perhaps not so intensely, for familiarity with wrong deadens the
conscience; but their convictions are altogether as yours are; and in
the slaveholding states, and among slaveholders themselves, conscience
is against the system. [Cheers.] There is no legislative control of the
subject of slavery, except by slaveholding legislators themselves.
Congress has no right to do any thing in the premises. They violated the
constitution, as I believe, in passing the Fugitive Slave Act. [Cheers.]
I do not believe they had any right to pass it. [Hear, hear!] I stand
here not as the representative of any body whatever. I only represent
myself, and give you my individual convictions, that have been produced
by a long and painful connection with the subject. [Hear, hear!] As to
the resolution, I approve it entirely. Its sentiment and its spirit are
my own. [Cheers.] At the close of the revolutionary war, which separated
the colonies from the mother country, every state of the Union was a
slaveholding state; every colony was a slaveholding colony; and now we
have seventeen free states. [Cheers.] Slavery has been abolished in one
half of the original colonies, and it was declared that there should be
neither slavery nor the slave trade in any territory north and west of
the Ohio River; so that all that part is entirely free from actual
active participation in this curse, laying open a free territory that, I
think, must be ten times larger in extent than Great Britain. [Loud
cheers.] The State of Massachusetts was the first in which slavery
ceased. How did it cease? By an enactment of the legislature? Not at
all. They did not feel there was any necessity for such an enactment.
The Bill of Rights declared, that all men were born free, and that they
had an equal right to the pursuit of happiness and the acquisition of
property. In contradiction to that, there were slaves in every part of
Massachusetts; and some philanthropic individual advised a slave to
bring into court an action for wages against his master during all his
time of servitude. The action was brought, and the court decided that