Judge Douglas contends that if any one man chooses to enslave another,
no third man has a right to object. Our Fathers, in accepting slavery
under the Constitution as a legal institution, were of opinion, as is
clearly indicated by the recorded utterances, that slavery would in the
course of a few years die out. They were quite clear in their minds that
the slave-trade must be abolished and for ever forbidden and this
decision was arrived at under the leadership of men like Jefferson and
without a protest from the South. Jefferson was himself the author of
the Ordinance of 1787, which in prohibiting the introduction of slavery,
consecrated to freedom the great territory of the North-west, and this
measure was fully approved by Washington and by the other great leaders
from the South. Where slavery exists, full liberty refuses to enter. It
was only through this wise action of the Fathers that it was possible to
bring into existence, through colonisation, the great territories and
great States of the North-west. It is this settlement, and the later
adjustment of 1820, that Douglas and his friends in the South are
undertaking to overthrow. Slavery is not, as Judge Douglas contends, a
local issue; it is a national responsibility. The repeal of the Missouri
Compromise throws open not only a great new territory to the curse of
slavery; it throws open the whole slavery question for the embroiling of
the present generation of Americans. Taking slaves into free territory
is the same thing as reviving the slave-trade. It perpetuates and
develops interstate slave-trade. Government derives its just powers from
the consent of the governed. The Fathers did not claim that "the right
of the people to govern negroes was the right of the people to govern
themselves."

The policy of Judge Douglas was based on the theory that the people did
not care, but the people did care, as was evinced two years later by the
popular vote for President throughout the North. One of those who heard