aid what I expected would take place. I made a
prediction only,--it may have been a foolish one, perhaps. I did not
even say that I desired that slavery should be put in course of ultimate
extinction. I do say so now, however; so there need be no longer any
difficulty about that. It may be written down in the great speech.

Gentlemen, Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was
probably carefully prepared. I admit that it was. I am not master of
language; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into
a disquisition upon dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not
believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge
Douglas puts upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to
words. I know what I meant, and I will not leave this crowd in doubt, if
I can explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that
paragraph.

I am not, in the first place, unaware that this government has endured
eighty-two years, half slave and half free. I know that. I am tolerably
well acquainted with the history of the country, and I know that it has
endured eighty-two years, half slave and half free. I believe--and that
is what I meant to allude to there--I believe it has endured, because,
during all that time, until the introduction of the Nebraska bill, the
public mind did rest all the time in the belief that slavery was in
course of ultimate extinction. That was what gave us the rest that we
had through that period of eighty-two years; at least, so I believe. I
have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist,--I
have been an old-line Whig,--I have always hated it, but I have always
been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the
Nebraska bill began. I always believed that everybody was against it,
and that it was in course of ultimate extinction.... They had reason so
to believe.

The adoption of the Constitution and its attendant history led the
people to believe so, and that such was the belief of the framers of the
Constitution itself. Why did those old men, about the time of the
adoption of the Constitution, decree that slavery should not go into the
new Territory where it had not already gone? Why declare that within
twenty years the African slave-trade, by which slaves are supplied,
might be cut off by Congress? Why were all these acts? I might enumerate
more of these acts; but enough. What were they but a clear indication
that the f