rtant said about
it by the same generation of men in the adoption of the old Ordinance of
'87, through the influence of which you here in Ohio, our neighbors in
Indiana, we in Illinois, our neighbors in Michigan and Wisconsin, are
happy, prosperous, teeming millions of free men. That generation of men,
though not to the full extent members of the convention that framed the
Constitution, were to some extent members of that convention, holding
seats at the same time in one body and the other, so that if there was any
compromise on either of these subjects, the strong evidence is that
that compromise was in favor of the restriction of slavery from the new
Territories.

But Douglas says that he is unalterably opposed to the repeal of those
laws because, in his view, it is a compromise of the Constitution. You
Kentuckians, no doubt, are somewhat offended with that. You ought not to
be! You ought to be patient! You ought to know that if he said less than
that, he would lose the power of "lugging" the Northern States to your
support. Really, what you would push him to do would take from him
his entire power to serve you. And you ought to remember how long, by
precedent, Judge Douglas holds himself obliged to stick by compromises.
You ought to remember that by the time you yourselves think you are ready
to inaugurate measures for the revival of the African slave trade, that
sufficient time will have arrived, by precedent, for Judge Douglas to
break through, that compromise. He says now nothing more strong than
he said in 1849 when he declared in favor of Missouri Compromise,--and
precisely four years and a quarter after he declared that Compromise to
be a sacred thing, which "no ruthless hand would ever daze to touch," he
himself brought forward the measure ruthlessly to destroy it. By a mere
calculation of time it will only be four years more until he is ready to
take back his profession about the sacredness of the Compromise abolishing
the slave trade. Precisely as soon as you are ready to have his services
in that direction, by fair calculation, you may be sure of having them.

But you remember and set down to Judge Douglas's debt, or discredit, that
he, last year, said the people of Territories can, in spite of the Dred
Scott decision, exclude your slaves from those Territories; that he
declared, by "unfriendly legislation" the extension of your property into
the new Territories may be cut off, in the teeth of the decision