d to insert a
provision for a prohibition of slavery, I would not vote for it. * * *
Sir, we hear occasionally of the annexation of Canada; and if there be
any man, any of the northern Democracy, or any of the Free Soil party,
who supposes it necessary to insert a Wilmot Proviso in a territorial
government for New Mexico, that man would, of course, be of opinion that
it is necessary to protect the ever-lasting snows of Canada from the
foot of slavery by the same overspreading wing of an act of Congress.
Sir, wherever there is a substantive good to be done, wherever there is
a foot of land to be prevented from becoming slave territory, I am ready
to assert the principle of the exclusion of slavery. I am pledged to
it from the year 1837; I have been pledged to it again and again; and I
will perform these pledges; but I will not do a thing unnecessarily
that wounds the feelings of others, or that does discredit to my own
understanding. * * *

Mr. President, in the excited times in which we live, there is found
to exist a state of crimination and recrimination between the North
and South. There are lists of grievances produced by each; and those
grievances, real or supposed, alienate the minds of one portion of the
country from the other, exasperate the feelings, and subdue the sense of
fraternal affection, patriotic love, and mutual regard. I shall bestow a
little attention, sir, upon these various grievances existing on the one
side and on the other. I begin with complaints of the South. I will not
answer, further than I have, the general statements of the honorable
Senator from South Carolina, that the North has prospered at the
expense of the South in consequence of the manner of administering this
Government, in the collection of its revenues, and so forth. These are
disputed topics, and I have no inclination to enter into them. But I
will allude to other complaints of the South, and especially to one
which has in my opinion, just foundation; and that is, that there has
been found at the North, among individuals and among legislators, a
disinclination to perform fully their constitutional duties in regard
to the return of persons bound to service who have escaped into the free
States. In that respect, the South, in my judgment, is right, and the
North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legislature is bound
by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the
Constitution of the United States; and the