"The South will not tolerate our interference with their slaves, [by our discussing the matter in the newspapers and elsewhere]." "The Union then, if used to disturb this institution of Slavery, will be then as the 'spider's web; a breath will agitate, a blast will sweep it away forever.'"
"If, then, these abolitionists shall go on ... the fate of our government is sealed.... And who will attempt to fathom the immeasurable abyss of a dissolution of the Union?"
"Tell the abolitionists this; present to them in full array the consequences of their attempts at immediate emancipation, and they meet all by a cold abstraction. They answer, 'We must do right regardless of consequences.'" "They assume that such a course [undoing the heavy burthens and letting the oppressed go free, and loving your neighbor as yourself] is right. When that is the very point in controversy, and when inevitable consequences demonstrate that it must be wrong."
"They [the abolitionists] insist upon immediate, instantaneous emancipation.... No man, say they, can be rightfully restrained of his liberty except for crime." "They come to the conclusion that no laws that sanction or uphold it [Slavery] can have any moral obligation. The Constitution is the Supreme law of the land. It does sanction, it does uphold Slavery; and if this doctrine be true, that sacred compact has always been [so far] morally null and void." "He [Washington] that Slaveholder ... came with other Slaveholders to drive the British myrmidons from this city and this Hall. Our fathers did not refuse to hold communion with him or with them. With Slaveholders they formed the Confederation ... with them they made the Declaration of Independence." "And in the original draft of the Declaration was contained a most eloquent passage upon this very topic of negro Slavery, which was stricken out in deference to the wishes of members from the South." "Slavery existed then as now." "Our fathers were not less devoted friends of liberty, not less pure as philanthropists or pious as Christians than any of their children of the present day." [Therefore we must not attempt to emancipate a slave!]
Here is the passage which the speaker thought it so praiseworthy in the Revolutionary Congress to strike out from the Declaration of Independence:—
"He [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of Infidel nations, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the Lives of another."
Mr. Jefferson says, "It was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under it, for though their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."
But the orator went on protesting against righteousness:—
"I would beseech them [the Abolitionists] to discard their dangerous abstractions [that men are endowed by their Creator with certain natural, equal, and unalienable Rights—to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness] which they [in common with the Declaration of Independence] adopt as universal rules of human conduct—without regard to time, condition, or circumstances; which darken the understanding and mislead the judgment, and urge them forward to consequences from which they will shrink back with horror. I would ask them to reflect that ... the religion they profess is not to be advanced by forgetting the precepts and the example of their Divine Master. Upon that example I would ask them to pause. He found Slavery, Roman Slavery, an institution of the country in which he lived. Did he denounce it? Did he attempt its immediate abolition? Did he do any thing, or say any thing which could in its remotest tendency encourage resistance and violence? No, his precept was, 'Servants (Slaves) obey your Masters.'"[183] "It was because he would not interfere with the administration of the laws, or abrogate their authority."