He offered to add new states to its power, and to take two hundred millions of dollars from the treasury of the United States, to be expended for its extra-constitutional security and defence.

Until something can be done to allay the feeling now separating different men and different sections, there can be NO USEFUL AND SATISFACTORY legislation in the two houses of Congress.

That a proposition to barter or to jeopard the liberty of our fellow-beings for any amount of money, however great, was intrinsically inhuman and wicked.

For the correctness of the first of these propositions, I appeal to every man who has a conscience, or even any elementary ideas of right or wrong, which are not smothered by his interests or his passions.

And we now have this stubborn fact to show for the soundness of that opinion,--the event has ratified it.

They have not obtained the tariff they were promised, though they have given for it the price of blood.

Now I wish to ask the manufacturers and commercial men of the north, whether, if they had seen,--as it was seen by every unbiased man at the seat of government,--that upholding the compromise would put down protection, they would have…

The commercial and manufacturing interests of the north, then, have been deceived, grossly deceived and imposed upon.

When their real interests were all on the side of freedom, they have been made to believe that it would promote those interests to unsay all they had ever said, and undo all they had ever done adverse to slavery.

Their chance for a tariff lay in standing to their principles like men, and not in abandoning them like cowards.

It has been said that the Press is the fourth estate in the realm; but I say Cotton is the fourth estate, for Cotton subdues the Press.

The eyes and ears and nose and mouth of a portion of our people have been so filled with cotton, that they have come to consider cotton not only as their daily bread, but their bread of life.

Still worse is it, when this cotton, so diabolically impregnated, gets beneath the rich velvet seats and embossed cushions of the pulpit;--unless, indeed, a double measure of the spirit of the Lord shall descend upon the preacher and…

God grant that this kind of cotton may never stuff the cushions of our judges!

But I believe that the reign of Cotton is to be short-lived.

Improvements in the arts give confident promise that some new textile substance will soon be discovered which will supersede this slave-made and slave-making material.

Even should this hope fail, every body sees what an unnatural attitude of power and strength the cotton-producing states now occupy.

I rejoice that this reference to the demoralizing power of interest gives me an opportunity to bestow well-deserved honor and praise upon a class of men who have nobly withstood its temptations.

Our slave power and its northern allies, being debarred by the principles of our government from bullets and bayonets, accomplished their work by the Judas articles of scrip and “dotation.” To carry out these purposes, the generals Haynau…

John Quincy Adams sounded the alarm; but men were so engrossed by their business, and by their paltry local and temporary political strifes, that even his voice, potent and prophetic as it was, passed by unheeded.

The question was taken by yeas and nays, and all the Whigs and almost all the Democrats in the general court recorded their names on the side of the constitution and liberty.

But the slave power then had possession of all the departments of the national government, and under the auspices of a slaveholding President, a breach was made in the walls of the constitution wide enough to let in a foreign government…

Yet, notwithstanding this perfidy to all the principles of a true democracy, such was the external pressure brought to bear upon the members of the Democratic party, that but few of them abandoned its ranks.

Precisely the arguments which were then used to seduce and corrupt the Democratic party into “acquiescence” are used by leading Whigs and Whig presses now for the same unhallowed purpose.

But from the fatal day of the annexation of Texas, thousands and thousands of honest and intelligent Democrats, though still remaining true to what they believed to be the principles of the party, became alienated from its leaders.