Slavery depends, not upon climate, but upon conscience.

Slavery, being a crime founded upon human passions, can go wherever those passions are unrestrained.

Can the oppression that tramples out voluntary industry, enterprise, intelligence, and the desire of independence, conduce to riches?

What a bridal gift for the harlot of bondage!

Are the children of darkness to be forever so much wiser than the children of light?

My words have been cool as the telegraphic wires, while my feelings have been like the lightning that runs through them.

I deprecate error of all sorts; but hold it to be more venial to err in judgment than in heart.

It seems to me quite as inconvenient for a free man to lose his liberty, as for a slaveholder to lose his slave.

But his citation of authorities is among the most surprising of all his aberrations from fact.

This demonstrates that they thought slavery could exist there.

Webster had always held, that slavery would invade the new territories if not barred out of them by positive law.

That these whole regions are filled with rich mines, is little less than certain, and that they can be profitably worked by slave labor is sure.

Not how much may we do for freedom, but how much can we do for slavery, has been the tacit assumption of the argument.

Now, I ask, if this gift of a slave state is a trifle to be thrown in like the value of a small coin in the settlement of an account?

Because, in the first place, I felt myself a moral and accountable being; and, as such, I could not do otherwise.

The politicians are just as ready now to betray their constituents as they ever have been.

Is free speech to be only on one side; and is it one of the offices of free speech to silence the sentiments it dislikes?

However much a man may reverence the constitution, though he may make it an idol and worship it, yet I mean to show him that this law is an unholy thing in its presence.

Can I have confidence in the supreme court of the United States, when my confidence fails in senators around me here?

In the eye of the legislators of the free states, and in the eye of the courts of the free states, so far as their domestic polity is concerned, there can be no such creature as a slave.

There is no such class as slaves known to our laws.

On the same ground on which Congress passes a law for escaped slaves, let every free state pass a law for resident freemen.

The proper question is, not whether the constitution expressly demands the jury trial, but whether it will, by any fair implication, allow it.

Would such be the case of a kidnapped freeman?

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