"Done at the City of Washington, this First day of January, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.
"By the President:
"ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
"WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State."
CHAPTER XIX.
HISTORICAL REVIEW.
Let us now refresh recollection by glancing backward over the history of our Country, and we shall see, as recorded in these pages, that, from the first, there existed in this Nation a class of individuals greedily ambitious of power and determined to secure and maintain control of this Government; that they left unturned no stone which would contribute to the fostering and to the extension of African Slavery; that, hand in hand with African Slavery—and as a natural corollary to it—they advocated Free Trade as a means of degrading Free White labor to the level of Black Slave labor, and thus increasing their own power; that from the first, ever taking advantage of the general necessities of the Union, they arrogantly demanded and received from a brow-beaten People, concession after concession, and compromise after compromise; that every possible pretext and occasion was seized by them to increase, consolidate, and secure their power, and to extend the territorial limits over which their peculiar Pro-Slavery and Pro-Free-Trade doctrines prevailed; and that their nature was so exacting, and their greed so rapacious, that it was impossible ever to satisfy them.
Nor were they burdened with over-much of that high sense of honor—a quality of which they often vaunted themselves—which impelled others to stand by their agreements. It seemed as though they considered the most sacred promises and covenants of no account, and made only to be trampled upon, when in the way of their Moloch.
We remember the bitter Slavery agitation in Congress over the admission of the State of Missouri, and how it eventuated in the Missouri Compromise. That compromise, we have seen, they afterward trod upon, and broke, with as little compunction as they would have stepped upon and crushed a toad.