he Northwest, only one vote, and that from New
York, was against it. And yet, thirty-seven years later, five thousand
citizens of Illinois, out of a voting mass of less than twelve thousand,
deliberately, after a long and heated contest, voted to introduce slavery
in Illinois; and, to-day, a large party in the free State of Illinois are
willing to vote to fasten the shackles of slavery on the fair domain of
Kansas, notwithstanding it received the dowry of freedom long before its
birth as a political community. I repeat, therefore, the question: Is it
not plain in what direction we are tending? [Sensation.] In the colonial
time, Mason, Pendleton, and Jefferson were as hostile to slavery in
Virginia as Otis, Ames, and the Adamses were in Massachusetts; and
Virginia made as earnest an effort to get rid of it as old Massachusetts
did. But circumstances were against them and they failed; but not that the
good will of its leading men was lacking. Yet within less than fifty years
Virginia changed its tune, and made negro-breeding for the cotton and
sugar States one of its leading industries. [Laughter and applause.]

In the Constitutional Convention, George Mason of Virginia made a more
violent abolition speech than my friends Lovejoy or Codding would desire
to make here to-day--a speech which could not be safely repeated anywhere
on Southern soil in this enlightened year. But, while there were some
differences of opinion on this subject even then, discussion was allowed;
but as you see by the Kansas slave code, which, as you know, is the
Missouri slave code, merely ferried across the river, it is a felony
to even express an opinion hostile to that foul blot in the land of
Washington and the Declaration of Independence. [Sensation.]

In Kentucky--my State--in 1849, on a test vote, the mighty influence
of Henry Clay and many other good then there could not get a symptom of
expression in favor of gradual emancipation on a plain issue of marching
toward the light of civilization with Ohio and Illinois; but the State of
Boone and Hardin and Henry Clay, with a nigger under each arm, took the
black trail toward the deadly swamps of barbarism. Is there--can there
be--any doubt about this thing? And is there any doubt that we must all
lay aside our prejudices and march, shoulder to shoulder, in the great
army of Freedom? [Applause.]

Every Fourth of July our young orators all proclaim this to be "the land
of the free and the home of