are broken down, as is now attempted, when they have made _things_ of
all the free negroes, how long, think you, before they will begin to
make _things_ of poor white men? [Applause.] Be not deceived.
Revolutions do not go backward. The founder of the Democratic party
declared that _all_ men were created equal. His successor in the
leadership has written the word "white" before men, making it read "all
_white_ men are created equal." Pray, will or may not the Know-nothings,
if they should get in power, add the word "protestant," making it read
"_all protestant white men_"?
Meanwhile the hapless negro is the fruitful subject of reprisals in
other quarters. John Pettit, whom Tom Benton paid his respects to, you
will recollect, calls the immortal Declaration "a self-evident lie;"
while at the birth-place of freedom--in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of
the "cradle of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and
Otis--Choate, from our side of the house, dares to fritter away the
birthday promise of liberty by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a
string of glittering generalities;" and the Southern Whigs, working hand
in hand with pro-slavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories
practical. Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholder, mindful of the moral element
in slavery, solemnly declared that he "trembled for his country when he
remembered that God is just;" while Judge Douglas, with an insignificant
wave of the hand, "don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted
down." Now, if slavery is right, or even negative, he has a right to
treat it in this trifling manner. But if it is a moral and political
wrong, as all Christendom considers it to be, how can he answer to God
for this attempt to spread and fortify it? [Applause.]
But no man, and Judge Douglas no more than any other, can maintain a
negative, or merely neutral, position on this question; and,
accordingly, he avows that the Union was made _by_ white men and _for_
white men and their descendants. As matter of fact, the first branch of
the proposition is historically true; the government was made by white
men, and they were and are the superior race. This I admit. But the
corner-stone of the government, so to speak, was the declaration that
"_all_ men are created equal," and all entitled to "life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness." [Applause.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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