gratuitous grants. But in the Constitution of the United States,
the political power invested in the owners of slaves is entirely
gratuitous. No extraordinary service is required of them; they are,
on the contrary, themselves grievous burdens upon the community,
always threatened with the danger of insurrections, to be smothered
in the blood of both parties, master and slave, and always
depressing the condition of the poor free laborer, by competition
with the labor of the slave. The property in horses was the gift of
God to man, at the creation of the world; the property in slaves is
property acquired and held by crimes, differing in no moral aspect
from the pillage of a freebooter, and to which no lapse of time can
give a prescriptive right. You are told that this is no concern of
yours, and that the question of freedom and slavery is exclusively
reserved to the consideration of the separate States. But if it be so,
as to the mere question of right between master and slave, it is of
tremendous concern to you that this little cluster of slave-owners
should possess, besides their own share in the representative hall
of the nation, the exclusive privilege of appointing two-fifths of
the whole number of the representatives of the people. This is now
your condition, under that delusive ambiguity of language and of
principle, which begins by declaring the representation in the
popular branch of the legislature a representation of persons, and
then provides that one class of persons shall have neither part not
lot in the choice of their representatives; but their elective
franchise shall be transferred to their masters, and the oppressors
shall represent the oppressed. The same perversion of the
representative principle pollutes the composition of the colleges of
electors of President and Vice President of the United States, and
every department of the government of the Union is thus tainted at
its source by the gangrene of slavery.

Fellow-citizens,--with a body of men thus composed, for legislators
and executors of the laws, what will, what must be, what has been
your legislation? The numbers of freemen constituting your nation
are much greater than those of the slaveholding States, bond and free.
You have at least three-fifths of the whole population of the Union.
Your influence on the legislation and the administration of the
government ought to be in the proportion of three to two.--But how
stands the fact? Besides th