Ten foreign wars,” it has been well said, “are a luxury compared with one civil war.” But I turn from this scene with a shudder.

And what is the object for which we are willing to make this awful sacrifice?

I trust that no pictures and no realities will ever induce us to extend slavery beyond its present limits.

What is to prevent the easy escape of slaves living within these limits?

I venture to predict, that in such a state of things, slaves will become cheap, and horses will become dear.

The old adage says, “riches have wings.” You will find that these riches have legs.

The free states are therefore absolved from all obligation to surrender fugitives.

By this law, every case of an escaping slave is but the self-recovery of stolen goods.

When they cross the line into a free state, they are free,--as free as you or I.

The states being separated, I would as soon return my own brother or sister into bondage, as I would return a fugitive slave.

Before God, and Christ, and all Christian men, they are my brothers and sisters.

As our laws make it piracy to kidnap slaves in Africa, or to ship them thence, so it shall be a felony, punishable with death, for any southern master to kidnap a colored man, in a free state, or transport him from it, on the ground of…

We will retort the Scripture, that “he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.

Thousands and tens of thousands can escape, even while you are dining.

The day for the power and the triumph of those whom you hate as abolitionists will have arrived.

A million and a half are left; five hundred thousand of these will have attachments to their own parents or children, or to their masters, too strong to be broken; or they may be so degraded as to be contented with bondage; for their…

What but affection should prevent the able-bodied and the profitable from escaping, and leaving the aged and the young on their masters’ hands.

Affection, indeed, would bind the parents to their children, but they know too well how often this bond is remorselessly broken by the master; and, besides, an enlightened affection would look to future children and their posterity…

Will you make your laws horribly penal, in order to deter slaves from escaping by fear?

Will you mutilate them, or scourge them till within a minute of death?

All such punishments not only nourish the love of freedom, but breed the purpose of revenge; and it is a kind of lesson which a brutalized nature is always prone to retaliate with improvements.

Will you make the act of escape a capital offence in a slave, and destroy the victim you cannot restrain?

It not only releases the slave himself, but is a prospective and perpetual amnesty,--a true act of oblivion,--for all his descendants.

In looking over the criminal codes of the slave states, I think I have noted cases where the slave is not punished with death for an offence for which a white man is.

Southern gentlemen, when they threaten disunion, cannot surely be so much at fault as to forget that slavery exists here as it never existed before in the world.