I know a great many men differ with me, and have all sorts of bankruptcy systems, but Nature is not built that way.
Finally, slavery took possession of the Government. Every man who wanted an office had to be willing to step between a fugitive slave and his liberty.
Slavery corrupted the courts, and made judges decide that the child born in the State of Pennsylvania, whose mother had been a slave, could not be free.
That was as infamous a decision as was ever rendered, and yet the people, in the name of the law, did this thing, and the Supreme Court of the United States did not know right from wrong.
These dignified gentlemen thought that labor could be paid by lashes on the back—which was a kind of legal tender—and finally an effort was made to subject the new territory—the Nation—to the institution of slavery.
Then we had a war with Mexico, in which we got a good deal of glory and one million square miles of land, but little honor. I will admit that we got but little honor out of that war. That territory they wanted to give to the slaveholder.
In 1803 we purchased from Napoleon the Great, one million square miles of land, and then, in 1821, we bought Florida from Spain. So that, when the war came, we had about three million square miles of new land. The object was to subject all this territory to slavery.
The idea was to go on and sell the babes from their mothers until time should be no more. The idea was to go on with the branding-iron and the whip. The idea was to make it a crime to teach men, human beings, to read and write; to make every Northern man believe that he was a bulldog, a bloodhound to track down men and women, who, with the light of the North Star in their eyes, were seeking the free soil of Great Britain.
Yes, in these times we had lots of mean folks. Let us remember that.
And all at once, under the forms of law, under the forms of our Government, the greatest man under the flag was elected President. That man was Abraham Lincoln. And then it was that those gentlemen of the South said: "We will not be governed by the majority; we will be a law unto ourselves."