y have been a foolish one, perhaps. I did not even say that I
desired that slavery should be put in course of ultimate extinction. I do
say so now, however, so there need be no longer any difficulty about that.
It may be written down in the great speech.

Gentlemen, Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was
probably carefully prepared. I admit that it was. I am not master of
language; I have not a fine education; I am not capable of entering into
a disquisition upon dialectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not
believe the language I employed bears any such construction as Judge
Douglas puts upon it. But I don't care about a quibble in regard to words.
I know what I meant, and I will not leave this crowd in doubt, if I can
explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph.

I am not, in the first place, unaware that this government has endured
eighty-two years half slave and half free. I know that. I am tolerably
well acquainted with the history of the country, and I know that it has
endured eighty-two years half slave and half free. I believe--and that is
what I meant to allude to there--I believe it has endured because during
all that time, until the introduction of the Nebraska Bill, the public
mind did rest all the time in the belief that slavery was in course of
ultimate extinction. That was what gave us the rest that we had through
that period of eighty-two years,--at least, so I believe. I have always
hated slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist,--I have been an Old
Line Whig,--I have always hated it; but I have always been quiet about
it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began. I
always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in course
of ultimate extinction. [Pointing to Mr. Browning, who stood near by.]
Browning thought so; the great mass of the nation have rested in the
belief that slavery was in course of ultimate extinction. They had reason
so to believe.

The adoption of the Constitution and its attendant history led the
people to believe so; and that such was the belief of the framers of the
Constitution itself, why did those old men, about the time of the adoption
of the Constitution, decree that slavery should not go into the new
Territory, where it had not already gone? Why declare that within twenty
years the African slave trade, by which slaves are supplied, might be cut
off by Congress? Why were all these acts? I