Page:The African Slave Trade (Clark).djvu/85

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SPEECH OF J. Q. ADAMS.
81

you and them? What is the temper of feeling between the component parts of your own southern population, between your Anglo-Saxon, Norman-French, and Moorish-Spanish inhabitants of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri? between them all and the Indian savage, the original possessor of the land from which you are scourging him already back to the foot of the Rocky Mountains? What between them all and the American negro, of African origin, whom they are holding in cruel bondage? Are these elements of harmony, concord, and patriotism between the component parts of a nation starting upon a crusade of conquest? And what are the feelings of all the motley compound, equally heterogeneous of the Mexican population? Do not you, an Anglo-Saxon, slaveholding exterminator of Indians, from the bottom of your soul, hate the Mexican-Spaniard-Indian emancipator of slaves, and abolisher of slavery? And do you think that your hatred is not with equal cordiality returned? Go to the city of Mexico, — ask any one of your fellow-citizens who have been there for the last three or four years, whether they scarcely dare show their faces, as Anglo-Americans, in the streets. Be assured, sir, that however heartily, you detest the Mexican, his bosom burns with an equally deep-seated detestation of you.

"And this is the nation with which, at the instigation of your executive government, you are now rushing into war, — into a war of conquest,-commenced by aggression on your part, and for the reëstablishment of slavery, where it has been abolished, throughout the Mexican republic. 66 And again I ask, what will be your cause in such a war? Aggression, conquest, and the reëstablishment of slavery, where it has been abolished. In that war, sir, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico; and your ban-