As to
the resolution, I approve it entirely. Its sentiment and its spirit are
my own. [Cheers.] At the close of the revolutionary war, which separated
the colonies from the mother country, every state of the Union was a
slaveholding state; every colony was a slaveholding colony; and now we
have seventeen free states. [Cheers.] Slavery has been abolished in one
half of the original colonies, and it was declared that there should be
neither slavery nor the slave trade in any territory north and west of
the Ohio River; so that all that part is entirely free from actual
active participation in this curse, laying open a free territory that, I
think, must be ten times larger in extent than Great Britain. [Loud
cheers.] The State of Massachusetts was the first in which slavery
ceased. How did it cease? By an enactment of the legislature? Not at
all. They did not feel there was any necessity for such an enactment.
The Bill of Rights declared, that all men were born free, and that they
had an equal right to the pursuit of happiness and the acquisition of
property. In contradiction to that, there were slaves in every part of
Massachusetts; and some philanthropic individual advised a slave to
bring into court an action for wages against his master during all his
time of servitude. The action was brought, and the court decided that
the negro was entitled to wages during the whole period. [Cheers.] That
put an end to slavery in Massachusetts, and that decision ought to have
put an end to slavery in all states of the Union, because the law
applied to all. They abolished slavery in all the Northern States--in
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island; and it was
expected that the whole of the states would follow the example. When I
was a child, I never heard a lisp in defence of slavery. [Hear, hear,
hear!] Every body condemned it; all looked upon it as a great curse, and
all regarded it as a temporary evil, which would soon melt away before
the advancing light of truth. [Hear, hear!] But still there was great
injustice done to those who had been slaves. Every body regarded the
colored race as a degraded race; they were looked upon as inferior; they
were not upon terms of social equality. The only thing approaching it
was, that the colored children attended the schools with the white
children, and took their places on the same forms; but in all other
respects they were excluded from the common advantages and privileg