Excerpt from Territorial Government, and the Admission of New States Into the Union: A Historical and Constitutional Treatise
While clamor has sometimes and recently attempted to drown the voice of your counsel, you know that I have constantly known and labored to expose its injustice, its selfishness and its insolence. I have not ceased to point my friends to your great services and acknowledged faculties, to your generous devotion to principle and unselfish advocacy of the truth, as living and incontestable evidences of your orthodoxy and reliability in this crisis of our affairs.
I need not suggest to you that, more than all other causes of distraction to the American people and threatened overthrow of our confederated system of free republics, remains the embittered controversy about African slavery, which, for generations, amidst all the changes of national fortunes, has increased in malignancy, and to-day wears an aspect of most fearful import and thrilling interest to every patriotic heart in the Union.
The grand old democratic party has hitherto been equal to the issues to which it has given rise, and if they have not always been disposed of satisfactorily to every section, and constitutionally and justly, it has not often, if at all, been its fault.
The democratic party has always been ready to admit slave states into the Union. It has put and retains upon the federal statute book the fugitive slave law, and done what it could to have its provisions respected and enforced.
It has repealed the Missouri restriction. It has wrested from congress the assumed power to intervene for the prohibition or destruction of slavery in the common territories; and if, for a moment, it now flounders in the bog of non-intervention for the protection of slavery, as property, and a recognized element of our constitutional compact, I trust and believe that it is only for a moment.
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