In this shape the bill passed both branches of Congress and became a law.
This is the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The foregoing history may
not be precisely accurate in every particular, but I am sure it is
sufficiently so for all the use I shall attempt to make of it, and in it
we have before us the chief material enabling us to judge correctly
whether the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is right or wrong. I think,
and shall try to show, that it is wrong--wrong in its direct effect,
letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective
principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world
where men can be found inclined to take it.
This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal, for
the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the
monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our
republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the
enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites;
causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially
because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with
the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the
Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right
principle of action but self-interest.
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