V.
The Crime against Kansas stands forth in painful light. Search history, and you cannot find its parallel. The slave-trade is bad; but even this enormity is petty, compared with that elaborate contrivance by which, in a Christian age and within the limits of a Republic, all forms of constitutional liberty were perverted, all the rights of human nature violated, and the whole country held trembling on the edge of civil war,—while all this large exuberance of wickedness, detestable in itself, becomes tenfold more detestable, when its origin is traced to the madness for Slavery. The fatal partition between Freedom and Slavery, known as the Missouri Compromise,—the subsequent overthrow of this partition, and the seizure of all by Slavery,—the violation of plighted faith,—the conspiracy to force Slavery at all hazards into Kansas,—the successive invasions by which all security there was destroyed, and the electoral franchise itself was trodden down,—the sacrilegious seizure of the very polls, and, through pretended forms of law, the imposition of a foreign legislature upon this Territory,—the acts of this legislature, fortifying the Usurpation, and, among other things, establishing test-oaths, calculated to disfranchise actual settlers friendly to Freedom, [313] and securing the privileges of the citizen to actual strangers friendly to Slavery,—the whole crowned by a statute, ‘the be-all and the end-all’ of the whole Usurpation, through which Slavery was not only recognized on this beautiful soil, but made to bristle with a Code of Death such as the world has rarely seen,—all these I fully exposed on a former occasion. And yet the most important part of the argument was at that time left untouched: I mean that found in the Character of Slavery. This natural sequel, with the permission of the Senate, I now propose to supply. Motive is to Crime as soul to body; and it is only when we comprehend the motive that we can truly comprehend the Crime. Here the motive is found in Slavery and the rage for its extension. Therefore, by logical necessity, must Slavery be discussed,—not indirectly, timidly, and sparingly, but directly, openly, and thoroughly. It must be exhibited as it is, alike in its influence and its animating character, so that not only outside, but inside, may be seen.
