I had long entertained most decided convictions in favor of protecting American labor, in favor of cheap postage, and of security to the lives and property of our fellow-citizens engaged in commerce.

But a new question had arisen,--the great question of freedom or slavery in our recently acquired territories,--and this question I deemed, for the time being, to be, though not exclusive of others, yet paramount to them.

Our present difficulties, which, as you well know, have arrested the gaze of the nation, and almost suspended the legislative functions of Congress, pertain to the destiny of freedom or of slavery, to which our new territories are to be…

Hence the war with Mexico, commenced and prosecuted to add slave territory and slave states to the southern section.

Could that question have been decided on its merits, or could the institutions to be planted upon the territory we might acquire have been determined by the unbiased suffrages of the American people, no war would have been declared, and no…

But the great political leaders of the south expected to make up both for their numerical weakness and for the injustice of their cause, by connecting the question of slavery extension with that of future presidential elections and with…

If it is honorable to produce corn and cotton, it is honorable to buy and sell them,--and if it is honorable to hold beings created in God’s image in slavery, it is honorable to stand between the producer and consumer, and to make…

Let this Light of the Age be set upon a hill, that all nations may behold it.

He is great, but truth is greater than us all.

It is undertaking to settle by mountains and rivers, and not by the Ten Commandments, a great question of human duty.

It abandons the second commandment of Christ and all bills of rights enacted in conformity thereto, and leaves our obligations to our “neighbor” to be determined by the accidents of earth and water and air.

To ascertain whether a people will obey the Divine command, and do to others as they would be done by, it looks at the thermometer.

What a problem would this be: “Required the height above the level of the sea at which the oppressor ‘will undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke,’--to be determined barometrically.” Alas! this cannot be…

The constitution of every free state in this Union must be first altered, before any such being as a slave, or any such condition as slavery, can be recognized under them, as state authorities.

So the constitution of the United States creates no slaves, and can create none.

Nor has it power to establish the condition of slavery any where.

And I hold further, that if the government of the United States, by escheat, by purchase, by execution against a debtor, or in any other way, should become possessed of a slave, that moment he would be free.

The government of the United States can neither hold a slave, nor make valid title to a slave by sale.

It is a government whose powers consist of the grants that have been made to it; and nowhere, by no competent party, has any such grant ever been made.

But the government of the United States has no more power to turn a freemen in a free state into a slave than it has to turn a slave in a slave state into a freeman.

Both by the constitution of the United States, then, and by the constitutions of all the free states, every man found within the limits of a free state is prima facie FREE.

No matter what complexion he may wear, or what language he may speak, he is a free man UNTIL some other civil condition is proved upon him, or until he forfeits his freedom by crime.

Every man, therefore, in any one of the free states of this Union, has a right to stand upon this legal presumption, and to claim all the privileges and immunities that grow out of it until his presumed freedom is wrested from him by legal…

It is the most cruel of sophisms to say, that because a man is claimed as a slave, he is not under the protection of the constitution, and then to prescribe a base mode of trial for him, by which he can be proved the thing he is claimed…

Nor is there any intermediate class, who may be presumed to be slaves on account of their color, or who may be proved to be slaves by less evidence, or by an inferior kind of evidence, because of color.