I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons.  That sight was a continued torment to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border.  It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.  You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union.  I do oppose the extension of slavery because my judgment and feeling 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 say 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 as a violence from the beginning.  It was conceived 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 circumstances, 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 violence 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.

You say men ought to be hung for the way they are executing the law; I say the way it is being executed is quite as good as any of its antecedents.  It is being executed in the precise way which was intended from the first, else why does no Nebraska man express astonishment or condemnation?  Poor Reeder is the only public man who has been silly enough to believe that anything like fairness was ever intended, and he has been bravely undeceived.

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 subject and real object of the law.  If, like Haman,