I will ask your attention to. He said upon the floor of
the United States Senate, and he has repeated it, as I understand, a great
many times, that he does not care whether slavery is "voted up or voted
down." This again shows you, or ought to show you, if you would reason
upon it, that he does not believe it to be wrong; for a man may say when
he sees nothing wrong in a thing; that he, dues not care whether it be
voted up or voted down but no man can logically say that he cares not
whether a thing goes up or goes down which to him appears to be wrong. You
therefore have a demonstration in this that to Judge Douglas's mind your
favorite institution, which you would have spread out and made perpetual,
is no wrong.
Another thing he tells you, in a speech made at Memphis in Tennessee,
shortly after the canvass in Illinois, last year. He there distinctly
told the people that there was a "line drawn by the Almighty across this
continent, on the one side of which the soil must always be cultivated by
slaves"; that he did not pretend to know exactly where that line was,
but that there was such a line. I want to ask your attention to that
proposition again; that there is one portion of this continent where the
Almighty has signed the soil shall always be cultivated by slaves; that
its being cultivated by slaves at that place is right; that it has the
direct sympathy and authority of the Almighty. Whenever you can get these
Northern audiences to adopt the opinion that slavery is right on the other
side of the Ohio, whenever you can get them, in pursuance of Douglas's
views, to adopt that sentiment, they will very readily make the other
argument, which is perfectly logical, that that which is right on that
side of the Ohio cannot be wrong on this, and that if you have that
property on that side of the Ohio, under the seal and stamp of the
Almighty, when by any means it escapes over here it is wrong to have
constitutions and laws "to devil" you about it. So Douglas is moulding the
public opinion of the North, first to say that the thing is right in your
State over the Ohio River, and hence to say that that which is right there
is not wrong here, and that all laws and constitutions here recognizing
it as being wrong are themselves wrong, and ought to be repealed and
abrogated. He will tell you, men of Ohio, that if you choose here to have
laws against slavery, it is in conformity to the idea that your climate
is not suited to it, t
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