reason to believe that it has been inculcated to no small extent in
the Northern mind.

It requires but a cursory examination of the Constitution of the
United States; but a partial knowledge of its history and of the
motives of the men who formed it, to see how utterly fallacious it is
to ascribe to them the purpose of interfering with the domestic
institutions of any of the States. But if a disrespect for that
instrument, a fanatical disregard of its purposes, should ever induce
a majority, however large, to seek by amending the Constitution, to
pervert it from its original object, and to deprive you of the
equality which your fathers bequeathed to you, I say let the star of
Mississippi be snatched from the constellation to shine by its
inherent light, if it must be so, through all the storms and clouds of
war.

The same dangerously powerful man describes the institution of slavery
as degrading to labor, as intolerant and inhuman, and says the white
laborer among us is not enslaved only because he cannot yet be reduced
to bondage. Where he learned his lesson, I am at a loss to imagine;
certainly not by observation, for you all know that by interest, if
not by higher motive, slave labor bears to capital as kind a relation
as can exist between them anywhere; that it removes from us all that
controversy between the laborer and the capitalist, which has filled
Europe with starving millions and made their poor houses an onerous
charge. You too know, that among us, white men have an equality
resulting from a presence of the lower caste, which cannot exist where
white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The
mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of
the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies