xtension of
slave power."

"I have to say, that while I hold with as much integrity, I
trust, and faithfulness, as any citizen of this country, to
all the original amendments and compromises in which the
Constitution under which we now live was adopted, I never
could, and never can persuade myself to be in favor of the
admission of other States into this Union as slave States
with the inequalities which were allowed and accorded to the
slaveholding States then in existence by the Constitution. I
do not think that the free States ever expected, or could
expect, that they would be called upon to admit further
slave States.... I think they have the clearest right to
require that the State coming into the Union, shall come in
upon an equality; and if the existence of slavery be an
impediment to coming in on an equality, then the State
proposing to come in should be required to remove that
inequality by abolishing slavery or take the alternative of
being excluded. I put my opposition on the political ground
that it deranges the balance of the Constitution."

Wherever there is a foot of land to be staid back from slavery! Every
occasion to be used to oppose the extension of the slave power! New
States to abolish the inequality of slavery, or be excluded! I suppose
Northern conservatives of the class referred to have endorsed those
doctrines and declarations of Mr. WEBSTER a thousand times, as sound,
national, conservative, and constitutional. But no Republican, so far
as I know, has ever proposed to go an inch beyond the line of policy
they indicated. The Chicago, or Republican Platform, certainly does
not. And yet that same line of policy, when advocated by Republicans,
is denounced as unsound, sectional, radical, and unconstitutional.

We have a great deal said about the equality of the States; of the new
with the original States. This is said to be a fundamental doctrine of
the Constitution.

It is claimed that citizens of the slaveholding States have an equal
right in the Territories with the citizens of the non-slaveholding
States; and I admit they have. But it is also claimed that they have
the same right to the protection of property in slaves as property in
cotton. This I deny. There is no such doctrine of State equality in
the Constitution, nor was any thing like it contemplated by its
framers. On the contrary, the Co