to use
its granted powers to protect our property as well as yours. For this
protection we pay as much as you do. This very property is subject to
taxation. It has been taxed by you and sold by you for taxes.

The title to thousands and tens of thousands of slaves is derived from
the United States. We claim that the government, while the Constitution
recognizes our property for the purposes of taxation, shall give it the
same protection that it gives yours.

Ought it not to be so? You say no. Every one of you upon the committee
said no. Your senators say no. Your House of Representatives says no.
Throughout the length and breadth of your conspiracy against the
Constitution there is but one shout of no! This recognition of this
right is the price of my allegiance. Withhold it, and you do not get my
obedience. This is the philosophy of the armed men who have sprung up in
this country. Do you ask me to support a government that will tax my
property: that will plunder me; that will demand my blood, and will not
protect me? I would rather see the population of my native State laid
six feet beneath her sod than they should support for one hour such a
government. Protection is the price of obedience everywhere, in all
countries. It is the only thing that makes government respectable. Deny
it and you can not have free subjects or citizens; you may have slaves.

We demand, in the next place, "that persons committing crimes against
slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, shall be delivered
up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other
property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee
shall be the test of criminality." That is another one of the demands of
an extremist and a rebel.

But the nonslaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts,
have steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro and that negro
was a slave, to deliver him up. It was refused twice on the requisition
of my own State as long as twenty-two years ago. It was refused by Kent
and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each
of the then federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we
submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead
letter from that day to this. The next case came up between us and the
State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the
governor of that State; and he refused it. Why? He said it was no