by six States. Three years later, on a square vote to exclude slavery
from the Northwest, only one vote, and that from New York, was against
it. And yet, thirty-seven years later, five thousand citizens of
Illinois out of a voting mass of less than twelve thousand,
deliberately, after a long and heated contest, voted to introduce
slavery in Illinois; and, to-day, a large party in the free State of
Illinois are willing to vote to fasten the shackles of slavery on the
fair domain of Kansas, notwithstanding it received the dowry of freedom
long before its birth as a political community. I repeat, therefore, the
question, Is it not plain in what direction we are tending? [Sensation.]
In the colonial time, Mason, Pendleton, and Jefferson were as hostile to
slavery in Virginia as Otis, Ames, and the Adamses were in
Massachusetts; and Virginia made as earnest an effort to get rid of it
as old Massachusetts did. But circumstances were against them and they
failed; but not that the good-will of its leading men was lacking. Yet
within less than fifty years Virginia changed its tune, and made
negro-breeding for the cotton and sugar States one of its leading
industries. [Laughter and applause.]

In the Constitutional Convention, George Mason of Virginia made a more
violent abolition speech than my friends Lovejoy or Codding would desire
to make here to-day--a speech which could not be safely repeated
anywhere on Southern soil in this enlightened year. But while there were
some differences of opinion on this subject even then, discussion was
allowed; but as you see by the Kansas slave code, which, as you know, is
the Missouri slave code, merely ferried across the river, it is a felony
to even express an opinion hostile to that foul blot in the land of
Washington and the Declaration of Independence. [Sensation.]

In Kentucky--my State--in 1849, on a test vote, the mighty influence of
Henry Clay and many other good men there could not get a symptom of
expression in favour of gradual emancipation on a plain issue of
marching toward the light of civilization with Ohio and Illinois; but
the State of Boone and Hardin and Henry Clay, with a _nigger_ under each
arm, took the black trail toward the deadly swamps of barbarism. Is
there--can there be--any doubt about this thing? And is there any doubt
that we must all lay aside our prejudices and march, shoulder to
shoulder, in the great army of Freedom? [Applause.]

Every Fourth of July o