When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge
them--not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any
legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives which should not in its
stringency be more likely to carry a free man into slavery than our
ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting
slavery to go into our own free territory than it would for reviving the
African slave trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves
from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking of them into
Nebraska, can hardy be distinguished on any moral principle, and the
repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the
latter.
The arguments by which the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is sought to
be justified are these:
First. That the Nebraska country needed a territorial government.
Second. That in various ways the public had repudiated that
compromise and demanded the repeal, and therefore should not now
complain of it.
And, lastly, That the repeal establishes a principle which is
intrinsically right.
I will attempt an answer to each of them in its turn.
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