ask?  Is it, that Congress shall resubject to their control those thousands of deeply wronged men?  No—­for this Congress cannot do.  They ask, that Congress shall fulfil the tyrant wishes of these States.  They ask, that the whole people of the United States—­those who hate, as well as those who love slavery, shall, by their representatives, assume the guilty and awful responsibility of perpetuating the enslavement of their innocent fellow men:—­of chaining the bodies and crushing the wills, and blotting out the minds of such, as have neither transgressed, nor even been accused of having transgressed, a single human law.  And the crime, which Virginia and Maryland, and they, who sympathise with them, would have the nation perpetrate, is, not simply that of prolonging the captivity of those, who were slaves before the cession—­for but a handful of them are now remaining in the District.  Most of the present number became slaves under the authority of this guilty nation.  Their wrongs originated with Congress:  and Congress is asked, not only to perpetuate their oppression, but to fasten the yoke of slavery on generations yet unborn.

There are those, who advocate the recession of the District of Columbia.  If the nation were to consent to this, without having previously exercised her power to “break every yoke” of slavery in the District, the blood of those so cruelly left there in “the house of bondage,” would remain indelible and damning upon her skirts:—­and this too, whether Virginia and Maryland did or did not intend to vest Congress with any power over slavery.  It is enough, that the nation has the power “to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain,” to make her fearfully guilty before God, if she “forbear” to exercise it.

Suppose, I were to obtain a lease of my neighbor’s barn for the single and express purpose of securing my crops; and that I should find, chained up in one of its dark corners, an innocent fellow man, whom that neighbor was subjecting to the process of a lingering death; ought I to pause and recall President Wayland’s, “Limitations of Human Responsibility,” and finally let the poor sufferer remain in his chains; or ought I not rather, promptly to respond to the laws of my nature and my nature’s God, and let him go free?  But, to make this case analogous to that we have been considering—­to that, which imposes its claims on Congress—­we must strike out entirely the condition of the lease, and with it all possible doubts of my right to release the victim of my neighbor’s murderous hate.

I am entirely willing to yield, for the sake of argument, that Virginia and Maryland, when ceding the territory which constitutes the District of Columbia, did not anticipate, and did not choose the abolition of slavery in it.  To make the admission stronger, I will allow, that these States were, at the time of the cession, as warmly opposed to the abolition of slavery in the District as they are said to be now:  and to make it stronger still, I will allow, that the abolition of slavery in the District would prove deeply injurious, not only to Virginia and Maryland but to the nation at large.  And, after all these admissions, I must still insist, that Congress is under perfectly plain moral obligation to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.