Britain, determined to keep open market where MEN should be bought
and sold."

In this sentence the word "men" is written by Jefferson in capital
letters, showing with what emphasis he wished to declare that the
King of Great Britain was making slaves of a people to whom
belonged the rights of men.

Unfortunately for our country, that King, and others who "waged
cruel war against human nature itself," had already succeeded in
planting in the bosom of American society an element implacably
hostile to human rights, and destined to become the enemy of the
Union, whenever the American people, in their National capacity,
should refuse assent to any measures which the holders of slaves
should deem necessary or even important for the security or
prosperity of their "peculiar institution."

I need not, upon this occasion, repeat what is now familiar
history--how, by the invention of the cotton-gin, and the
consequent enormous increase of the cotton crop, slave labor in the
cotton States, and slave breeding in the Northern slave States,
became so profitable that the slaveholders were able, for many
years, largely to influence, if not control, every department of
the National Government. The slave power became something more than
a phrase--it was a definite, established, appalling fact. The
Missouri controversy, South Carolina nullification, the Texas
controversy, the adoption of the compromise measures of 1850, and
the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854, were all occasions
when the country was compelled to see the magnitude, the energy,
the recklessness, and the arrogance of the slave power.

Precisely when the men who wielded that power determined to destroy
the Union it is not now necessary to inquire. Threats of disunion
were made in the first Congress that assembled under the
constitution. Upon various pretexts they were repeated from time to
time, and no one doubts that slavery was at the bottom of them. In
1833 General Jackson wrote to Rev. A. J. Crawford: "Take care of
your nullifiers; you have them among you; let them meet with the
indignant frown of every man who loves his country. The tariff, it
is now known, was a mere pretext ... and disunion and a Southern
Confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro or
s