the
_first_ petitioners for the abolition of slavery in the District, and
for a long time the only ones, petitioning from year to year through
evil report and good report, still petitioning, by individual societies
and in their national conventions.

But as if it were not enough to table the charge against such men as
Benjamin Rush, William Rawle, John Sergeant, Robert Vaux, Cadwallader
Colden, and Peter A. Jay,--to whom we may add Rufus King, James
Hillhouse, William Pinkney, Thomas Addis Emmett, Daniel D. Tompkins, De
Witt Clinton, James Kent, and Daniel Webster, besides eleven hundred
citizens of the District itself, headed by their Chief Justice and
judges--even the sovereign States of Pennsylvania, New-York,
Massachusetts, and Vermont, whose legislatures have either memorialized
Congress to abolish slavery in the District, or instructed their
Senators to move such a measure, must be gravely informed by Messrs.
Clay, Norvell, Niles, Smith, Pierce, Benton, Black, Tipton, and other
honorable Senators, either that their perception is so dull, they know
not what of they affirm, or that their moral sense is so blunted they
can demand without compunction a violation of the nation's faith!

We have spoken already of the concessions unwittingly made in this
resolution to the true doctrine of Congressional power over the
District. For that concession, important as it is, we have small thanks
to render. That such a resolution, passed with such an _intent_, and
pressing at a thousand points on relations and interests vital to the
free states, should be hailed, as it has been, by a portion of the
northern press as a "compromise" originating in deference to northern
interests, and to be received by us as a free-will offering of
disinterested benevolence, demanding our gratitude to the mover,--may
well cover us with shame. We deserve the humiliation and have well
earned the mockery. Let it come!

If, after having been set up at auction in the public sales-room of the
nation, and for thirty years, and by each of a score of "compromises,"
treacherously knocked off to the lowest bidder, and that without money
and without price, the North, plundered and betrayed, _will not_, in
this her accepted time, consider the things that belong to her peace
before they are hidden from her eyes, then let her eat of the fruit of
her own way, and be filled with her own devices! Let the shorn and
blinded giant grind in the prison-house of the Ph