and not be opposed to slavery? It is, then, because
I love the principles which brought your government into existence,
and which have become the corner stone of the building supporting you,
sir, in that chair, and giving to myself and other Senators seats in
this body--it is because I love all this, that I hate slavery. Is it
because I contend for the right of petition, and am opposed to
slavery, that I have been denounced by many as an abolitionist? Yes;
Virginia newspapers have so denounced me, and called upon the
Legislature of my State to dismiss me from public confidence. Who
taught me to hate slavery, and every other oppression? _Jefferson_,
the great and the good Jefferson! Yes, _Virginia Senators_, it was
your own Jefferson, Virginia's favorite son, a man who did more for
the natural liberty of man, and the civil liberty of his country, than
any man that ever lived in our country; it was him who taught me to
hate slavery; it was in his school I was brought up. That Mr.
Jefferson was as much opposed to slavery as any man that ever lived in
our country, there can be no doubt; his life and his writings
abundantly prove the fact. I hold in my hand a copy, as he penned it,
of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, a part of
which was stricken out, as he says, in compliance with the wishes of
South Carolina and Georgia. I will read it. Speaking of the wrongs
done us by the British Government, in introducing slaves among us, he
says: "He (the British King) has waged cruel war against human nature
itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the
persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and
carrying them into SLAVERY in another hemisphere, or to incur
miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical
warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the
Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market
where MEN should be BOUGHT and SOLD, he has prostituted his
prerogative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or
restrain execrable commerce, and that this assemblage of horrors might
want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very
people to rise in arms against us, and purchase that liberty of which
he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he has also
obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to comm