VI.
THE DOOM OF SLAVERY.
SPEECH DELIVERED IN VERANDAH HALL, ST. LOUIS,
ON THE 1ST OF AUGUST, 1860.
The speaker had been invited to St. Louis by the Emancipationists of that city. The Presidential campaign of 1860, with Mr. Lincoln as the candidate of the Republicans, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Breckinridge as the two rival candidates of the Democrats, and Mr. Bell as the candidate of the Constitutional Union party, had fairly begun, and the popular excitement was running high. The Anti-slavery movement had grown to imposing dimensions in the city of St. Louis, but still weak in the interior of the State. His speech was, in the first place, intended to aid the Emancipationists in electing their Congressional candidates, but the speaker availed himself of this opportunity to address a direct argument to the people of the Slave States.
Mr. President and Gentlemen:—
To deny the existence of an evil they do not mean
to remedy, to ascribe to paltry causes the origin of great
problems they do not mean to solve, to charge those who
define the nature of an existing difficulty with having
originated it—these are expedients which the opponents
of reformatory movements have resorted to since
mankind has a history. An appeal to ignorance or timidity
is their last hope, when all resources of logic and argument
are exhausted. The old comedy is repeated again
and again.
The assertions that the great contest between free and slave labor has no foundation in fact, that the origin of the slavery controversy is to be found in the fanaticism of a few Northern abolitionists, and that those who speak
