If you mean by this that the Constitution of the United States gives you the right to go into the Territories belonging to the people of this country, and take with you not only your human chattels, but also your bloody slave laws, I say, you have no such constitutional rights.
Tompkins argues against the constitutional justification for bringing slave laws into U.S. territories.
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It is our privilege, it is our duty, to repel those assaults, that the world may know that when the advanced guard of freedom is attacked, "our feet shall be always in the arena, and our shields shall hang always in the lists.
It will not be conceived, from these observations, that it is my wish to hold these unhappy people (negroes) in slavery.
It was dangerous to liberty then; no man now apprehends any danger to liberty, unless from the same source.
Would to God a like spirit might diffuse itself generally into the people of this country!
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