. Let us purify it.
Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit if not the blood of the
Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of moral right, back
upon its existing legal rights and its arguments of necessity. Let us
return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in
peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the
practices and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South, let
all Americans, let all lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the great
and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union,
but we shall have so saved it as to make and to keep it for ever worthy
of the saving.

_From Letter to the Hon. Geo. Robertson, Lexington, Kentucky.
Springfield, Illinois. August 15, 1855_

My dear Sir, ... You are not a friend of slavery in the abstract. In
that speech you spoke of "the peaceful extinction of slavery" and used
other expressions indicating your belief that the thing was, at some
time, to have an end. Since then we have had thirty-six years of
experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is
no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us. The signal failure
of Henry Clay and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect anything
in favour of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand
other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly. On the question of liberty,
as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political
slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that
"all men are created equal" a self-evident truth; but now when we have
grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have
become so greedy to be _masters_ that we call the same maxim "a
self-evident lie." The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is
still a great day for burning fire-crackers!

That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself
become extinct with the _occasion_ and the _men_ of the Revolution.
Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the States adopted
systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact that not a
single State has done the like since. So far as peaceful, voluntary
emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America,
scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as
fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of the lost souls of
the fina