Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 3

they would think it an act taking away from them what they regard as a proper equality of privilege" ... "a plain theoretic wrong," "more or less derogatory to their character and their rights."

"African slavery," he tells us, "cannot exist there." It could once exist in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Very little of this territory lies north of Mason and Dixon's line, the northern limit of Maryland; none above the parallel of forty-two degrees; none of it extends fifty miles above the northern limit of Virginia; two hundred and four thousand three hundred and fifty-three square miles of it lie south of the line of the Missouri Compromise, south of 36° 30´. Almost all of it is in the latitude of Virginia and the Carolinas. If slavery can exist on the west coast of the Atlantic, I see not why it cannot on the east of the Pacific, and all the way between. There is no reason why it cannot. It will, unless we forbid it by positive laws, laws which no man can misunderstand. Why, in 1787, it was