Now, sir, what are the remedies that are proposed for the
present condition of things, and what have they been from the
beginning? They have been propositions of compromise; and
Senators have spoken of peace, and of the horrors of civil war;
and gentlemen who have contended for the right of the people of
the territories to regulate their own affairs, and who have
been horrified at the idea of a geographical line dividing free
states from slave states, free territory from slave territory,
and who have proclaimed that the great principle upon which the
Revolution was fought was that of the right of the people to
govern themselves, and that it was monstrous doctrine for
Congress to interfere in any way with its own territories, come
forward here with propositions to divide the country on a
geographical line; and not only that, but to establish slavery
south of the line; and they call this the Missouri Compromise!
The proposition known as the "Crittenden Proposition" is no
more like the Missouri Compromise than is the Government of
Turkey like that of the United States. The Missouri Compromise
was a law declaring that in all the territory which we had
acquired from Louisiana, north of a certain line of latitude,
slavery or involuntary servitude should never exist. But it
said nothing about the establishment of slavery south of that
line. It was a compromise made in order to admit Missouri into
the Union as a slave state, in 1820. That was the consideration
for the exclusion of slavery from all the country north of 36°
30'. Now, sir, I have no objection to the restoration of the
Missouri Compromise as it stood in 1854, when the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill passed; and I have drawn up--and I intend
to offer it at the proper time as an amendment to some of these
propositions--a clause declaring that so much of the fourteenth
section of the act to organize the territories of Nebraska and
Kansas, approved the 30th of May, 1854, as repeals the Missouri
Compromise, and contains the little stump speech, shall be
repealed, and that we may hear no more of it, I trust, forever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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