ery State in the Union, under the power claimed by
the slavery propagandists, would have a right to take with them all the
constitutions and all the laws of all the States. The confusion which
would follow would be worse than at the Tower of Babel. If a citizen of
any slave State leaves it, and goes into a free State or Territory to
reside, he takes with him none of the rights or powers with which his
State clothed him while he remained therein. He can take with him such
articles as, by the universal consent of mankind, are considered
property, and exercise ownership over them. When at home, I am a legal
voter; I can vote for any State or county officer, or President of the
United States. But if I cross the river, a distance of eighty rods, or
go out of my election district, or in any other direction, I have no
such privilege. The right of suffrage, which is the highest right that
ever can be exercised by a citizen, is controlled by the laws and
Constitution of each particular State. In the State of Ohio, a man need
not be a property holder to entitle him to the right of suffrage; if he
remove into a State where he must have a property qualification before
he can vote, are the rights of the State he left violated? I presume no
one will contend that they are. A man may have some power in the State
of Virginia, given by its Legislature--the right to issue paper money,
for instance; but if he remove to Ohio, he has not this right. No man
would pretend to claim that any of the rights of Virginia are infringed.

Yet the man who would make this claim, would be just as reasonable as he
who should claim that the rights of Virginia are invaded because her
slaveholders are not permitted to take slaves into Kansas or Nebraska.

I understand those Southern men, who talk so much about Southern rights,
claim not only the right to take slaves into the Territories, but they
claim the right to take slave laws and the habits and customs which are
practiced in the slave States. They claim to take laws by which four
million negroes are reduced to the condition of brutes. Six million
white men, women, and children, who have to obtain their living by
labor, are condemned to perpetual degradation and ignorance, by which
three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders can govern and control the
destinies of the millions of people in the slave States; and not only of
those people, but of this great country of ours. They not only claim the
right t