Why, look to this very question of the annexation of Texas.  We talk of the dictation of the slave power!  At least they do, I do not.  I do not allow that anybody dictates to me.  They talk of the triumph of the South over the North!  There is not a word of truth or reason in the whole of it.  I am bound to say on my conscience, that, of all the evils inflicted upon us by these acquisitions of slave territory, the North has borne its full part in the infliction.  Northern votes, in full proportion, have been given in both houses for the acquisition of new territory, in which slavery existed.  We talk of the North.  There has for a long time been no North.  I think the North Star is at last discovered; I think there will be a North; but up to the recent session of Congress there has been no North, no geographical section of the country, in which there has been found a strong, conscientious, and united opposition to slavery.  No such North has existed.

Pope says, you know,

    “Ask where’s the North?  At York, ’tis on the Tweed;
    In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there,
    At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.”

Now, if there has heretofore been such a North as I have described, a North strong in opinion and united in action against slavery,—­if such a North has existed anywhere, it has existed “the Lord knows where,” I do not.  Why, on this very question of the admission of Texas, it may be said with truth, that the North let in Texas.  The Whigs, North and South, resisted Texas.  Ten Senators from slave-holding States, of the Whig party, resisted Texas.  Two, only, as I remember, voted for it.  But the Southern Whig votes against Texas were overpowered by the Democratic votes from the Free States, and from New England among the rest.  Yes, if there had not been votes from New England in favor of Texas, Texas would have been out of the Union to this day.  Yes, if men from New England had been true, Texas would have been nothing but Texas still.  There were four votes in the Senate from New England in favor of the admission of Texas, Mr. Van Buren’s friends, Democratic members:  one from Maine; two from New Hampshire; one from Connecticut.  Two of these gentlemen were confidential friends of Mr. Van Buren, and had both been members of his cabinet.  They voted for Texas; and they let in Texas, against Southern Whigs and Northern Whigs.  That is the truth of it, my friends.  Mr. Van Buren, by the wave of his hand, could have kept out Texas.  A word, a letter, though it had been even shorter than General Cass’s letter to the Chicago Convention, would have been enough, and would have done the work.  But he was silent.

When Northern members of Congress voted, in 1820, for the Missouri Compromise, against the known will of their constituents, they were called “Dough Faces.”  I am afraid, fellow-citizens, that the generation of “dough faces” will be as perpetual as the generation of men.