hat your climate is not suited to slave labor, and
therefore you have constitutions and laws against it.

Let us attend to that argument for a little while and see if it be sound.
You do not raise sugar-cane (except the new-fashioned sugar-cane, and you
won't raise that long), but they do raise it in Louisiana. You don't raise
it in Ohio, because you can't raise it profitably, because the climate
don't suit it. They do raise it in Louisiana, because there it is
profitable. Now, Douglas will tell you that is precisely the slavery
question: that they do have slaves there because they are profitable, and
you don't have them here because they are not profitable. If that is so,
then it leads to dealing with the one precisely as with the other. Is
there, then, anything in the constitution or laws of Ohio against raising
sugar-cane? Have you found it necessary to put any such provision in your
law? Surely not! No man desires to raise sugar-cane in Ohio, but if
any man did desire to do so, you would say it was a tyrannical law that
forbids his doing so; and whenever you shall agree with Douglas, whenever
your minds are brought to adopt his argument, as surely you will have
reached the conclusion that although it is not profitable in Ohio, if any
man wants it, is wrong to him not to let him have it.

In this matter Judge Douglas is preparing the public mind for you of
Kentucky to make perpetual that good thing in your estimation, about which
you and I differ.

In this connection, let me ask your attention to another thing. I believe
it is safe to assert that five years ago no living man had expressed the
opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence.
Let me state that again: five years ago no living man had expressed the
opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence.
If there is in this large audience any man who ever knew of that opinion
being put upon paper as much as five years ago, I will be obliged to him
now or at a subsequent time to show it.

If that be true I wish you then to note the next fact: that within the
space of five years Senator Douglas, in the argument of this question, has
got his entire party, so far as I know, without exception, in saying that
the negro has no share in the Declaration of Independence. If there be now
in all these United States one Douglas man that does not say this, I have
been unable upon any occasion to scare him up. Now, if none of you