d
harassing our citizens. A case of this kind has lately occurred, where
a colored boy was seduced from Ohio into Indiana, taken from thence
into Alabama and sold as a slave; and to the honor of the slave
States, and gentlemen who administer the laws there, be it said, that
many who have thus been taken and sold by the connivance, if not
downright corruption, of citizens in the free States, have been
liberated and adjudged free in the States where they have been sold,
as was the case of the boy mentioned, who was sold in Alabama.

Slave power is seeking to establish itself in every State, in defiance
of the constitution and laws of the States within which it is
prohibited. In order to secure its power beyond the reach of the
States, it claims its parentage from the Constitution of the United
States. It demands of us total silence as to its proceedings, denies
to our citizens the liberty of speech and the press, and punishes them
by mobs and violence for the exercise of these rights. It has sent its
agents into the free States for the purpose of influencing their
Legislatures to pass laws for the security of its power within such
State, and for the enacting new offences and new punishments for their
own citizens, so as to give additional security to its interest. It
demands to be heard in its own person in the hall of our Legislature,
and mingle in debate there. Sir, in every stage of these oppressions
and abuses, permit me to say, in the language of the Declaration of
Independence--and no language could be more appropriate--we have
petitioned for redress in the most humble terms, and our repeated
petitions have been answered by repeated injury. A power, whose
character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit
to rule over a free people. In our sufferings and our wrongs we have
besought our fellow-citizens to aid us in the preservation of our
constitutional rights, but, influenced by the love of gain or
arbitrary power, they have sometimes disregarded all the sacred rights
of man, and answered in violence, burnings, and murder. After all
these transactions, which are now of public notoriety and matter of
record, shall we of the free States tauntingly be asked what we have
to do with slavery? We should rejoice, indeed, if the evils of slavery
were removed far from us, that it could be said with truth, that we
have nothing to do with slavery. Our citizens have not entered its
territories for the purpose