of the United States, with the deliberate consent, if not purpose, that slavery should be extended from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean. We have seen the constitution of the United States perverted by the consent of the people until that constitution, instead of being a law of freedom and a citadel of human rights, has come to be pronounced by the affected judgment and willing consent of the highest tribunal of the United States, yet enjoying the confidence and support of the people, to be a tower and bulwark of human slavery, of African bondage; and you have it now announced by the government of the United States, which you yourselves brought into power, that wherever the constitution of the United States goes, it carries, not freedom with the eagles of conquest, but hateful bondage. If the principle which you have thus permitted to be established is true, then there is not an arsenal within the United States, not a military or naval school of the federal government, not a federal jail, not a dock yard, not a ship that traverses the ocean bearing the American flag in any part of the world, where the law, the normal law, the law by which men are tried and judged, is not a law by which every man whose ancestor was a slave is a slave, and by which property in slaves, not freedom of man, is the real condition of society under the federal system of government. I can only ask you to consider for a moment how near you have come to losing everything which you enjoy of this great interest of freedom. The battle culminated at last on the fields of Kansas.___

How severe and how dreadful a battle 3

that has been, you all know. It was a great and desperate effort of the aristocracy of capital in labor, to carry their system practically with all its evils to the shorts of the gulf of Mexico, and to cut off the antic states from all communication with the sister states on the Pacific, and so extend slavery from the centre, both ways, restoring it throughout the whole country. You will say that this was a very visionary attempt; but it was far from being visionary. It was possible, and for a time seemed fearfully probable-probable for this reason, that the land must have labor, and that it must be either the labor of free men or the labor of slaves. Introduce slave labor in any way that you and free labor is repelled, and avoids it. Slave labor was introd into this country by the opening of the African slave trade, and when the territory of the United States, in the interior of the continent, was open to slavery with your consent and mine, nothing then

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would have remained but to reöpen and restore the African slave trade; for it is prohibited only by a law, and the same power that made the law could repeal and abrogate it. The same power that abrogated the Missouri compromise in 1854, would, if the efforts to establish slavery in Kansas had been successful, have been, after a short time, bold enough, daring enough, desperate enough, to have repealed the prohibition of the African slave trade. And, indeed, that is yet a possibility now; for, disguise these issues now before the American people, as they may be disguised by the democratic party, yet it is nevertheless perfectly true, that if you forego your opposition and resistance to slavery, if this popular resistance should be withdrawn, or should, for any reason, cease, then the African slave trade, which at first illegally renews itself along the coasts of our southern states, would gradually steal up the Mississippi, until the people, tired with a hopeless resistance, should become indifferent, and African slavery would once more become the disgraceful trade of the American flag.

Now, all these evils would have happened, all this abandonment of the continent of North America to slavery would have happened, and have been inevitable, had resistance to it depenaed alone on the people of the thirteen original states. We were already overpowered there. From one end of the Atlantic states to the other, there were, in 1850, scarcely three states which did not declare that henceforth. they gave up the contest, and that they were willing that the people of the new territories might have slavery or freedom, and might come into the Union as slave states, or as free states, just as they pleased.

When that had happened, what would have followed? Why, that the people who had the right to slavery if they pleased, had the right to get slaves if they pleased. How, then, were we saved? It seems almost as if it was providential that these new states of the northwest, the state of Michigan, the state of Wisconsin, the state of Iowa, the state of Ohio, founded on this reservation for freedom that had been made in the year 1787, matured just in the critical moment to interpose, to rally the free states of the Atlantic coast, to call them back to their ancient principles, to nerve them to sustain them in the contest at the capitol, and to send their noble and true sons and daughters to the plains of Kansas, to defend, at the peril of their homes, and even their lives, if need were, the precious soil

which had been abandoned by the government to slavery, from the intrusion of that, the greatest evil that has ever befallen our land. You matured in the right time. And how came you to mature? How came you to be better, wiser, than we of the Atlantic states? The reason is a simple one, perfectly plain. Your soil had been never polluted by the footprints of a slave. Every foot of ours had been redeemed from slavery. You are a people educated in the love of freedom, and to whom the practice of freedom and of democracy belongs, for every one of you own the land you cultivate, and no human being that has ever trodden it has worn the manacles of a slave. And you come from other regions too. You come from the south, where you knew the evils of slavery. You come from Germany and from Ireland, and from Holland, and from France, and from all over the face of the globe, where you have learned by experience the sufferings that result from aristocracy and oppression. And you brought away with you from your homes the sentiments, the education of freemen. You came then just at the right moment. You came prepared. You came qualified. You came sent by the Almighty to rescue this land and the whole continent from slavery. Did ever men have a more glorious duty to perform, or a more beneficent destiny before them than the people of the northwestern angle that lies between the Ohio river and the great lakes and the Mississippi? I am glad to see that you are worthy of it, that you appreciate it.

It does not need that I should stimulate you by an appeal to your patriotism, to your love of justice, and to your honor, to perfect this great work, to persevere in it until you shall bring the government of the United States to stand hereafter as it stood forty years ago, a tower of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed of all lands, instead of a bulwark of slavery. I prefer rather to deal in what may perhaps be not less pleasing to you, and that is, to tell you that the whole responsibility rests henceforth directly or indirectly on the people of the northwest. Abandon that responsibility, and slavery extends from the gulf of Mexico to the gulf of St. Lawrence on the Atlantic coast. There can be no virtue in commercial and manufacturing communities to maintain a democracy, when the democracy themselves do not want a democracy. There is no virtue in Pearl street, in Wall street, in Court street, in Chestnut street, in any other street of great commercial cities, that can save the great demo

cratic government of ours, when you cease to uphold it with your intelligent votes, your strong and mighty hands. You must, therefore, lead us as we heretofore reserved and prepared the way for you. We resign to you the banner of human rights and human liberty, on this continent, and we bid you be firm, bold and onward, and then you may hope that we will be able to follow you.

I have said that you are to have the responsibility alone. I have shown you that in the Atlantic northern states we were dependent on you. I need not tell you that at present you can expect no effective support or sympathy in the Atlantic southern states.

You must demonstrate the wisdom of our cause by argument, by reason, by the firm exercise of suffrage, in every way in which the human intelligence and human judgment can be convinced of truth and right—you must demonstrate it, giving line upon line, and precept upon precept, overcoming passion and prejudice and enmity, with gentleness, with patience, with loving kindness to your brethren of the slave states, until they shall see that the way of wisdom which you have chosen is also the path of peace. The southwest are sharers with you of the northwest in this great inheritance of empire. It belongs equally to them and to you. They have plains as beautiful. They have rivers as noble. They have all the elements of wealth, prosperity and power that you have. Still from them, from Kentucky and Tennessee, from Missouri and Arkansas, from Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, you will for the present receive no aid or support; but you will have to maintain your principles in opposition, although I trust not in defiance of them-and that, for the simple reason that in the great year 1787, when Mr. Jefferson proposed that slavery should be excluded in all the public domain of the United States, lying southwest, as well as that lying northwest of the Ohio river, those states had not the forecast, had not the judgment, to surrender the temporary conveniences and advantages of slavery, and to elect, as your ancestors chose for you, the great system of free labor. They chose slavery, and they have to drag out, for some years yet, not long, not so long as some of you will live, but still so long that they will be a drag and a weight upon your movements, instead of lending you assistance they have got to drag out to the end their system of slave labor. You have, therefore, as you see, the whole responsibility. It depends upon you. You have no reliance upon the Atlantic states of the east, north or south. You

have the opposition of the southern states on either side of the Alleghany mountains; but still the power is with you. You are situated where all powers have ever been, that have controlled the destiny of the nation to which they belonged. You are in the land which produces the wheat and the corn, the cereal grains the land that is covered with the oak, and where they say the slave cannot live. They are in the land that produces cotton and sugar and the tropical fruits in the land where they say the white man cannot labor; in the land where the white man must perish if he have not a negro slave to provide him with food and raiment. They do, indeed, command the mouths of the rivers; but what is that worth, except as they derive perpetual supplies, perpetual moral reinvigoration, from the hardy sons of the north that reside around the sources of those mighty rivers?

I am sure that in this I am speaking only words of truth and experience. The northwest is by no means so small as you may think it; I speak to you because I feel that I am, and during all my mature life have been, one of you. Although of New York, I am still a citizen of the northwest. The northwest extends eastward to the base of the Alleghany mountains, and does not all of western New York lie westward of the Alleghany mountains? Whence comes all the inspiration of free soil which spreads itself with such cheerful voices over all these plains? Why, from New York westward of the Alleghany mountains.' The people before me-who are you but New York men, while you are men of the northwest? It is an old proverb, that men change the skies, but not their minds, when they emigrate; but you have changed neither skies nor mind.

I will add but one word more. This is not the business of this day alone. It is not the business of this year alone. It is not the business of the northwest alone. It is the interest, the destiny of human society on the continent. You are to make this whole continent, from north to south, from east to west, a land of freedom and a land of happiness. There is no power on earth now existing, no empire existing, or as yet established, that is to equal or can equal

1 At this point of the speech a large number of voices in the audience responded, indicating the different counties in New York, from which they had emigrated, “Cayuga,” "Genesee," "Seneca," "Yates," "Ontario," &c., so that Mr. Seward remarked: "Why, I thought I was midway between the Lakes and the Mississippi, but I find I am at home among old neighbors and friends."