to barter
the liberties of the country for personal aggrandisement? "Resistance
to tyrants is obedience to God."

The Senator further insists, "that what the law makes property is
property." This is the predicate of the gentleman; he has neither
facts nor reason to prove it; yet upon this alone does he rest the
whole case that negroes are property. I deny the predicate and the
argument. Suppose the Legislature of the Senator's own State should
pass a law declaring his wife, his children, his friends, indeed, any
white citizen of Kentucky, _property_, and should they be sold and
transferred as such, would the gentleman fold his arms and say, "Yes,
they are property, for the law has made them such?" No, sir; he would
denounce such law with more vehemence than he now denounces
abolitionists, and would deny the authority of human legislation to
accomplish an object so clearly beyond its power.

Human laws, I contend, cannot make human beings property, if human
force can do it. If it is competent for our legislatures to make a
black man _property_, it is competent for them to make a white man the
same; and the same objection exists to the power of the people in an
organic law for their own government; they cannot make property of
each other; and, in the language of the Constitution of Indiana, such
an act "can only originate in usurpation and tyranny." Dreadful,
indeed, would be the condition of this country, if these principles
should not only be carried into the ballot box, but into the
presidential chair. The idea that abolitionists ought to pay for the
slaves if they are set free, and that they ought to think of this, is
addressed to their fears, and not to their judgment. There is no
principle of morality or justice that should require them or our
citizens generally to do so. To free a slave is to take from
usurpation that which it has made property and given to another, and
bestow it upon the rightful owner. It is not taking property from its
true owner for public use. Men can do with their own as they please,
to vary their peace if they wish, but cannot be compelled to do so.

The gentleman repeats the assertion that has been repeated a thousand
and one times: that abolitionists are retarding the emancipation of
the slave, and have thrown it back fifty or a hundred years; that they
have increased the rigors of slavery, and caused the master to treat
his slave with more severity. Slavery, then, is to cease at some