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power of a slaveholding oligarchy upon that liberty which our fathers thought they had bequeathed us, have been made to such an extent, that the champions of that oligarchy have, on the floor of our national congress, pronounced the glorious declaration of '76, that all men have an inalienable right to liberty— a mere rhetorical flourish—and have dared to intimate that the poor and laboring people of the northern states, ought not to be allowed to exercise the prerogatives of freemen, any more than the Southern slaves. And by the machinery of partyism, the leaders of the northern wings of the two political hosts have been brought to acquiesce in the supremacy of the slaveholding power in our country, and to unite in requiring of us all, implicit obedience to its demands, though they violate utterly, our highest sense of right, and outrage every feeling of humanity. Now then these unrighteous, tyrannical demands must be withstood, or all but the semblance of liberty, all, but liberty for certain favored classes, will be lost! And by whom shall these demands be withstood, unless by those, who most deeply feel how grievous they are? No—we who love true and impartial liberty, are the last men who ought to leave our country at this crisis. Lord help us to say—"Our country—though we die for thee—yet will we not forsake thee!"
But say the abettors of this fugitive slave law—the demands which this law makes on us, are all in accordance with the compromise of the constitution. Then, I reply, it was a compromise which ought never to have been made; and would not have been binding even upon those who made it, unless men have powder to abrogate the laws of God. Ah! say our opponents that compromise was made by the great and glorious fathers of our revolution, What then, were those men incapable of error? Are we to bow even to them, as if they had a divine right to dictate to all coming ages, what is wisest and best to be done or suffered? They were the last men, who would have assumed that control over their posterity, which the sycophants of slaveholders are now eager to give them. And the history of the ratification of the constitution assures us. that our fathers by no means anticipated the terrible results, to which their compromises have led. They believed rather, and declared, that such an arrangement was made, as would in a few years undermine and extirpate the system of slavery.
Here however I may be told that a few years afterwards,
