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African slavery has always met with a spirited, yet compromising opposition from the American people. From the time it first began to attract attention in the English colonies, the earnest prayer and efforts of the inhabitants have been to prevent its extension, and provide for its ultimate extinction. But the history of this foul institution will show that whenever by its growth the bonds of legislation have become too tight, it has broken them; that whenever the patriotic and freedom-loving people of this country have met its advance with a determined resistance, it has, by menacing the existence of the General Government, or brandishing aloft the sword of disunion, compelled them in order to avert the threatened danger, to acquiesce in its demands; that thus it ruled the founders of our Republic and the Congress of the United States, until it challenged a contest with Freedom at the ballot-box in the distant field of Kansas; that here, discarding its chosen weapon, and trampling under foot the sanctity of the ballot-box—the palladium of American liberty—it sought to attain its ends by its usual tactics,—intimidation, force and fraud; that here, Freedom, driven to the very door of her temple, comprehending the real character of the monster with which she had to grapple, fought with the valor and prowess of an angel, combatting Satan and his demons in their approach upon the battlements of Heaven; that, its loathsome and blighting presence driven back from the sacred soil of Kansas, smarting from defeat, with its ungovernable spirit enraged by