whom the master has known from infancy, whom he has seen
sporting in the innocent gambols of childhood--who have been accustomed
to look to him for protection, he tears from the mother's arms, and
sells into a strange country--among strange people, subject to cruel
taskmasters."

You are in favor of increasing the number of slave states. The terms of
the celebrated "Missouri compromise" warrant, in your judgment, the
increase. But, notwithstanding you admit, that this unholy compromise,
in which tranquillity was purchased at the expense of humanity and
righteousness, does not "in terms embrace the case," and "is not
absolutely binding and obligatory;" you, nevertheless, make no attempt
whatever to do away any one of the conclusive objections, which are
urged against such increase. You do not attempt to show how the
multiplication of slave states can consist with the constitutional duty
of the "United States to guarantee to every state in the Union a
republican form of government," any more than if it were perfectly
clear, that a government is republican under which one half of the
people are lawfully engaged in buying and selling the other half; or
than if the doctrine that "all men are created equal" were not the
fundamental and distinctive doctrine of a republican government. You no
more vindicate the proposition to enlarge the realm of slavery, than if
the proposition were as obviously in harmony with, as it is opposed to
the anti-slavery tenor and policy of the Constitution--the rights of
man--and the laws of God.

You are perhaps of the number of those, who, believing, that a state can
change its Constitution as it pleases, deem it futile in Congress to
require, that States, on entering the Union, shall have anti-slavery
Constitutions. The Framers of the Federal Constitution doubtless foresaw
the possibility of treachery, on the part of the new States, in the
matter of slavery: and the restriction in that instrument to the old
States--"the States now existing"--of the right to participate in the
internal and "African slave trade" may be ascribed to the motive of
diminishing, if not indeed of entirely preventing, temptation to such
treachery. The Ordinance concerning the North-west Territory, passed by
the Congress of 1787, and ratified by the Congress of 1790, shows, so
far as those bodies can be regarded as correct interpreters of the
Constitution which was framed in 1787, and adopted in 1789, that slavery
was