appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify
their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and
the Union. I do oppose the extension of slavery because my judgment and
feeling so prompt me, and I am under no obligations to the contrary.
If for this you and I must differ, differ we must. You say, if you were
President, you would send an army and hang the leaders of the Missouri
outrages upon the Kansas elections; still, if Kansas fairly votes herself
a slave State she must be admitted or the Union must be dissolved. But how
if she votes herself a slave State unfairly, that is, by the very means
for which you say you would hang men? Must she still be admitted, or the
Union dissolved? That will be the phase of the question when it first
becomes a practical one. In your assumption that there may be a fair
decision of the slavery question in Kansas, I plainly see you and I would
differ about the Nebraska law. I look upon that enactment not as a law,
but as a violence from the beginning. It was conceived in violence, is
maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence. I say it was
conceived in violence, because the destruction of the Missouri Compromise,
under the circumstances, was nothing less than violence. It was passed in
violence because it could not have passed at all but for the votes of
many members in violence of the known will of their constituents. It is
maintained in violence, because the elections since clearly demand its
repeal; and the demand is openly disregarded.

You say men ought to be hung for the way they are executing the law; I say
the way it is being executed is quite as good as any of its antecedents.
It is being executed in the precise way which was intended from the first,
else why does no Nebraska man express astonishment or condemnation? Poor
Reeder is the only public man who has been silly enough to believe
that anything like fairness was ever intended, and he has been bravely
undeceived.

That Kansas will form a slave constitution, and with it will ask to be
admitted into the Union, I take to be already a settled question, and so
settled by the very means you so pointedly condemn. By every principle of
law ever held by any court North or South, every negro taken to Kansas
is free; yet, in utter disregard of this,--in the spirit of violence
merely,--that beautiful Legislature gravely passes a law to hang any
man who shall venture to infor