onal, as to
justify the contempt with which the numerous petitions for the measure
are treated, and the impeachment of their fidelity to the Constitution,
and of their patriotism and purity, which the petitioners are made
to endure?

I was about to take it for granted, that, although you deny the power of
Congress to abolish the inter-state traffic in human beings, you do not
justify the traffic--when I recollected the intimation in your speech,
that there is no such traffic. For, when you speak of "the slave trade
between the states," and add--"or, as it is described in abolition
petitions, the traffic in human beings between the states"--do you not
intimate there is no such traffic? Whence this language? Do you not
believe slaves are human beings? And do you not believe that they suffer
under the disruption of the dearest earthly ties, as human beings
suffer? I will not detain you to hear what we of the North think of this
internal slave trade. But I will call your attention to what is thought
of it in your own Kentucky and in your native Virginia. Says the
"Address of the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky to the Churches in
1835:"--"Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives,
are torn asunder, and permitted to see each other no more. Those acts
are daily occurring in the midst of us. The shrieks and the agony often
witnessed on such occasions, proclaim with a trumpet tongue the iniquity
and cruelty of the system. There is not a neighborhood where these
heart-rending scenes are not displayed. There is not a village or road
that does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts, whose
chains and mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from
all that their hearts hold dear." Says Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in the
Virginia Legislature in 1832, when speaking of this trade: "It is a
practice, and an increasing practice, in parts of Virginia, to rear
slaves for market. How can an honourable mind, a patriot, and a lover of
his country, bear to see this ancient dominion, rendered illustrious by
the noble devotion and patriotism of her sons in the cause of liberty,
converted into one grand menagerie, where men are to be reared for the
market like oxen for the shambles. Is it better--is it not worse than
the (foreign) slave trade--that trade which enlisted the labor of the
good and wise of every creed and every clime to abolish? The (foreign)
trader receives the slave, a stranger in langua