I do oppose the extension of slavery, because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no obligations to the contrary.  If for this you and I must differ, differ we must.  You say, if you were President you would send an army and hang the leaders of the Missouri outrages upon the Kansas elections; still, if Kansas fairly votes herself a slave State, she must be admitted, or the Union must be dissolved.  But how if she votes herself a slave State unfairly—­that is, by the very means for which you would hang men?  Must she still be admitted, or the Union dissolved?  That will be the phase of the question when it first becomes a practical one.  In your assumption that there may be a fair decision of the slavery question in Kansas, I plainly see you and I would differ about the Nebraska law.  I look upon that enactment not as a law but a violence from the beginning.  It was conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence, and is being executed in violence.  I say it was conceived in violence, because the destruction of the Missouri Compromise under the Constitution was nothing less than violence.  It was passed in violence, because it could not have passed at all but for the votes of many members in violent disregard of the known will of their constituents.  It is maintained in violence, because the elections since clearly demand its repeal; and the demand is openly disregarded.  That Kansas will form a slave constitution, and with it will ask to be admitted into the Union, I take to be already a settled question, and so settled by the very means you so pointedly condemn.  By every principle of law ever held by any court, North or South, every negro taken to Kansas is free; yet in utter disregard of this—­in the spirit of violence merely—­that beautiful Legislature gravely passes a law to hang any man who shall venture to inform a negro of his legal rights.  This is the substance and real object of the law.  If, like Haman, they should hang upon the gallows of their own building, I shall not be among the mourners for their fate.  In my humble sphere I shall advocate the restoration of the Missouri Compromise so long as Kansas remains a Territory; and, when, by all these foul means, it seeks to come into the Union as a slave State, I shall oppose it....  You inquire where I now stand.  That is a disputed point.  I think I am a Whig; but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an Abolitionist.  When I was in Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of any attempt to unwhig me for that.  I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery.  I am not a Know-Nothing—­that is certain.  How could I be?  How can anyone who abhors the oppression of the negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?  Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.