..?"
Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in other
quarters. John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you will
recollect, calls the immortal Declaration "a self-evident lie"; while at
the birthplace of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the
"cradle of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and
Otis--Choate, from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the
birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a
string of glittering generalities"; and the Southern Whigs, working hand
in hand with proslavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories
practical. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element
in slavery, solemnly declared that he trembled for his country when he
remembered that God is just; while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant
wave of the hand, "don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down."
Now, if slavery is right, or even negative, he has a right to treat it in
this trifling manner. But if it is a moral and political wrong, as all
Christendom considers it to be, how can he answer to God for this attempt
to spread and fortify it? [Applause.]
But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a
negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and, accordingly,
he avows that the Union was made by white men and for white men and their
descendants.
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