of the five
States--New Jersey and North Carolina--that then gave the free
negro the right of voting, the right has since been taken away;
and in a third--New York--it has been greatly abridged; while it
has not been extended, so far as I know, to a single additional
State, though the number of the States has more than doubled. In
those days, as I understand, masters could, at their own pleasure,
emancipate their slaves; but since then such legal restraints have
been made upon emancipation as to amount almost to prohibition. In
those days, legislatures held the unquestioned power to abolish
slavery in their respective States; but now it is becoming quite
fashionable for State constitutions to withhold that power from
the legislatures. In those days, by common consent, the spread of
the black man's bondage to the new countries was prohibited; but
now Congress decides that it will not continue the prohibition,
and the Supreme Court decides that it could not if it would. In
those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by
all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the
bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and
sneered at, and construed and hawked at, and torn, till if its
framers could rise from their graves they could not at all
recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining
against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy
follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They
have him in his prison house, they have searched his person and
left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have
closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it
were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be
unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the
hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what
invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can he
produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete
than it is....

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people
at the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and
black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope
upon the chances of his being able to