Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/504

 from the mind, that the body may be more easily bowed down to servitude. The bodies of slaves may, with impunity, be prostituted to any purpose, and deformed in any manner by their owners. The sympathies of nature in slaves are disregarded; mothers and children are sold and separated; the children wring their little hands, and expire in agonies of grief, while the bereft mothers commit suicide in despair. How long will the desire of wealth render us blind to the sin of holding both the bodies and souls of our fellow-men in chains! But, sir, I am admonished of the constitution, and told we cannot emancipate slaves. I know we may not infringe that instrument, and therefore do not propose to emancipate slaves. The proposition before us goes only to prevent our citizens from making slaves of such as have a right to freedom. In the present slaveholding states, let slavery continue, for our boasted constitution connives at it; but do not, for the sake of cotton and tobacco, let it be told to future ages that, while pretending to love liberty, we have purchased an extensive country, to disgrace it with the foulest reproach of nations. Our constitution requires no such thing of us. The ends for which that supreme law was made, are succinctly stated in its preface. They are, first, to form a more perfect Union, and insure domestic tranquility? Will slavery effect this? Can we, sir, by mingling bond with free, black spirits with white, like Shakspeare's witches in Macbeth, form a more perfect Union, and insure domestic tranquility? Secondly, to establish justice. Is justice to be established by subjecting half mankind to the will of the other half? Justice, sir, is blind to colors, and weighs in equal scales the rights of all men, whether white or black. Thirdly, to provide for the common defense, and secure the blessings of liberty. Does slavery add anything to the common defense? Sir, the strength of a republic is in the arm of freedom. But, above all things, do the blessings of liberty consist in slavery? If there is any sincerity in our profession, that slavery is an ill, tolerated only from necessity, let us not, while we feel that ill, shun the cure, which consists only in an honest avowal that liberty and equal rights are the end and aim of all our institutions, and that to tolerate slavery beyond the narrowest limits prescribed for it by the constitution, is a perversion of them all.

Slavery, sir, I repeat, is not established by our constitution; but a part of the states are indulged in the commission of a sin from which they could not at once be restrained, and which they would not consent to abandon. But, sir, if we could, by any process of reasoning, be brought to believe it justifiable to hold others to involuntary servitude, policy forbids that we should increase it. Even the present slaveholding states have an interest, I think, in limiting the extent of involuntary servitude; for, should slaves become much more numerous, and, conscious of their strength, draw the sword against their masters, it will be to the free states the masters must resort for an efficient power to suppress servile insurrection. But we have made a treaty with France, which, we are told, can only be preserved by the charms of slavery.

Sir, said Mr. L., until the ceded territory shall have been made into states, and the new states admitted into the Union, we can do what we will with it.