You may sooner, by act of Congress, compel the sea to suppress its upheavings, and the round earth to extinguish its internal fires.

He was neither impassioned nor always impressive; but when he spoke he seemed to strike a blow that had in it the whole vigour and strength of the public sentiment which he represented.

So far as one can judge from contemporary accounts he never spoke better than on this occasion; or when it was more evident that he spoke with all the sincere emotion of one whose mind and heart alike were filled with the cause for which…

Public meetings, full of enthusiasm and noble sentiment, resembled religious gatherings enlisted in a holy war against a great social evil.

Wit, wisdom, patriotism, and pathos, mingled with the loftiest strains of eloquence, compelled the attention and the admiration of every listener.

These men were now brought together by an absorbing sense of duty and a common impulse of resistance to the encroachments of slavery.

That the different elements of opposition should be fused into one complete whole seemed political wisdom.

Yet after all, the time seemed ripe for the formation of a party whose cardinal principle might be summed up as opposition to the extension of slavery."--James F.

Although now well advanced in years, age had not cowed his spirit or lessened the purity of a character which shone in the gentleness of amiable manners; but his pro-slavery platform hit his consistency a hard blow.

In 1819, as secretary of a mass-meeting called to oppose the Missouri Compromise, he had declared that Congress possessed the clear and indisputable power to prohibit the admission of slavery in any State or territory thereafter to be…

He showed that the position of judge in interpreting the law was a very different thing from that of making the law by steering a party into power in a crucial campaign.

As the champion of the Wilmot Proviso concluded, the assembly resembled the Buffalo convention of 1848 at the moment of its declaration for free soil, free speech, free labour, and free men.

He might be broken, but he could not be bent.

When, at last, the Maine liquor bill, which he had introduced and engineered, passed the Legislature, his name was a household word throughout the State.

People realised that a governor no less than a legislature was needed to make laws, and, with the spirit of reformers, the delegates demanded his nomination.

Early in the campaign, Greeley favoured dropping the name of Whig and organising an anti-Nebraska or Republican party, with a ticket of Whigs and Democrats, as had been done in some of the Western States.

Everything is un-American, he argued, which makes a distinction between the native-born American and the one who renounces his allegiance to a foreign land and swears fealty to the country that adopts him.

The campaign opened with two clearly defined issues--limitation of the liquor traffic and condemnation of the Nebraska Act.

The result of the election could scarcely be called a Whig victory; but it was a popular rebuke to the Nebraska bill.

Clark's majority, slender as it finally appeared by the official count, was due to the Whigs occupying common ground with Free-soilers who discarded party attachments in behalf of their cherished convictions.

The predominant sentiment demanded that Kansas should be free, and the excitement aroused by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was quickly rekindled when the South approved the murderous methods intended to make it a slave State.

The territorial legislature, elected by admitted and wholesale fraud, unseated all free-state members whose election was contested, and proceeded to pass laws upholding and fortifying slavery.

They would disapprove prohibition, commend Marcy's admirable foreign policy, and praise the President's management of the exchequer; but they would not countenance border ruffianism, encourage slavery propagandists in Kansas, or submit to…

The Kansas disclosures had the effect of drawing into closer communion the various shades of anti-slavery opinion in New York.

The absence of violent democratic innovations was the Constitution's remarkable feature.