e given me, I should not know what to do
as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the
slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But a moment's
reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think
there is) there may be in this in the long run, its sudden execution is
impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish
in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money
enough to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them
all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this
betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any
rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon.
What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?
My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know
that those of the great mass of whites will not. Whether this feeling
accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if
indeed it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill
founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then make them equals. It
does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted, but
for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of
the South.

When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge
them--not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any
legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not in
its stringency be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than our
ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.

But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting
slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the
African slave trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves
from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking of them
into Nebraska, can hardy be distinguished on any moral principle, and the
repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the
latter.

The arguments by which the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is sought to
be justified are these:

First. That the Nebraska country needed a territorial government.

Second. That in various ways the public had repudiated that compromise and
demanded the repeal, and therefore should not now complain of it.

And, lastly, That