ed on new
propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and
denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for
reviving the foreign slave trade; some for a Congressional
Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the
Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for
maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the judiciary; some
for the "gur-reat pur-rinciple" that "if one man would enslave
another, no third man should object," fantastically called "Popular
Sovereignty"; but never a man among you in favor of federal
prohibition of slavery in federal territories, according to the
practice of "our fathers who framed the Government under which we
live." Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an
advocate in the century within which our Government originated.
Consider, then, whether your claim of conservatism for yourselves,
and your charge of destructiveness against us, are based on the most
clear and stable foundations.

Again, you say we have made the slavery question more prominent than
it formerly was. We deny it. We admit that it is more prominent, but
we deny that we made it so. It was not we, but you, who discarded
the old policy of the fathers. We resisted, and still resist, your
innovation; and thence comes the greater prominence of the question.
Would you have that question reduced to its former proportions? Go
back to that old policy. What has been will be again, under the same
conditions. If you would have the peace of the old times, readopt
the precepts and policy of the old times.

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny
it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown
was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single
Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our
party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it.
If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man
and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for
asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after
you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need not be told
that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is
simply malicious slander.[29]

Some of you admit that