These were States
acting in their sovereign capacity; they possessed power to do as they
pleased; and that was the view which they took of it. I ask, then, how
are we, their descendants, those holding under their authority, to
assume a power which they refused to admit, upon principles eternal and
lying at the foundation of the Constitution itself?
If, then, there be no such distinction or discrimination; if protection
be the duty (and who will deny it?) with which this Government is
charged, and for which the States pay taxes, because of which they
surrendered their armies and their navies; if general protection be the
general duty, I ask, in the name of reason and constitutional right--I
ask you to point me to authority by which a discrimination is made
between slave-property and any other. Yet this is the question now
fraught with evil to our country. It is this which has raised the
hurricane threatening to sweep our political institutions before it.
This is the dark spot which some already begin to fear may blot out the
constellation of the Union from the political firmament of mankind. Does
it not become us, then, calmly to consider it, justly to weigh it; to
hold it in balances from which the dust has been blown, in order that we
may see where truth, right, and the obligations of the Constitution
require us to go?
It may be pardoned to one who, from his earliest youth up, has been
connected with a particular party, who has always believed that the
welfare and the safety of the country most securely rested with that
party, who has seen in the triumph of Democracy the triumph of the
Union, and who has believed for years past that the downfall of
Democracy would be its destruction--it may be pardoned, I say, under
such circumstances as these, to such a person as that, to refer even in
this connection to that feature of the particular point which I am
discussing, which has been brought forward by the recent action of that
party.
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