maintain his denial; not by indignation, not by passion and fury, but
by sound and sober reasoning from the laws of nations and the laws of
war. And if my position can be answered and refuted, I shall receive
the refutation with pleasure; I shall be glad to listen to reason,
aside, as I say, from indignation and passion. And if, by the force
of reasoning, my understanding can be convinced, I here pledge myself
to recant what I have asserted.

Let my position be answered; let me be told, let my constituents be
told, the people of my State be told--a State whose soil tolerates
not the foot of a slave--that they are bound by the Constitution to
a long and toilsome march under burning summer suns and a deadly
Southern clime for the suppression of a servile war; that they are
bound to leave their bodies to rot upon the sands of Carolina, to
leave their wives widows and their children orphans; that those who
cannot march are bound to pour out their treasures while their sons
or brothers are pouring out their blood to suppress a servile,
combined with a civil or a foreign war, and yet that there exists no
power beyond the limits of the slave State where such war is raging
to emancipate the slaves. I say, let this be proved--I am open to
conviction; but till that conviction comes, I put it forth not as a
dictate of feeling, but as a settled maxim of the laws of nations,
that, in such a case, the military supersedes the civil power; and on
this account I should have been obliged to vote, as I have said,
against one of the resolutions of my excellent friend from Ohio, (Mr.
Giddings,) or should at least have required that it be amended in
conformity with the Constitution of the United States.