been violated; and finally, the real ultra-abolitionists, who would resort to the ballot, and also to the bayonet, to effect a revolution in the South, and hurry the country “down a dreadful precipice.” The principal cause of the present excitement he found in the example of emancipation in the British West Indies, and in the existence of “persons in both parts of the Union who have sought to mingle abolition with politics, and to array one part of the Union against another.” He recited all his old arguments against the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the Territory of Florida, as well as against the power of Congress to prohibit the slave-trade between the Slave States.
The immediate object of the abolitionists, he asserted, was to liberate, at one stroke, all the three millions of slaves in the Slave States. Of this he denied the power as well as the morality. If there were no slavery in the country, he would resolutely oppose its introduction. But in the Slave States the alternative was that the white man must govern the black, or the black the white. “In such an alternative,” he said, “who can hesitate? Is it not better for both parties that the existing state should be preserved? This is our true ground of defense. It is that which our Revolutionary ancestors assumed. It is that which, in my opinion, forms our justification in the eyes of all Christendom.”
There was a visionary dogma that negro slaves were not property. “That is property which the
