But men whose lives are but a series violations of the dearest rights that God has bestowed on man cannot be expected to be bound by pledges of national faith and national honor. This time-honored compact was annulled, the barrier between freedom and slavery broken down. The whole country was astounded at the perfidy of the act. But the climax was not reached. The Territory was overrun with desperadoes; ruffians from adjoining States usurped the rights of actual settlers, stuffed ballot-boxes with illegal votes, and elected members of their own lawless bands to the Legislature, to enact laws by which every friend of freedom might be driven from the country. Innocent and unoffending men were murdered in cold blood, houses were consumed with fire, hamlets laid in smoking ruins, homeless and houseless innocents, women and tender children, were driven forth, exposed to the winds and storms of heaven. All these wrongs, all these outrages, all these crimes of blood and deeds of horror, were committed to plant the accursed institution on the soil that had been, by a great national act, dedicated to freedom. But violence and arson, bloodshed and murder, failed. The black banner of slavery is trailing in the dust. The stars and stripes wave triumphantly over a free and joyous people. The heretofore invincible is conquered. I have borrowed the word "aggression" to express the conduct of the South toward the North. I do not intend to make the charge without the specifications. 1. I charge upon slavery, that the enforcement of the Missouri compromise was an aggression upon the North. 2. I charge the annexation of Texas, whereby the Mexican war was brought upon the country, more than two hundred millions of money were spent, and many thousand lives sacrificed, as an aggression. 3. I charge that the adoption of the fugitive slave law, with many of its odious and obnoxious provisions, was an aggression upon the people of the North. 4. I charge that the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case was an aggression upon the North. It was a decision made for the benefit of slavery, and to deprive the people of the free States of their equal rights in the Territories. 5. I charge that the repeal of the Missouri compromise line was an outrageous aggression upon the rights of the North; disreputable to the nation, and dishonorable to the party engaged in it; one that has brought in its train innumerable woes, and created an excitement that will not be allayed during the present generation. 6. I charge that the murders, robberies, and arsons, in Kansas, were aggressions of slavery.