Mr. President, what is the result of this?  We stand here now, at least I do, for one, to say, that, considering there have been already five new slave-holding States formed out of newly acquired territory, and only one non-slave-holding State, at most, I do not feel that I am called on to go further; I do not feel the obligation to yield more.  But our friends of the South say, You deprive us of all our rights.  We have fought for this territory, and you deny us participation in it.  Let us consider this question as it really is; and since the honorable gentleman from Georgia proposes to leave the case to the enlightened and impartial judgment of mankind, and as I agree with him that it is a case proper to be considered by the enlightened part of mankind, let us see how the matter in truth stands.  Gentlemen who advocate the case which my honorable friend from Georgia, with so much ability, sustains, declare that we invade their rights, that we deprive them of a participation in the enjoyment of territories acquired by the common services and common exertions of all.  Is this true?  How deprive?  Of what do we deprive them?  Why, they say that we deprive them of the privilege of carrying their slaves, as slaves, into the new territories.  Well, Sir, what is the amount of that?  They say that in this way we deprive them of the opportunity of going into this acquired territory with their property.  Their “property”?  What do they mean by “property”?  We certainly do not deprive them of the privilege of going into these newly acquired territories with all that, in the general estimate of human society, in the general, and common, and universal understanding of mankind, is esteemed property.  Not at all.  The truth is just this.  They have, in their own States, peculiar laws, which create property in persons.  They have a system of local legislation on which slavery rests; while everybody agrees that it is against natural law, or at least against the common understanding which prevails among men as to what is natural law.

I am not going into metaphysics, for therein I should encounter the honorable member from South Carolina,[3] and we should find “no end, in wandering mazes lost,” until after the time for the adjournment of Congress.  The Southern States have peculiar laws, and by those laws there is property in slaves.  This is purely local.  The real meaning, then, of Southern gentlemen, in making this complaint, is, that they cannot go into the territories of the United States carrying with them their own peculiar local law, a law which creates property in persons.  This, according to their own statement, is all the ground of complaint they have.  Now here, I think, gentlemen are unjust towards us.  How unjust they are, others will judge; generations that will come after us will judge.  It will not be contended that this sort of personal slavery exists by general law.  It exists only by local law.  I do not mean to deny the validity of that local law where