dropped their pens, and sat enchanted from near the beginning to quite
the close. The speech now lives only in the memory of a few old men, and
the enthusiasm with which they cherish their recollection of it is
absolutely astonishing. The precise language of this speech we shall
never know; but we do know we cannot help knowing--that with deep pathos
it pleaded the cause of the injured sailor, that it invoked the genius of
the Revolution, that it apostrophized the names of Otis, of Henry, and of
Washington, that it appealed to the interests, the pride, the honor, and
the glory of the nation, that it shamed and taunted the timidity of
friends, that it scorned and scouted and withered the temerity of
domestic foes, that it bearded and defied the British lion, and, rising
and swelling and maddening in its course, it sounded the onset, till the
charge, the shock, the steady struggle, and the glorious victory all
passed in vivid review before the entranced hearers.

Important and exciting as was the war question of 1812, it never so
alarmed the sagacious statesmen of the country for the safety of the
Republic as afterward did the Missouri question. This sprang from that
unfortunate source of discord--negro slavery. When our Federal
Constitution was adopted, we owned no territory beyond the limits or
ownership of the States, except the territory northwest of the River Ohio
and east of the Mississippi. What has since been formed into the States
of Maine, Kentucky and Tennessee, was, I believe, within the limits of or
owned by Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina. As to the
Northwestern Territory, provision had been made even before the adoption
of the Constitution that slavery should never go there. On the admission
of States into the Union, carved from the territory we owned before the
Constitution, no question, or at most no considerable question, arose
about slavery--those which were within the limits of or owned by the old
States following respectively the condition of the parent State, and