannot be acquired by him, or devised to him, or transmitted through him.

A white man may give his testimony against him, but he cannot give his testimony against a white man.

And this corruption of blood, which the law of slavery works, does not stop with the first, nor with the second generation,--not with the tenth nor the ten thousandth; but by the theory of the law, goes on forever.

But here, Congress, in defiance of the constitution, has undertaken to establish a degraded caste in society, and to perpetuate it through all generations.

Now, can any reasonable man for a moment suppose that the constitution meant to debar Congress from passing acts of attainder against individuals, but to permit it to pass wholesale, sweeping laws, working disfranchisement of an entire…

Yet if Congress can create or legalize slavery, it can establish the worst order of nobility that ever existed.

It can give to one class of men the power to own and to control, to punish and to despoil another class; to sell father, mother, wife, and children, into bondage.

To prohibit Congress from doing one of these things, and to permit it to do the other, is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel,--a whole caravan of camels!

Under the laws of Maryland, he might have held his slave, for her statutes had legalized slavery; but under the constitution of the United States, he could not hold a slave; for that constitution had given Congress no power to legalize…

For the plainest of all reasons, I answer: for the reason that a horse is property by the universal consent of mankind, by the recognition of every civilized court in Christendom, without any positive law declaring it to be the subject of…

But a man is not property, without positive law; without a law declaring him to be the subject of ownership.

It is better, under the present circumstances, that slavery should be abolished here by a law of Congress, than by the decision of a court; because Congress can provide an indemnity for the owners, and let the slaves go free.

But should it be abolished by a legal adjudication, every slave would be hurried away to the south, and sold, he and his descendants, into perpetual bondage.

The time has surely come when the voice of freedom should find an utterance.

Would to God that on the present occasion it might find an abler defender than myself, although if my ability to defend it were equal to the love I bear it, it could ask no stronger champion.

It expresses a determination on the part of its disciples to keep free the territory that is now free; to stand upon its frontiers as the cherubim stood at the gates of Paradise, with a flaming sword to turn every way, to keep the sin of…

They have ceased to be genuine and single-hearted Free Soilers, whom I love, and have become partisans, whom I condemn.

For myself, I will engage in any honorable measure most likely to secure freedom to the new territories.

I will resist any and every measure that proposes to abandon them to slavery.

The epithet “Free Soiler,” therefore, when rightly understood and correctly applied, implies both political and moral worth; and I covet the honor of its application to myself.

It means that this Republic, as we call it, formed to establish freedom, should enlist in a crusade against freedom.

And again; those of us at the north who resist slavery extension, who mean to withstand its spread beyond the limits where it now exists, are denounced as Abolitionists.

This epithet is applied to us as a term of reproach and obloquy; as a brand and stigma upon our characters and principles.

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