it exclusively to either. It is now free territory by the
Mexican law. We will not extend slavery over it, nor will we exclude
slavery from it; but we open the territory to citizens of all the States
alike. It is their common property. The land is all before them where to
choose; let them go in with their wives and their children, their men
servants and their maid servants, their goods and their cattle, and the
stranger that is within their gates, and form such domestic institutions
as may suit their wants and desires, consistent with republican
government and the Federal Constitution, which is for them, as for us,
the supreme law. Let _the people_, who are to constitute States in all
that wide domain, decide for themselves, for they will best know, what
fundamental or temporary laws they want, and the Federal government will
protect them in their free choice. When they come to us matured, as
California now is, into republican States, we will admit them to our
common Union on an equal footing with the original States in all
respects whatsoever, "with or without slavery, as their Constitution may
prescribe at the time of their admission."

Here at last was found the true solution of the question of slavery in
its relations to the Federal government, and it was adopted by the
Congress and accepted by the nation; for both the Democratic and Whig
parties, then the great dividing political parties, united upon it as
common ground in the presidential canvass of 1852. One party, however,
styling itself the _Free Soil Democracy_, the remnant of the party that
had in 1848 supported Martin Van Buren for the presidency upon the
Buffalo platform of "_no more Slave States--no more Slave Territory_,"
did meet in convention, at Pittsburgh, on 11th August, 1852, to denounce
in no measured language the compromise of 1850 and slavery in general. I
notice this party now only to refer you at your leisure to its platform,
and to ask you to note that the President of the Convention was Henry
Wilson of Massachusetts, and its nominees for President and
Vice-President were John P. Hale of New Hampshire, and George W. Julian
of Indiana. Two of these gentlemen are now Republican Senators in
Congress, and the third, Mr. Julian, a member elect from Indiana to the
House of Representatives in Congress. These gentlemen were known in 1852
as _Free Soil Abolitionists_, in 1860 they are known by the more
fashionable and pleasant-sounding name of Republic