here was no freedom of speech or of the
press, on any question connected with Slavery. Are they for the sale,
under the Union as it was, even of free negroes into perpetual bondage?
Are they for the denial of the rights of Northern citizens throughout
the South? Above all, are they for the renewal of the African slave
trade, as notoriously occurred in 1859 (during the Administration of
Buchanan), at Savannah, in Georgia, when the wretched victims, just
stolen from their native homes in Africa, were carried to Savannah, and
there, in defiance of the Federal Constitution, openly distributed by
sale among the boasted chivalry of the South? If the Chicago candidates
and their party are for these things--if they are for the Union as it
was in these respects, I am against them. I am for the Union (as clearly
intended by the fathers and founders of the Government) as it will be
when Slavery (its great, and, in fact, its only domestic foe) shall
have been entirely extinguished. While I am for the extinction of
Slavery as a Union and as a war measure, I am consoled by the reflection
that, while it will secure the perpetuity of the Union, it will vastly
increase our wealth and power, and advance all our industrial and
material interests. For several years past I have examined this
question, and, in various essays, published at home, but more especially
abroad, have proved by official statistics, from the censuses of 1850
and 1860, that, under the system of free labor and free schools which
exist in the North, as compared with the South, the product of the Free
States is $217 _per capita_, and that of the slave-holding States $96
_per capita_. Also, that the lands of the South are worth $10 per acre,
and of the North $25 per acre. It was further proved by me, in those
essays, by the same official data, that, exactly in proportion to the
number of slaves is the decreased production _per capita_ in the Slave
States; that of South Carolina, with 402,406 slaves and 291,388 whites,
being $66 _per capita_, and of Delaware, with 90,589 whites and 1,798
slaves, being $143 _per capita_; while that of Massachusetts, with her
sterile soil and severe climate, and far inferior natural advantages,
was $235 _per capita_; and the same rule was also shown to hold in
counties of the same Slave States, those counties with few slaves always
producing more _per capita_ than those having many. The result was, as
shown by the census, that if the productio