pair of the Republic.

It is worthy of note that none of the great statesmen engaged in
this first memorable combat in which the Union was threatened in
slavery's cause, lived to confront disunion in fact, face to face.

Clay, then Speaker of the House, and possessed of great influence,
spoke first in opposition to the amendment. Though his speech,
like others of that time, was not reported, we know he denied the
power of Congress to impose conditions upon a new State after its
admission to the Union. He maintained the sovereign right of each
State to be slave or free. He did not profess to be an advocate
of slavery. He, however, vehemently asserted that a restriction
of slavery was cruel to the slaves already held. While their
numbers would be the same, it would so crowd them in narrow limits
as to expose them "in the old, exhausted States to destitution,
and even to lean and haggard starvation, instead of allowing them
to share the fat plenty of the new West."(42) (What an argument
in favor of perpetuating an immoral thing! So spread it over the
world as to make it thin, yet fatten it!)

Clay's arguments were the most specious and weighty of those made
against the amendment. And they did not fail to claim the amendment
was in violation of the third article of the cession of Louisiana,
already, in another connection, referred to.

The Missouri delegate denounced the amendment as a shameful
discrimination against Missouri and slavery, which would endanger
the Union; in this latter cry a member from Georgia joined.

The friends of the amendment fearlessly answered Clay's speech and
the speeches of others. The House was reminded that the great
Ordinance of 1787, passed contemporaneous with the adoption of the
Constitution, and approved and enforced by its framers (some of
whom were also then members of the Continental Congress) imposed
an absolute inhibition on slavery forever, precedent to the admission
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the other States to be formed from
the Northwest Territory; they showed the treaty with France did
not profess to perpetuate slavery in the ceded Territory; they
denounced slavery as an evil, unnatural, cruel, opposed to the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, and that it had only
been tolerated, not approved, by the Constitution; and Mr. Talmadge
closed the debate by characterizing slavery as a "scourge of the
human race," certain to bring on "dire calamities to t