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78 the publication of anti-slavery tracts, the delivery of anti-slavery speeches in the Northern States, should be put down by penal laws. But then it turned out that Northern men, who had favored the mobs and voted for the resolutions, instinctively recoiled from the enactment of laws clearly hostile to the freedom of speech and press. They felt the difference between the occasional violence of a mob — a passing occurrence — and a solemn act of legislation, the establishment of a permanent rule. They had been willing to do a lawless thing, but they were not willing to make that thing legal. There the slave power was asking too much. No Northern State made the laws demanded by it; and the Southern press was not slow to declare that the anti-abolition resolutions adopted by Northern meetings had no real value as to the safety of slavery, if the Northern States refused to clothe the sentiments professed with the strength of law.

It was under these circumstances that, as Benton expressed it, “the slavery discussion became installed in Congress,” thenceforward to keep its place. For some years abolition societies had sent petitions to Congress praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and of the slave-trade, without creating much excitement. The twenty-fourth Congress was flooded with them, and they were taken more seriously. In the Senate, Calhoun denounced them as incendiary documents, and moved that they be not received. There was, then,