Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v6.djvu/46

 24 SPEECHES [Feb. 27

the session, had under consideration, and in prog- ress toward maturity, these constitutional amend- ments, and this act prohibiting slavery in all the territory the nation then owned. The constitu- tional amendments were introduced before, and passed after, the act enforcing the ordinance of '87; so that, during the whole pendency of the act to enforce the ordinance, the constitutional amendments were also pending.

The seventy-six members of that Congress, in- cluding sixteen of the framers of the original Constitution, as before stated, were preeminently our fathers who framed that part of "the gov- ernment under which we live" which is now claimed as forbidding the Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal Territories.

Is it not a little presumptuous in any one at this day to affirm that the two things which that Congress deliberately framed, and carried to ma- turity at the same time, are absolutely incon- sistent with each other? And does not such affirmation become impudently absurd when coupled with the other affirmation, from the same mouth, that those who did the two things alleged to be inconsistent, understood whether they really were inconsistent better than we — better than he who affirms that they are inconsistent?

It is surely safe to assume that the thirty-nine framers of the original Constitution, and the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken together, do certainly include those who may be fairly called "our fathers who framed the government under which we live." And so assuming, I defy any man to show that any one of them ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understand-