I say, sir, under such circumstances, slavery would melt away upon your borders like an iceberg in the tropics.

Perhaps a dissolution of the Union is the means foreordained by God for the extinction of slavery; and did I not foresee its doom before any very long period shall have elapsed, without the unspeakable horrors of a civil and a servile war…

But if I expatriate myself, I leave all that interest and proprietorship behind me.

But, I venture to prophesy, that if the slave states shall pass through one war, single-handed, they will afterwards be the most peaceable nation the world ever saw.

But I have never known of a single case,--I believe there is no well-authenticated case on record,--where a northern man has instigated the slaves to rise in rebellion, and to retaliate upon their masters for the wrongs which they and…

Thousands will start up, who will think it as much a duty and an honor to assist the slaves in any contest with their masters, as to assist Greeks, or Poles, or Hungarians, in resisting their tyrants.

Two things exist at the north which the south does not duly appreciate,--the depth and intensity of our abhorrence of slavery, and that reverence for the law which keeps it in check.

But release us from our obligations, tear off from the bond with your own hands the signatures which bind our consciences and repress our feelings, destroy those compensations which the world and which posterity would derive from a…

They felt as you and I should feel if we had been subjected to Algerine bondage.

If agitation and instigation are evils now, woe to those who would seek to mitigate or to repress them by the remedies of disunion and civil war.

Not only churches, but moral and religious men, the world over, have begun to read slaveholders out of their communion and companionship.

If the south expects to rid itself of agitation and abolitionism by rupturing its bonds with the north and substituting an alliance with Great Britain for our present constitution, they may envy the wisdom of the geese who invited the fox…

Northern interference will increase a hundred fold; and the whole power and wealth of British abolitionism, not only founded on moral principle but nursed by national pride, will be brought to bear directly upon them.

I said that the slave does not know much of geography; but he understands enough of it to know where lies the free frontier.

The slave does not know much of astronomy; but there is one star in the firmament which is dearer to him than all the heavenly host were to the Chaldeans.

But let the south form commercial alliances with Great Britain; let the carrying trade be carried on in British vessels; and the slave will find a star in the east as beautiful to his eye, and as inspiring to his hopes, as the star in the…

Gold is a great pacificator between nations; and, in this money-loving age, mutual interests will, in the end, subdue mutual hostilities.

They will invade none of the securities of home; they will not associate poison with our daily food, nor murder and conflagration with our nightly repose; nor black violation with the sanctities of our daughters and our wives.

Even in a pecuniary point of view, a dissolution of our political ties would cause less immediate and intense suffering at the north than at the south.

Our laws and institutions are all framed so as to encourage the poor man, and, by education, to elevate his children above the condition of their parents; but their laws and institutions all tend to aggrandize the rich, and to perpetuate…

With every philanthropic northern man, a collateral motive for keeping the new territories free is, that they may be a land of hope and of promise to the poor man, to whichever of all our states he may belong; where he may go and find a…

But the south, in attempting to open these territories to the slaveholders, would give them to the rich alone,--would give them to less than three hundred thousand persons out of a population of six millions.

The interests of the poorer classes at the south all demand free territory, where they can go and rise at once to an equality with their fellow-citizens, which they never can do at home.

They are natural abolitionists, and unless blinded by ignorance, or overawed by their social superiors, they will so declare themselves.

We are often reminded by gentlemen of the south, that, at the time of the adoption of that constitution, slavery existed in almost every state in the Union; and that some northern merchants, by a devilish alchemy, transmuted gold from its…