an abolitionist?  Yes; Virginia newspapers have so denounced me, and called upon the Legislature of my State to dismiss me from public confidence.  Who taught me to hate slavery, and every other oppression? Jefferson, the great and the good Jefferson!  Yes, Virginia Senators, it was your own Jefferson, Virginia’s favorite son, a man who did more for the natural liberty of man, and the civil liberty of his country, than any man that ever lived in our country; it was him who taught me to hate slavery; it was in his school I was brought up.  That Mr. Jefferson was as much opposed to slavery as any man that ever lived in our country, there can be no doubt; his life and his writings abundantly prove the fact.  I hold in my hand a copy, as he penned it, of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, a part of which was stricken out, as he says, in compliance with the wishes of South Carolina and Georgia.  I will read it.  Speaking of the wrongs done us by the British Government, in introducing slaves among us, he says:  “He (the British King) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into SLAVERY in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be BOUGHT and SOLD, he has prostituted his prerogative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain execrable commerce, and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us, and purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he has also obtruded them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”  Thus far this great statesman and philanthropist.  Had his contemporaries been ruled by his opinions, the country had now been at rest on this exciting topic.  What abolitionist, sir, has used stronger language against slavery than Mr. Jefferson has done?  “Cruel war against human nature,” “violating its most sacred rights,” “piratical warfare,” “opprobrium of infidel powers,” “a market where men should be bought and sold,” “execrable commerce,” “assemblage of horrors,” “crimes committed against the liberty of the people,” are the brands which Mr. Jefferson has burned into the forehead of slavery and the slave trade.  When, sir, have I, or any other person opposed to slavery, spoken in stronger and more opprobrious terms of slavery, than this?  You have caused the bust of this great man to be placed in the centre of your Capitol; in that conspicuous part where every visitor must see it, with its hand resting on the Declaration of Independence, engraved