proclaiming themselves the champions of liberty, crying up their Free Soil creed, and using it for selfish and deceptive purposes.  They were the persons who aided in bringing in Texas.  It was all fairly told to you, both beforehand and afterwards.  You heard Moses and the prophets, but if one had risen from the dead, such was your devotion to that policy, at that time, you would not have listened to him for a moment.  I do not, of course, speak of the persons now here before me, but of the general political tone in New York, and especially of those who are now Free Soil apostles.  Well, all that I do not complain of; but I will not now, or hereafter, before the country, or the world, consent to be numbered among those who introduced new slave power into the Union.  I did all in my power to prevent it.

Then, again, Gentlemen, the Mexican war broke out.  Vast territory was acquired, and the peace was made; and, much as I disliked the war, I disliked the peace more, because it brought in these territories.  I wished for peace indeed, but I desired to strike out the grant of territory on the one side, and the payment of the $12,000,000 on the other.  That territory was unknown to me; I could not tell what its character might be.  The plan came from the South.  I knew that certain Southern gentlemen wished the acquisition of California, New Mexico, and Utah, as a means of extending slave power and slave population.  Foreseeing a sectional controversy, and, as I conceived, seeing how much it would distract the Union, I voted against the treaty with Mexico.  I voted against the acquisition.  I wanted none of her territory, neither California, New Mexico, nor Utah.  They were rather ultra-American, as I thought.  They were far from us, and I saw that they might lead to a political conflict, and I voted against them all, against the treaty and against the peace, rather than have the territories.  Seeing that it would be an occasion of dispute, that by the controversy the whole Union would be agitated, Messrs. Berrien, Badger, and other respectable and distinguished men of the South, voted against the acquisition, and the treaty which secured it; and if the men of the North had voted the same way, we should have been spared all the difficulties that have grown out of it.  We should have had peace without the territories.

Now there is no sort of doubt, Gentlemen, that there were some persons in the South who supposed that California, if it came into the Union at all, would come in as a slave State.  You know the extraordinary events which immediately occurred, and the impulse given to emigration by the discovery of gold.  You know that crowds of Northern people immediately rushed to California, and that an African slave could no more live there among them, than he could live on the top of Mount Hecla.  Of necessity it became a free State, and that, no doubt, was a source of much disappointment to the South.  And then there were New Mexico and