"Holding, as they do," said he, "that slavery is morally right and
socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national
recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing. Nor can we
justifiably withhold this on any ground, save our conviction that
slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and
constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced
and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its
nationality--its universality! If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist
upon its extension--its enlargement. All they ask we could readily
grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily
grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our
thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole
controversy.... Wrong as we think slavery is we can yet afford to let it
alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising
from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will
prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to
overrun us here in the free States? If our sense of duty forbids this,
then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be
diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so
industriously plied and belabored, contrivances such as groping for some
middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a
man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy
of 'don't care,' on a question about which all true men do care; such as
Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists;
reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the
righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring
men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.
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