spirit of which may be discerned in the following
extract:

"Our government is a complicated machine. We have twenty-six states,
with governments administered by separate legislatures and executive
chiefs, and represented by equal numbers in the general Senate of
the nation. This organization is an anomaly in the history of the
world. It is that which distinguishes us from all other nations,
ancient and modern: from the simple monarchies and republics of
Europe, and from the confederacies which have figured in any age
upon the face of the globe. The seeds of this complicated machine
were all sown in the Declaration of Independence; and their fruits
can never be eradicated but by the dissolution of the Union. The
calculators of the value of the Union, who would palm upon you, in
the place of this sublime invention, a mere cluster of sovereign,
confederated states, do but sow the wind to reap the whirlwind.

"One lamentable evidence of deep degeneracy from the spirit of
the Declaration of Independence is the countenance which has been
occasionally given, in various parts of the Union, to this
doctrine; but it is consolatory to know that, whenever it has
been distinctly disclosed to the people, it has been rejected by
them with pointed reprobation. It has, indeed, presented itself in
its most malignant form in that portion of the Union the civil
institutions of which are most infected by the gangrene of slavery.
The inconsistency of the institution of domestic slavery with the
principles of the Declaration of Independence was seen and lamented
by all the Southern patriots of the Revolution; by no one with
deeper and more unalterable conviction than by the author of the
Declaration himself. No insincerity or hypocrisy can fairly be laid
to their charge. Never, from _their_ lips, was heard one syllable
of attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They universally
considered it as a reproach fastened upon them by the unnatural
step-mother country; and they saw that, before the principles of
the Declaration of Independence, slavery, in common with every
other mode of oppression, was destined sooner or later to be
banished from the earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of
Jefferson to his dying day. In the memoir of his life, written at
the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his co