contending for legitimacy; who were contending for the right of the
Crown being inherent and depending on the will of God, 'the divine right
of Kings,' for maintaining an hereditary landed-aristocracy; there was
another Party who were contending against this doctrine of legitimacy,
and the right of primogeniture. These were called the Whigs; they
established this general phraseology in denouncing the divine right and
the doctrine of legitimacy, and it became the common phraseology of the
Country; so that in the obscure county of Mecklenburg, in North
Carolina, a declaration containing the same assertions was found as in
this celebrated Declaration of Independence, written by the immortal
Jefferson.

"Which of us, I ask, is there upon this floor who has not read and
re-read whatever was written within the last twenty-five or thirty years
by the distinguished men of this country? But enough of that.

"As I said before, there ought not have been, and there did not
necessarily result from our form of Government, any irrepressible
conflict between the Slaveholding and the non-Slaveholding States.
Nothing of the sort was necessary.

"Strike out a single clause in the Constitution of the United States,
that which secures to each State a Republican form of Government, and
there is no reason why, under precisely such a Constitution as we have,
States that are Monarchical and States that are Republican, could not
live in peace and quiet. They confederate together for common defense
and general welfare, each State regulating its domestic concerns in its
own way; those which preferred a Republican form of Government
maintaining it, and those which preferred a Monarchical form of
Government maintaining it.