and that, in such case, taking a slave there operates his freedom. That
is good book-law, but it is not the rule of actual practice. Wherever
slavery is it has been first introduced without law. The oldest laws we
find concerning it are not laws introducing it, but regulating it as an
already existing thing. A white man takes his slave to Nebraska now. Who
will inform the negro that he is free? Who will take him before court to
test the question of his freedom? In ignorance of his legal emancipation
he is kept chopping, splitting, and plowing. Others are brought, and move
on in the same track. At last, if ever the time for voting comes on the
question of slavery the institution already, in fact, exists in the
country, and cannot well be removed. The fact of its presence, and the
difficulty of its removal, will carry the vote in its favor. Keep it out
until a vote is taken, and a vote in favor of it cannot be got in any
population of forty thousand on earth, who have been drawn together by
the ordinary motives of emigration and settlement. To get slaves into the
Territory simultaneously with the whites in the incipient stages of
settlement is the precise stake played for and won in this Nebraska
measure.

The question is asked us: "If slaves will go in notwithstanding the
general principle of law liberates them, why would they not equally go in
against positive statute law--go in, even if the Missouri restriction
were maintained!" I answer, because it takes a much bolder man to venture
in with his property in the latter case than in the former; because the
positive Congressional enactment is known to and respected by all, or
nearly all, whereas the negative principle that no law is free law is not
much known except among lawyers. We have some experience of this
practical difference. In spite of the Ordinance of '87, a few negroes
were brought into Illinois, and held in a state of quasi-slavery, not
enough, however, to carry a vote of the people in favor of the