, and say if we
do not admit your interpretation,--if we elect a Republican
president,--you will break up the Union. But this is simply the
highwayman's plea. What, then, can we Republicans do to satisfy the
South? We must not only let them alone, but somehow convince them that
we do let them alone. In a word, this and this only will convince them;
we must cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.
And this must be done thoroughly,--done in acts as well as in words.
Silence will not be tolerated; we must place ourselves avowedly with
them. "Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced,
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in
politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and
return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our
Free-State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from
all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe
that all their troubles proceed from us."

Thus he concludes: "If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand
by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of
those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied
and belabored,--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground
between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should
be neither a living man nor a dead man,--such as a policy of 'don't
care' on a question about which all true men do care,--such as Union
appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing
the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous, to
repentance,--such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay
what Washington said and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be
slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened
from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to
ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith,
let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

In behalf of the South, Jefferson Davis, at about this time, presented
in the Senate, as their ultimatum, a set of resolutions. These called
for the recognition of slave-property as an indefeasible right of
territorial settlers, entitled to congressional protection; for the
enforcement of the fugitive slave law, and the repeal of the "personal
liberty laws" by which it was hindered or nulli