I do say so now,
however; so there need be no longer any difficulty about that. * * * I
am tolerably well acquainted with the history of the Country and I know
that it has endured eighty-two years half Slave and half Free. I
believe--and that is what I meant to allude to there--I believe it has
endured, because during all that time, until the introduction of the
Nebraska Bill, the public mind did rest all the, time in the belief that
Slavery was in course of ultimate extinction. That was what gave us the
rest that we had through that period of eighty-two years; at least, so I
believe.
"I have always hated Slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist--I
have been an Old Line Whig--I have always hated it, but I have always
been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the
Nebraska Bill began. I always believed that everybody was against it,
and that it was in course of ultimate extinction. * * * The great mass
of the Nation have rested in the belief that Slavery was in course of
ultimate extinction. They had reason so to believe. The adoption of
the Constitution and its attendant history led the People to believe so,
and that such was the belief of the framers of the Constitution itself.
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