d, and South of it should be
protected, by Territorial law. * * * What is now the case? It is true
the Crittenden proposition has not yet become part of the Constitution;
but it is also true that an equitable partition has been made by the
vote of the people themselves, establishing, maintaining, and protecting
Slavery in every inch of territory South of the thirty-seventh parallel,
giving the South half a degree more than the Crittenden Proposition.

"There stands your Slave-code in New Mexico protecting Slavery up to the
thirty-seventh degree as effectually as laws can be made to protect it.
There it stands the Law of the Land. Therefore the South has all below
the thirty-seventh parallel, while Congress has not prohibited Slavery
even North of it.

* * * * * *

"What more, then, is demanded? Simply that a Constitutional Amendment
shall be adopted, affirming--what? Precisely what every Republican in
both Houses of Congress has voted for within a month. Just do, by
Constitutional Amendment, what you have voted in the Senate and House of
Representatives, that is all. You are not even required to do that, but
merely to vote for a proposition submitting the question to the People
of the States whether they will make a Constitutional Amendment
affirming the equitable partition of the Territories which the People
have already made. * * *

"You may ask, why does the South want us to do it by Constitutional
Amendment, when we have just done it voluntarily by Law? The President
of the United States, in his Inaugural, has told you the reason. He has
informed you that all of these troubles grow out of the absence of a
Constitutional provision defining the power of Congress over the subject
of Slavery. * * * He thinks that the trouble has arisen from the
absence of such a Constitutional Provision, and suggests a National
Convention to enable the People to supply the defect, leaving the People
to say what it is, instead of dictating to them what it shall be."

It may here be remarked that while Mr. Douglas held that "So far as the
doctrine of Popular Sovereignty and Nonintervention is concerned, the
Colorado Bill, the Nevada Bill, and the Dakota Bill, are identically the
same with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and in its precise language"--these
former Bills having been passed at the last Session of the 36th
Congress--the Republicans, on the contrary, held that neither in these
nor other meas