pose to try to show you that you ought to nominate for the next
presidency, at Charleston, my distinguished friend, Judge Douglas. In
all that, there is no real difference between you and him; I understand
he is as sincerely for you, and more wisely for you than you are for
yourselves. I will try to demonstrate that proposition.

In Kentucky perhaps--in many of the slave States certainly--you are
trying to establish the rightfulness of slavery by reference to the
Bible. You are trying to show that slavery existed in the Bible times by
Divine ordinance. Now, Douglas is wiser than you, for your own benefit,
upon that subject. Douglas knows that whenever you establish that
slavery was right by the Bible, it will occur that that slavery was the
slavery of the white man,--of men without reference to colour,--and he
knows very well that you may entertain that idea in Kentucky as much as
you please, but you will never win any Northern support upon it. He
makes a wiser argument for you. He makes the argument that the slavery
of the black man--the slavery of the man who has a skin of a different
colour from your own--is right. He thereby brings to your support
Northern voters, who could not for a moment be brought by your own
argument of the Bible right of slavery.

... At Memphis he [Judge Douglas] declared that in all contests between
the negro and the white man, he was for the white man, but that in all
questions between the negro and the crocodile, he was for the negro. He
did not make that declaration accidentally ... he made it a great many
times.

The first inference seems to be that if you do not enslave the negro,
you are wronging the white man in some way or other; and that whoever is
opposed to the negro being enslaved is in some way or other against the
white man. Is not that a falsehood? If there was a necessary conflict
between the white man and the negro, I should be for the white man as
much as Judge Douglas; but I say there is no such necessary conflict. I
say there is room enough for us all to be free, and that it not only
does not wrong the white man that the negro should be free, but it
positively wrongs the mass of the white men that the negro should be
enslaved,--that the mass of white men are really injured by the effects
of slave labour in the vicinity of the fields of their own labour....

There is one other thing that I will say to you in this relation. It is
but my opinion; I give it to you without