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unhappy. Have they suffered from this being made a free republic? If so, will any one here who sympathizes with them, and they have many of that class, will any one tell me what wrong, what injurious measure any one or all the slave states in this republic have ever suffered from the policy which has made this and kept this a free republic?

Have they not enjoyed freedom? Have they not enjoyed the freedom of having slavery, and has any one deprived them of the right or the power? Has any one enjoined upon them, or enforced upon them, an unwilling duty? Not one. Have they been taxed oppressively? They have submitted to equal taxation, and no other can be enforced. Have they not enjoyed equal representation? Aye, a representation equal to those of the free states, with the addition of three-fifths of all the slaves. They complain of no wrong, of no suffering that they have endured, and they could not complain, for they themselves have administered the government itself for the whole period of fifty years. They make no complaint against the government and its action, as they could not, because they were exercising the government, the free states having resigned it to their hands in contentment. What then is the character and ground of their discontent? Nothing but this: That slavery, confined to the natural increase of slave labor, and being by its nature inert and without vigor and force, that slavery does not produce prosperity for them equal to the prosperity which free labor and freedom produce for the states which abolished slavery. This is the whole of all the complaint they have-that we of the free states prosper more than they of the slave states; they under the system of their choice, however, and we under the system of our choice. They have still another complaint, and that is this: That free states multiply so that where we had in the beginning only one free state, and they had the other twelve, they have now only fifteen slave states, and we have eighteen free states, without counting the last and youngest one, which they still continue to deny to us.

This discontentment it is that works upon them to desire to produce a change. What is that change now which they desire and which they are seeking to produce, and can be produced only by our consent, and we can do nothing without taking their voice? It is to make no more free states, or to make less, or to reduce the number of free states in the republic by admitting hereafter slave states, and

enable them to provide the material for these slave states by consenting to reopen the African slave trade, and thereby reject the free and voluntary emigrant from Europe, excluding with him our own children from the common soil of the republic.

And now I come to the question, how it happens that we are in the crisis which I describe and confess? It is that for the sake of peace and harmony we have gone so far with them, conceded to their discontent so long, that they have proceeded in direct opposition to the action of all the social causes in the country. They have procured from the congress of the United States laws, from the president of the United States judgments, which all lead directly to enable them, if we do not prevent the further passage of such laws, if we do not prevent the further issuing of such edicts, if we do not prevent the further registering of such decrees, to reopen the African slave trade, causing the territories which shall come in hereafter ast states to be slave territory and not free territory, or at least so large a number of them as to subvert the balance of freedom which has been established, and to introduce slavery as an element in the constitution of the republic.

Now, fellow citizens, I speak not unconscious of the place where I stand. I am surrounded by citizens of the county of Seneca. That one county, which has been known to me intimately for a long period, that one county lying between two beautiful lakes, transparent as crystal, with a soil as rich as ever the human hand subjected to supply the wants of man, a county in the very center of western New York, which stood persistently, I will not say obstinately,stood fixed in resisting and in dissenting from the people of all the counties of all the region around it, and maintaining continually toleration, not for freedom, but for slavery, concession not to freedom, but concession to slavery, and for nearly forty years that I have known it, a balance of one or two hundred votes turned the scale, if ever it did turn, in favor of freedom (God be praised!) and the balance turned it nine-tenths of the time I think in favor of human bondage. I know where I stand. I know where you stand. I know that this persistency in maintaining and defending slavery here, while not you but your neighbors of Cayuga and Wayne, Ontario and Tompkins, and all the other people of this state, have arrested the footsteps of the invader of slavery in Kansas, and turned him back.

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I know you have not had this design-God knows there is no such perverseness among men that they can be insensible to the difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice, liberty and slavery, humanity and cruelty. You have done it simply because you would not listen. You had your guides, grown up men as you are; from childhood up you had your parties-your whig party, and your American party, and your democratic party. And they had their leaders, and you must take care of the welfare of your leaders. You must see that they were sent to the legislature, and sent to congress, sent to the public offices, and you had no time to listen to those who told you that the man that you call your leader is but the ephemeris of the day, that he perishes to-morrow, but freedom or slavery is the interest of humanity for all countries, for all ages.

TRADE IN SLAVES.!

WE may call slavery by gentle names or modest terms, but slavery is nothing less than the trade in slaves, for it makes merchandise of the bodies and souls of men. The fifteen states have the right and have the power, the unquestionable and undeniable power, to carry on this trade in slaves within those fifteen states themselves. We do not interfere with them. We have no right to interfere with them. They are sovereign on that subject, and are exempt from our control. But when it comes to the Federal Union-the Union which is the government over us all-there their right to trade in slaves in the territories of the United States has ceased, because the constitution is a constitution to establish justice, not injustice; to maintain peace not by force, but by the consent of the governed, and to perpetuate, not the curse of slavery, but the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity forever! This Union is this nation-is this empire of thirty millions of people. It is not made for mere trade, much less for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is made for the happiness of the people, for the development of the material resources of the country, to guarantee peace and safety to every citizen in this broad land, and to guarantee him in the full enjoyment of all his rights of life, liberty and property. It opens to him this vast continent for the pursuit of happiness, and by its power acting on the governments of the old world and of the new, it makes the American citizen the citizen of the world.

VOL. IV.

Extract from a speech at La Crosse, Wis., September 14, 1860.

52

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND SECESSION.

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 2, 1860.

It would surprise, I doubt not, the citizens of the metropolis, who meet daily on 'Change, and who are found at night in the political and social circles, if I were to claim that I, whose home is in a distant rural district, feel an equal interest and an equal pride in the prosperity and greatness of New York. And yet I know not why I should not. The city, and the country around which sustains it, are not separate and isolated from each other, but they are parts of one whole. The town stands by common consent for town and country. Certainly an inhabitant of the suburbs may justly feel that he shares in all the pride and in all the glory of the city, as he certainly is seldom altogether exempt from its misfortunes and disas ters. But when a city extends its dimensions so far on all sides as to make the state its suburbs, and when, extending still further, it embraces the most remote regions of the country within its suburbs, then he who lives outside, as well as he who resides within the city gates, feels his heart warm with the impulses of patriotism, for the town and the country have become one.

In the spirit, then, of such a pride in the city in which we stand as a patriot may feel, I shall hope that I can speak profitably, if I treat of the political questions of the canvass in their relations to the metropolis of the country. In the beginning of our history the city of New York was as unconscious of its then future destiny as the country was ignorant itself of the destiny of the city. At the beginning of this century, it was a small provincial town. It had just lost the seat of the federal government. Its inland navigation was all included in a sloop navigation from New York bay to the overslaugh at Albany, together with the navigation of Long Island sound. Public-spirited citizens of New York cast about to see what they could do to continue the prosperity which New York had then recently enjoyed in consequence of its being the federal capital.

They concluded that it was useless to try to make a commercial city on New York bay, because the commerce of the country was destined to be enjoyed by Boston and Philadelphia; and the wise men of the day, after casting around for all other resources, finally coucluded that this island, upon which we stand, was exactly the best spot in the whole country for the establishment of schools, which, by bringing in pupils from large portions of the surrounding country, would make a tolerably fair town on Manhattan island. I do not know whether the experiment was attempted, but if it was, there is no doubt that New York was soon distanced in the race of education by Princeton and New Haven. I do not know whether the people of New Jersey and the people of Connecticut had better qualifications for instructing the young, but I must confess-and I speak it, nevertheless, with reverence-that the Scotch, the English and the Irish schoolmasters and the Dutch, which New York city then employed, if they were to be judged by those they sent out into the rural dis tricts in my childhood, were not altogether the best qualified persons for the task of public education.'

Manhattan island fell, by the dispensation of a wise Providence, within the circuit of a great state and a great nation, and although that state and that nation thought little and cared less for the city of New York, yet, like a great state and a great nation that thought deeply, they thought long and they cared wisely for themselves. The state owned a broad region, rich in forest, mineral, agricultural and manufacturing resources, lying south of the St. Lawrence and west of the falls at Cohoes. Any one could see that a great and flourishing state must arise here if this great region could be peopled with free men, intelligent men, and if its settlers could be furnished with facilities for access to this, the only seaport within. the state. The United States owned a still greater domain, lyingjust west of the domain of New York, stretching to the Mississippi river, and bounded north by the lakes and south by the river Ohio.. Everybody did see that the United States must become a great nation if they could spread the civilization of intelligent freemen over this vast domain, and could connect the seat of that flourishing portion of the country with an adequate seaport on the Atlantic coast. Manhattan island stood just exactly in the point to which all the

'Here there were cries of "Three cheers for William H. Seward, the father of free schools !''

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