e had only referred to himself when urgently
requested to give an account of his personal experience. He never had
a wish to be considered a martyr. If, when he had finished his course
here; if, when this probationary scene was over, he was found to have
done his duty, he would be fully satisfied. He was not pharasaical
enough to imagine that he had performed any works of supererogation.
Mr. Breckinridge had said this was not a national question; that
slavery in America was not American Slavery; that it was not a
national evil; that it was not a national sin; that is was merely a
question between the State Legislatures and the slave owners. He (Mr.
T.) had said last night, that slavery in America was a national sin,
and he would now adduce the reasons for his statement:--First--The
American people had admitted the slave states into the Union; and by
consenting to admit these states into the confederacy, although there
were in them hundreds of thousands in a state of slavery, they took
the slaves under the government of the United States, and made the sin
national. Second--For twenty years after the adoption of their
Constitution, and by virtue of that very instrument, the United States
permitted the horrid, unchristian, diabolical African slave-trade.
Third--Than the Capital of the United States of America there was not
one spot in the whole world which was more defiled by slavery; and
considering the professions and privileges of the people, there was
not a more anti-christian traffic on the face of the earth.
Fourth--each of the states is bound by the Constitution to give up all
run-away slaves; so that the poor, wretched, tortured slave might be
pursued from Baltimore to Pennsylvania, from thence to New Jersey and
New York, and dragged even from the confines of Canada, a fugitive and
a felon, back into the slavery from which he had fled. He might be
taken from the Capitol: from the very horns of the altar, to be
subjected by a cruel kidnapper to the most horrid of human sufferings.
It is not a national question! When the North violates the law of
God--when it tramples on the Decalogue--when it defies Jehovah! what
was a stronger injunction in the law of Moses than that the Israelites
should protect the run-away slave? But in America every state was
bound by law to give up the slave to his slave-master, to his ruthless
pursuer; and yet it must not be called a national question! Fifth--The
citizens of the free states we