I was about to take it for granted, that, although you deny the power of Congress to abolish the inter-state traffic in human beings, you do not justify the traffic—­when I recollected the intimation in your speech, that there is no such traffic.  For, when you speak of “the slave trade between the states,” and add—­“or, as it is described in abolition petitions, the traffic in human beings between the states”—­do you not intimate there is no such traffic?  Whence this language?  Do you not believe slaves are human beings?  And do you not believe that they suffer under the disruption of the dearest earthly ties, as human beings suffer?  I will not detain you to hear what we of the North think of this internal slave trade.  But I will call your attention to what is thought of it in your own Kentucky and in your native Virginia.  Says the “Address of the Presbyterian Synod of Kentucky to the Churches in 1835:”—­“Brothers and sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives, are torn asunder, and permitted to see each other no more.  Those acts are daily occurring in the midst of us.  The shrieks and the agony often witnessed on such occasions, proclaim with a trumpet tongue the iniquity and cruelty of the system.  There is not a neighborhood where these heart-rending scenes are not displayed.  There is not a village or road that does not behold the sad procession of manacled outcasts, whose chains and mournful countenances tell that they are exiled by force from all that their hearts hold dear.”  Says Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in the Virginia Legislature in 1832, when speaking of this trade:  “It is a practice, and an increasing practice, in parts of Virginia, to rear slaves for market.  How can an honourable mind, a patriot, and a lover of his country, bear to see this ancient dominion, rendered illustrious by the noble devotion and patriotism of her sons in the cause of liberty, converted into one grand menagerie, where men are to be reared for the market like oxen for the shambles.  Is it better—­is it not worse than the (foreign) slave trade—­that trade which enlisted the labor of the good and wise of every creed and every clime to abolish?  The (foreign) trader receives the slave, a stranger in language, aspect, and manner, from the merchant who has brought him from the interior.  The ties of father, mother, husband, and child, have already been rent in twain; before he receives him, his soul has become callous.  But here, sir, individuals whom the master has known from infancy, whom he has seen sporting in the innocent gambols of childhood—­who have been accustomed to look to him for protection, he tears from the mother’s arms, and sells into a strange country—­among strange people, subject to cruel taskmasters.”