have covered so large a portion of our country as it does now.  The cheap rate at which slaves might have been imported by the planters of the south, would have prevented the rearing of them for sale, by the farmers of Maryland, Virginia, and the other slave-selling states.  If these states could be restrained from the commerce in slaves, slavery could not be supported by them for any length of time, or to any considerable extent.  They could not maintain it, as an economical system, under the competition of free labor.  It is owing to the non-user by Congress, or rather to their unfaithful application of their power to the other points, on which it was expected to act for the limitation or extermination of slavery, that the hopes of our fathers have not been realized; and that slavery has, at length, become so audacious, as openly to challenge the principles of 1776—­to trample on the most precious rights secured to the citizen—­to menace the integrity of the Union and the very existence of the government itself.

Slavery has advanced to its present position by steps that were, at first, gradual, and, for a long time, almost unnoticed; afterward, it made its way by intimidating or corrupting those who ought to have been forward to resist its pretensions.  Up to the time of the “Missouri Compromise,” by which the nation was wheedled out of its honor, slavery was looked on as an evil that was finally to yield to the expanding and ripening influences of our Constitutional principles and regulations.  Why it has not yielded, we may easily see, by even a slight glance at some of the incidents in our history.

It has already been said, that we have been brought into our present condition by the unfaithfulness of Congress, in not exerting the power vested in it, to stop the domestic slave-trade, and in the abuse of the power of admitting “new states” into the Union.  Kentucky made application in 1792, with a slave-holding Constitution in her hand.—­With what a mere technicality Congress suffered itself to be drugged into torpor:—­She was part of one of the “Original States”—­and therefore entitled to all their privileges.

One precedent established, it was easy to make another.  Tennessee was admitted in 1796, without scruple, on the same ground.

The next triumph of slavery was in 1803, in the purchase of Louisiana, acknowledged afterward, even by Mr. Jefferson who made it, to be unauthorized by the Constitution—­and in the establishment of slavery throughout its vast limits, actually and substantially under the auspices of that instrument which declares its only objects to be—­“to form a more perfect union, establish JUSTICE, insure DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of LIBERTY to ourselves and our posterity."[A]