I could not avoid noticing the anxiety of the Senator from Kentucky to
accept any thing, and the readiness of the Senator from Oregon to
pledge his people--"my people"--to any thing that he chooses. Now, I
know there are many free people in the State of Oregon. They generally
do as they please. They have no master. No man owns them; and no man
can claim to control them. But this I am warranted in asserting--for I
know long, well, and intimately, the gallant men of Oregon--that they
will not be found ready or inclined, at the Senator's and his masters
beck, to imbrue their hands, in a godless cause, in fraternal gore.

Mr. President, the principles asserted in the resolutions adopted by
the Senate, last winter, have not been carried out. We see the
consequences. We see a dissevered country and a divided Union. A
number of the States have gone off, have formed an independent
Government; it is in existence, and the States composing it will never
come back to you, unless you say in plain English, in your amendments
to the Constitution, that every State in the future Union has an equal
right to the Territories and all the protection and blessings of this
Government--never! I tell you, sir, although some foolish men and some
wicked ones may say I am a disunionist, I am for the Union upon the
principles of the Constitution, and not a traitor. None but a coward
will even think me a traitor; and if anybody thinks I am, let him test
me. This Union could exist upon the principles that I have held and
that are set forth in the DAVIS resolutions; but upon no other
condition can it exist. Then, sir, disunion is inevitable. It is not
going to stop with the seven States that are out. No, sir; my word for
it, unless you do something more than is proposed in this proposition,
old Virginia will go out too--slothful as she has been, and tardy as
she seems in appreciating her own interests and her rights, and kind
and generous as she has been in inviting a Peace Congress to agree
upon measures of safety for the Union. The time will come, however,
when old Virginia will stand trifling and chicanery no longer. Neither
will North Carolina suffer it. None of the slave States will endure
it; for they cannot separate one from the other, and they will not.
They will go out of this Union and into one of their own; forming a
great, homogeneous, and glorious Southern Confederacy. It is and it
has been, Senators, in your power to prevent this; it is