But now it is to be transformed into a sacred right....  Henceforth it is to be the chief jewel of the nation,—­the very figure-head of the ship of State.  Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith.  Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a sacred right of self-government.  These principles cannot stand together.  They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other....

Our Republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust.  Let us purify it.  Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit if not the blood of the Revolution.  Let us turn slavery from its claims of moral right, back upon its existing legal rights and its arguments of necessity.  Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in peace.  Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it.  Let North and South, let all Americans, let all lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the great and good work.  If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it as to make and to keep it for ever worthy of the saving.

From Letter to the Hon. Geo. Robertson, Lexington, Kentucky.  Springfield, Illinois.  August 15, 1855

My dear Sir, ...  You are not a friend of slavery in the abstract.  In that speech you spoke of “the peaceful extinction of slavery” and used other expressions indicating your belief that the thing was, at some time, to have an end.  Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience; and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.  The signal failure of Henry Clay and other good and great men, in 1849, to effect anything in favour of gradual emancipation in Kentucky, together with a thousand other signs, extinguishes that hope utterly.  On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.  When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that “all men are created equal” a self-evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim “a self-evident lie.”  The Fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day for burning fire-crackers!

That spirit which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution.  Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the States adopted systems of emancipation at once; and it is a significant fact that not a single State has done the like since.  So far as peaceful, voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent.  The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown and proclaim his subjects free republicans, sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.