The REPEAL of the fugitive slave law.
The REPEAL of the Nebraska Kansas Bill.
No more slave territories.
The purchase and manumission of slaves in the District of Columbia, or the removal of the seat of government to free territory.”
Says the Baltimore Clipper:—
“The South is contending for, and the North against, the extension of slavery into the territories; but we do not think that either side would consent to dissolve the Union about the negro population—a population which we look upon as a curse to the nation, and should rejoice to see removed to their native clime of Africa.”
The National Era, one of the best papers in the country, published in Washington City, D. C., says:—
“The tendency of slavery to diffuse itself, and to crowd out free labor, was early observed by American patriots, North and South; and Mr. Jefferson, the great apostle of Republicanism, made an effort, in 1784, to cut short the encroaching tide of barbaric despotism, by prohibiting slavery in all the territories of the Union, down to thirty-one degrees of latitude, which was then our Southern boundary. His beneficent purpose failed, not for want of a decisive majority of votes present in the Congress of the Confederation, but in consequence of the absence of the delegates from one or two States, which were necessary to the constitutional majority. When the subject again came up, in 1787, Mr. Jefferson was Minister to France, and the famous ordinance of that year was adopted, prohibiting slavery North and West of the Ohio river. Between 1784 and 1787, the strides of slavery westward, into Tennessee and Kentucky, had become too considerable to admit of the policy of exclusion; and besides those regions were then integral parts of Virginia and North Carolina, and of course they could not be touched without the consent of those States. In 1820, another effort was made to arrest the progress of slavery, which threatened to monopolize the whole territory west of the Mississippi. In the meantime the South had apostatized from the faith of Jefferson. It had ceased to love universal liberty, and the growing importance of the cotton culture had caused the people to look with indifference upon the moral deformity of slavery; and, as a matter of course, the politicians became its apologists and defenders. After a severe struggle a compromise was agreed upon, by which Missouri was to be admitted with slavery, which was the immediate point in controversy; and slavery was to be excluded from all the territory North and West of that State.
“We have shown, from the most incontestable evidence, that there is in slave society a much greater tendency to diffuse itself into new regions, than belongs to freedom, for the reason that it has no internal vitality. It cannot live if circumscribed, and must, like a consumptive, be continually roving for a change of air to recuperate its wasting energies.”
In the Missouri Legislature, in January, 1857, Mr. Brown, of St. Louis, proved himself a hero, a patriot, and a statesman, in the following words:—