hority to do the same
thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the Constitution. In
1800 they prohibited American citizens from trading in slaves between
foreign countries, as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they
passed a law in aid of one or two slave-State laws in restraint of the
internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law,
nearly a year in advance,--to take effect the first day of 1808, the very
first day the Constitution would permit, prohibiting the African slave
trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties. In 1820, finding these
provisions ineffectual, they declared the slave trade piracy, and annexed
to it the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the
General Government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted
systems of gradual emancipation, by which the institution was rapidly
becoming extinct within their limits. Thus we see that the plain,
unmistakable spirit of that age toward slavery was hostility to the
principle and toleration only by necessity.

But now it is to be transformed into a "sacred right." Nebraska brings it
forth, places it on the highroad to extension and perpetuity, and with a
pat on its back says to it, "Go, and God speed you." Henceforth it is
to be the chief jewel of the nation the very figure-head of the ship of
state. Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have
been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we began
by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning
we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave
others is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles cannot
stand together. They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and who ever holds
to the one must despise the other. When Pettit, in connection with his
support of the Nebraska Bill, called the Declaration of Independence "a
self-evident lie," he only did what consistency and candor require all
other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty-odd Nebraska senators who sat
present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprised that any
Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation has ever
yet rebuked him. If this had been said among Marion's men, Southerners
though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this
had been said to the men who captured Andre, the man who said it would
probably have been hung soone