prohibited Slavery
even North of it.

* * * * * *

"What more, then, is demanded? Simply that a Constitutional Amendment
shall be adopted, affirming--what? Precisely what every Republican in
both Houses of Congress has voted for within a month. Just do, by
Constitutional Amendment, what you have voted in the Senate and House of
Representatives, that is all. You are not even required to do that, but
merely to vote for a proposition submitting the question to the People
of the States whether they will make a Constitutional Amendment
affirming the equitable partition of the Territories which the People
have already made. * * *

"You may ask, why does the South want us to do it by Constitutional
Amendment, when we have just done it voluntarily by Law? The President
of the United States, in his Inaugural, has told you the reason. He has
informed you that all of these troubles grow out of the absence of a
Constitutional provision defining the power of Congress over the subject
of Slavery. * * * He thinks that the trouble has arisen from the
absence of such a Constitutional Provision, and suggests a National
Convention to enable the People to supply the defect, leaving the People
to say what it is, instead of dictating to them what it shall be."

It may here be remarked that while Mr. Douglas held that "So far as the
doctrine of Popular Sovereignty and Nonintervention is concerned, the
Colorado Bill, the Nevada Bill, and the Dakota Bill, are identically the
same with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and in its precise language"--these
former Bills having been passed at the last Session of the 36th
Congress--the Republicans, on the contrary, held that neither in these
nor other measures had they abandoned any distinctive Republican
principle; while Breckinridge declared that they had passed those
Territorial Bills, without the Wilmot proviso, because they felt
perfectly secure in those Territories, with all the Federal patronage in
Republican hands.

However that may be, we have here, brought out in strong contrast, the
conciliatory feeling which inspired such Union men as Douglas, and the
strong and persistent efforts they made in behalf of Concession and
Peace up to a period only a few weeks before the bombardment of Sumter;
and the almost total revulsion in their sentiments after that event, as
to the only proper means to preserve the Union. For it was only then
that the truth, as it fell fr