by any moral law that I know
of, that if a man loses his horse, the whole country will turn out to
help hang the thief; but if a man but a shade or two darker than I am is
himself stolen, the same crowd will hang one who aids in restoring him to
liberty. Such are the inconsistencies of slavery, where a horse is more
sacred than a man; and the essence of squatter or popular sovereignty--I
don't care how you call it--is that if one man chooses to make a slave of
another, no third man shall be allowed to object. And if you can do this
in free Kansas, and it is allowed to stand, the next thing you will see is
shiploads of negroes from Africa at the wharf at Charleston, for one thing
is as truly lawful as the other; and these are the bastard notions we have
got to stamp out, else they will stamp us out. [Sensation and applause.]

Two years ago, at Springfield, Judge Douglas avowed that Illinois came
into the Union as a slave State, and that slavery was weeded out by
the operation of his great, patent, everlasting principle of "popular
sovereignty." [Laughter.] Well, now, that argument must be answered, for
it has a little grain of truth at the bottom. I do not mean that it is
true in essence, as he would have us believe. It could not be essentially
true if the Ordinance of '87 was valid. But, in point of fact, there
were some degraded beings called slaves in Kaskaskia and the other French
settlements when our first State constitution was adopted; that is a fact,
and I don't deny it. Slaves were brought here as early as 1720, and were
kept here in spite of the Ordinance of 1787 against it. But slavery did
not thrive here. On the contrary, under the influence of the ordinance the
number decreased fifty-one from 1810 to 1820; while under the influence of
squatter sovereignty, right across the river in Missouri, they increased
seven thousand two hundred and eleven in the same time; and slavery
finally faded out in Illinois, under the influence of the law of freedom,
while it grew stronger and stronger in Missouri, under the law or practice
of "popular sovereignty." In point of fact there were but one hundred and
seventeen slaves in Illinois one year after its admission, or one to every
four hundred and seventy of its population; or, to state it in another
way, if Illinois was a slave State in 1820, so were New York and New
Jersey much greater slave States from having had greater numbers, slavery
having been established there in ve