, educated at the
North, have lived all my days at the North. I know five hundred Northern
men to one Southern man. My sympathies, all my sympathies, my love of
liberty for all mankind, of every color, are the same as yours. My
affections and hopes in that respect are exactly like yours. I wish to
see all men free, all men happy. I have few personal associations out of
the Northern States. My people are your people. And yet I am told
sometimes that I am not a friend of liberty, because I am not a Free
Soil man. What am I? What was I ever? What shall I be hereafter, if I
could sacrifice, for any consideration, that love of American liberty
which has glowed in my breast since my infancy, and which, I hope, will
never leave me till I expire?

Gentlemen, I regret that slavery exists in the Southern States; but it
is clear and certain that Congress has no power over it. It may be,
however, that, in the dispensations of Providence, some remedy for this
evil may occur, or may be hoped for hereafter. But, in the mean time, I
hold to the Constitution of the United States, and you need never expect
from me, under any circumstances, that I shall falter from it; that I
shall be otherwise than frank and decisive. I would not part with my
character as a man of firmness and decision, and honor and principle,
for all that the world possesses. You will find me true to the North,
because all my sympathies are with the North. My affections, my
children, my hopes, my everything, are with the North. But when I stand
up before my country, as one appointed to administer the Constitution of
the country, by the blessing of God I will be just.

Gentlemen, I expect to be libelled and abused. Yes, libelled and abused.
But it does not disturb me. I have not lost a night's rest for a great
many years from any such cause. I have some talent for sleeping. And why
should I not expect to be libelled? Is not the Constitution of the
United States libelled and abused? Do not some people call it a covenant
with hell? Is not Washington libelled and abused? Is he not called a
bloodhound on the track of the African negro? Are not our fathers
libelled and abused by their own children? And ungrateful children they
are. How, then, shall I escape? I do not expect to escape; but, knowing
these things, I impute no bad motive to any men of character and fair
standing. The great settlement measures of the last Congress are laws.
Many respectable men, representatives