I am not, in the first place, unaware that this government has endured eighty-two years, half slave and half free.  I know that.  I am tolerably well acquainted with the history of the country, and I know that it has endured eighty-two years, half slave and half free.  I believe—­and that is what I meant to allude to there—­I believe it has endured, because, during all that time, until the introduction of the Nebraska bill, the public mind did rest all the time in the belief that slavery was in course of ultimate extinction.  That was what gave us the rest that we had through that period of eighty-two years; at least, so I believe.  I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist,—­I have been an old-line Whig,—­I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska bill began.  I always believed that everybody was against it, and that it was in course of ultimate extinction....  They had reason so to believe.

The adoption of the Constitution and its attendant history led the people to believe so, and that such was the belief of the framers of the Constitution itself.  Why did those old men, about the time of the adoption of the Constitution, decree that slavery should not go into the new Territory where it had not already gone?  Why declare that within twenty years the African slave-trade, by which slaves are supplied, might be cut off by Congress?  Why were all these acts?  I might enumerate more of these acts; but enough.  What were they but a clear indication that the framers of the Constitution intended and expected the ultimate extinction of that institution?  And now when I say,—­as I said in my speech that Judge Douglas has quoted from,—­when I say that I think the opponents of slavery will resist the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, I only mean to say that they will place it where the founders of this government originally placed it.

I have said a hundred times, and I have now no inclination to take it back, that I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free States, to enter into the slave States and interfere with the question of slavery at all.  I have said that always; Judge Douglas has heard me say it.  And when it is said that I am in favour of interfering with slavery where it exists, I know it is unwarranted by anything I have ever intended, and, as I believe, by anything I have ever said.  If by any means I have ever used language which could fairly be so construed (as, however, I believe I never have), I now correct it.

So much, then, for the inference that Judge Douglas draws, that I am in favour of setting the sections at war with one another.  I know that I never meant any such thing, and I believe that no fair mind can infer any such thing from anything I have said.