t change? Public
opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like ours, this popular
sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the
public mind to the extent I have stated. There is no man in this crowd who
can contradict it.

Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask you
to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on,
layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro
every where as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched
already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all
that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of
this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further,
until your minds, now ripening under these teachings, will be ready for
all these things, and you will receive and support, or submit to, the
slave trade, revived with all its horrors, a slave code enforced in our
Territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the
very heart of the free North. This, I must say, is but carrying out those
words prophetically spoken by Mr. Clay,--many, many years ago,--I believe
more than thirty years, when he told an audience that if they would
repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation they must go
back to the era of our independence, and muzzle the cannon which thundered
its annual joyous return on the Fourth of July; they must blow out the
moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate
the love of liberty: but until they did these things, and others
eloquently enumerated by him, they could not repress all tendencies to
ultimate emancipation.

I ask attention to the fact that in a pre-eminent degree these popular
sovereigns are at this work: blowing out the moral lights around us;
teaching that the negro is no longer a man, but a brute; that the
Declaration has nothing to do with him; that he ranks with the crocodile
and the reptile; that man, with body and soul, is a matter of dollars and
cents. I suggest to this portion of the Ohio Republicans, or Democrats, if
there be any present, the serious consideration of this fact that there
is now going on among you a steady process of debauching public opinion on
this subject. With this, my friends, I bid you adieu.

SPEECH AT CINCINNATI OHIO, SEPTEMBER 17, 1859

My Fellow-Citizens of the State of Ohio: This