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 in 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 be produced to
make the impossibility of escape more complete than it is. It is
grossly incorrect to say or assume that the public estimate of the negro
is more favourable now than it was at the origin of the government.

... 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 appropriate the benefit of this disgust to
himself. If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of
that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the
storm. He therefore clings to this hope as a drowning man to the last
plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the
Dred Scott decision. He