I have always been an old
line Henry Clay Whig.
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I have said a hundred times,
and I have no inclination to take it back,
that I believe there is no right,
and ought to be no inclination in the people
of the free States to enter into the slave States,
and to interfere with the question of slavery at all.
I have said that always.
Being elected to Congress,
though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it,
has not pleased me as much as I expected.
Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent
upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil
and in the proportionable amount of the same
which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.
In so far as the government lands can be disposed of,
I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels so
that every poor man may have a home.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it
and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief
that it is in course of ultimate extinction,
or its advocates will push it forward,
till it shall become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new
North as well as South.
That our government should have been maintained in its original
form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at.
It had many props to support it through that period,
which now are decayed and crumbled away.
Through that period,
it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now,
it is understood to be a successful one.
Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by
all and thought to include all; but now,
to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal,
it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till,
if its framers could rise from their graves,
they could not at all recognize it.
Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature
opposition to it is his love of justice.
These principles are an eternal antagonism;
and when brought into collision so fiercely,
as slavery extension brings them,
shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.
My father... removed from Kentucky to... Indiana,
in my eighth year... It was a wild region,
with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.
There I grew up... Of course when I came of age,
I did not know much.
Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher...
but that was all.
The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim
their fugitives I have constantly admitted.
The legal right of Congress to interfere with
their institution in the states,
I have constantly denied.
We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain
that this nation, under God,
shall have a new birth of freedom
and that government of the people,
by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth on this continent, a new nation,
conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal.
The people know their rights,
and they are never slow to assert
and maintain them when they are invaded.