r country. Yes, it is
_color_, not right and justice, that is to continue forever slavery in
our country. It is prejudice against color, which is the strong ground
of the slaveholder's hope. Is that prejudice founded in nature, or is
it the effect of base and sordid interest? Let the mixed race which we
see here, from black to almost perfect white, springing from white
fathers, answer the question. Slavery has no just foundation in color:
it rests exclusively upon usurpation, tyranny, oppressive fraud, and
force. These were its parents in every age and country of the world.

The Senator says, the next or greatest difficulty to emancipation is,
the amount of property it would take from the owners. All ideas of
right and wrong are confounded in these words: emancipate property,
emancipate a horse, or an ox, would not only be unmeaning, but a
ludicrous expression. To emancipate is to set free from slavery. To
emancipate, is to set free a man, not property. The Senator estimates
the number of slaves--_men_ now held in bondage--at three millions in
the United States. Is this statement made here by the same voice which
was heard in this Capitol in favor of the liberties of Greece, and for
the emancipation of our South American brethren from political
thralldom? It is; and has all its fervor in favor of liberty been
exhausted upon foreign countries, so as not to leave a single whisper
in favor of three millions of men in our own country, now groaning
under the most galling oppression the world ever saw? No, sir. Sordid
interest rules the hour. Men are made property, and paper is made
money, and the Senator, no doubt, sees in these two peculiar
institutions a power which, if united, will be able to accomplish all
his wishes. He informs us that some have computed the slaves to be
worth the average amount of five hundred dollars each. He will
estimate within bounds at four hundred dollars each. Making the amount
twelve hundred millions of dollars' worth of slave property. I heard
this statement, Mr. President, with emotions of the deepest feeling.
By what rule of political or commercial arithmetic does the Senator
calculate the amount of property in human beings? Can it be fancy or
fact, that I hear such calculation, that the people of the United
States own twelve hundred millions' (double the amount of all the
specie in the world) worth of property in human flesh! And this
property is owned, the gentleman informs us, by all clas