But, my hearers, I have not yet presented this subject in the light of its most appalling darkness; nor applied the sharpest point of its universal bearing. _The_ _union of these States was originally purchased at the price of the blood and groans of Africa_; and _all our citizens_ from the north and the south, from the east and the west, _gave their consent to the bargain_. One section of the constitution of the United States was written, like the laws of Draco, in lines of blood; the blood of Africans.[3] By it, all the horrours of the slave-trade, the whole root and stock and branch of which slavery is the bitter fruit, were firmly sanctioned for thirty tedious years. During this gloomy period, under the sanction of the charter of freemen, and of freemen too, who, in the days of their emancipation from the chains of despotism, appealed to heaven for the sincerity of their intentions, while they declared to the world “that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to life, _liberty_ and the pursuit of happiness;” under the sanction of such a charter, adopted by such men, and under such circumstances, thousands and tens of thousands of harmless Africans, who were born free as the air of heaven, or the streams of the fountain, were forcibly dragged from their native shores, bound with massy chains, crowded into the filthy hold of a floating dungeon, without power to rise or room to stand; and when multitudes had been swept off by wasting pestilence, and found a watery grave, the wretched remnant, emaciated with famine and worn down with disease, were sold under the hammer into perpetual bondage. Without the sanction of all these horrours, the union of these states would never have been effected. And in consenting to this measure, the northern states became voluntarily partakers with those of the south, in all the guilt of the barbarous slave-trade and all its horrid consequences. Footnote 3: Article I. Sec. 9.