They wish to expostulate, in regard to the wrong, in such a way as to arrest the wrong, and not, by inflaming the wrongdoer, to increase the evil.

By this act, freedom secures a new domain on the eastern continent, while you are striving to give a new domain to bondage on the western.

Beyond those limits, “No more slave territories, no more slave states,” is the doctrine by which I, for one, shall live and die.

The constitution of the United States, and the law of 1793, being at an end, the law of nature revives.

These slaves, therefore, had no place to flee to, where better institutions and juster laws prevailed.

Now, the ignorant slave knows but little of geography, but he would know of these avenues to freedom, and nothing but death could extinguish such knowledge and the hopes it would inspire.

Alas, they will have to read that Declaration, as the devil reads Scripture, backwards!

Knowledge and industry are recuperative energies that can never long be balked in their quest of prosperity.

The south, notwithstanding any personal hostility, will be as ready to take northern gold as though it had come from the English mint; and they will employ those first, who will do their manufacturing or their commercial labor cheapest and…

Every intelligent and virtue-loving wife or mother, at the south, when she thinks of her husband and her sons, is forced to be an abolitionist.

Mark the progress in the public sentiment of Christendom, within the last few centuries, on the subject of slavery and the rights of man.

Since the year 1814, written constitutions have been extorted by the people from more than three fourths of all the sovereigns of Europe.

What a tempest now beats upon Austria, from all points of the compass, because, during the last season, she attempted only to half enslave the Hungarians,--because she attempted to do what, during the last century, she might have done…

It is an indestructible part of the nature of man.

Weakened it may be, but it cannot be destroyed.

Has it any barriers to keep the spirit of liberty, which has electrified the Old World, from crossing its own borders, and quickening its bondmen into mutinous life?--not all of them, but one in ten thousand, one in a hundred thousand of…

It may be a text of Scripture, it may be the contents of a wine vault; but the result will be the same,--havoc wherever there is wealth, murder wherever there is life, violation wherever there is chastity.

Let this wildfire of a servile insurrection break out in but one place in a state; nay, in but ten places, or in five places in all the fifteen states; and then, in all their length and breadth, there will be no more quiet sleep.

Civil war between the north and the south,--any thing that brings the quickening idea of freedom home to the mind of the slave; that supplies him with facilities of escape, or immunities for revenge,--will unleash the bloodhounds of…

Badger represents me as saying that I would “prefer a disunion of these states,” and all the other evils in his long and labored catalogue, “rather than the extension of slavery one foot;” “yes,” he repeats with emphasis, “one foot.” Now…

But the real issue on this point is, (and the senator must know it,) whether the victims of slavery shall be indefinitely multiplied by the addition to its domain of regions now free.

Every student of the criminal legislation of the Southern States in regard to slaves, knows that their laws are replete with proofs where the sensibilities of a man are sacrificed to the spirit of gain.

I cheerfully submit to all “intelligent men,” if they are at the same time humane and patriotic, to pass upon such a sentiment.

I affirm, then, that a knowledge of the premises is indispensable to a judgment on the conclusion.

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