Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/656

 the territories. Congress cannot deny him that right. Here is the third article of that convention by which Louisiana, including Kansas and Nebraska, was ceded to the United States:

"The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the principles of the federal constitution, to the enjoyment of the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens of the United States; and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and the religion they profess."

The inhabitants of Kansas and Nebraska are citizens already, and by force of this treaty must continue to be, and as such to enjoy the right of suffrage, whatever laws you may make to the contrary. My opinions are well known, to wit: that slavery is not only an evil, but a local one, injurious and ultimately pernicious to society, wherever it exists, and in conflict with the constitutional principles of society in this country. I am not willing to extend nor to permit the extension of that local evil into regions now free within our empire. I know that there are some who differ from me, and who regard the constitution of the United States as an instrument which sanctions slavery as well as freedom. But if I could admit a proposition so incongruous with the letter and spirit of the federal constitution, and the known sentiments of its illustrious founders, and so should conclude that slavery was national, I must still cherish the opinion that it is an evil; and because it is a national one, I am the more firmly held and bound to prevent an increase of it, tending, as I think it manifestly does, to the weakening and ultimate overthrow of the constitution itself, and therefore to the injury of all mankind. I know there have been states which have endured long, and achieved much, which tolerated slavery; but that was not the slavery of caste, like African slavery. Such slavery tends to demoralize equally the subjected race and the superior one. It has been the absence of such slavery from Europe that has given her nations their superiority over other countries in that hemisphere. Slavery, wherever it exists, begets fear, and fear is the parent of weakness. What is the secret of that eternal, sleepless anxiety in the legislative halls, and even at the firesides of the slave states, always asking new stipulations, new compromises and abrogation of compromises, new assumptions of power and abnegations of power, but fear? It is the apprehension that, even if safe now, they will not always or long be secure against some invasion or some aggression from the free states. What is the secret of the humiliating part which proud old Spain is acting at this day, trembling between alarms of American intrusion into Cuba on one side, and British dictation on the other, but the fact that she has cherished slavery so long, and still cherishes it, in the last of her American colonial possessions? Thus far Kansas and Nebraska are safe, under the laws of 1820, against the introduction of this element of national debility and decline. The bill before us, as we are assured, contains a great principle, a glorious principle; and yet that principle, when fully ascertained, proves to be nothing less than the subversion of that security, not only within