"The feelings of the people disclosed since the year 1760 in the votes of towns and in the verdicts of juries, ... the fact that there is no law at present in force which makes a distinction between white and black persons, ... the same law which allows justices to expel blacks from the State after a certain notice expressly recognizing the right of blacks to become citizens (a law, the constitutionality of which has been called in question, and which it is well known was passed on the same day as the Abolition Act of March, 1788, in order to prevent the State from being overrun with runaway slaves),--blacks having the same public provisions for education, and the same public support in case of sickness and poverty,--many blacks before and during the Revolution having obtained their freedom by a legal process, and, as the spirit of the Constitution of this State abrogates all exclusive laws, thereby becoming invested with all the rights of freemen, and with a capability of becoming freeholders, ... and, above all, the construction given to the first principle in the Declaration of Rights at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, both in the public mind and in the courts of law,--clearly manifest and demonstrate that the people of this Commonwealth have always believed negroes and mulattoes to possess the same right and capability to become citizens as white persons." God forbid that I should do injustice to South Carolina! I know well the gallantry of many of her sons. I know the response which she made to the appeal of Massachusetts for union against the Stamp Act--the Fugitive Slave Act of that day--by the pen of Christopher Gadsden. And I remember with sorrow that this patriot was obliged to confess, at the time, her "weakness in having such a number of slaves," though it is to his credit that he recognized Slavery as "crime."[97] I have no pleasure in dwelling on the humiliations of South Carolina; I have little desire to expose her sores; I would not lay bare even her nakedness. But the Senator, in his vaunt for "slaveholding communities," has made a claim for Slavery so derogatory to Freedom, and so inconsistent with history, that I cannot allow it to pass unanswered. [97] Bancroft, History of the United States, Vol. V. pp. 294, 425, 426. * * * * *