In South Carolina, slaves have never been admitted to the benefit of clergy for offences at common law; and thus a slave is punished capitally for maiming or grievously beating a white man.

The slave’s time is too valuable to be lost in a prison, but the white man’s is not; the white man’s skin is too sacred to be flayed or branded, but the slave’s is not.

These are not the customs of a lawless banditti, of outcasts or renegades, but solemn enactments of state legislatures, devised by talent and eminence, enforced and preserved by the oligarchical few, by the virtual nobility and flower of…

What shall be thought of a system, AND OF EXTENDING A SYSTEM, which so perverts the hearts of men, otherwise clear-headed, high-minded, and generous!

It is not, however, the existence of slavery, but its extension, we now intend to avert.

He is like the man who should declare that the Scriptures say “there is no God,” when it is the fool, and not the Bible, that makes the declaration.

Beyond our present limits “no more slave territories and no more slave states,” was the exact ground I took.

I never said any thing to give countenance or color to such a declaration.

Badger further charges me with invoking all the calamities he enumerates, “rather than permit one man who now stands upon the soil of North Carolina a slave, to stand a slave upon the soil of New Mexico.” This statement is not merely…

In a national point of view, and looking at the subject as a statesman, the sentiment imputed to me is simply ridiculous.

But this wrongful imputation of such a sentiment, without substance or semblance to justify it, is far worse than ridiculous; it becomes unjust and ungenerous; and is none the less so for being made in a place where he knew I could not…

The whole scope and stress of my argument went against yielding any such portion of our new acquisitions to slavery as would form either a state or a territory.

That the creation of a new slave territory will increase the victims of slavery, is a proposition too plain to be argued.

My complaint was, that he had taken half a dozen lines from my speech, and had attributed a meaning to them, in some respects odious, in other respects ridiculous, and in all respects unwarrantable.

By his own admission, too, he had done this without reading the speech itself; when, had he accorded to me the justice of hearing me before he condemned me, he would have found that both subject-matter and context confuted his…

I answer, as before; the injustice consists in giving a false meaning to true “words” and “syllables,”--a meaning which both the subject-matter and context of my speech repudiate.

I do not see that it is less unjustifiable to attach false meanings to words correctly quoted, than to forge quotations.

Surely, the honorable senator is too good a lawyer to be ignorant of the maxim, “qui hæret in litera” &c.; and too good a theologian not to have read that “the letter killeth” if divorced from the spirit.

With all deference to the senator,--and mine is unfeignedly great,--I submit that this is false logic and worse ethics.

As well may one declare the judgment of a court to be legal or illegal, merciful or tyrannous, without looking back to the allegations and proofs on which it is founded.

As “intelligent” men, my constituents foresee that the extension of slavery over our territories will not only be an unspeakable crime in itself, but will be converted into the means of future unspeakable crimes in further extensions.

As “patriotic” men, they prefer to bear any calamity that may come upon themselves, rather than to devolve accumulated calamities, growing out of their own dereliction from duty, upon their posterity.

As “humane” men, they would deprecate and forefend that greatest of inhumanities, the dooming of increased thousands and millions of their fellow-men to the dreadful inheritance of bondage.

It would be rash and reckless in me to encounter the distinguished senator on any other subject; but on this I would say, as was said by a knight in an old tournament, that he had such confidence in the justness of his cause that he would…

But I feel, on the other hand, that my constituents, having intrusted to me some of their most precious interests, are entitled to know my “views and opinions” respecting the hopes and the dangers that encompass them.