Book Description

Excerpt from The Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, in the Senatorial Campaign of 1858 in Illinois: Together With Certain Preceding Speeches of Each at Chicago, Springfield, Etc The passage of the kansas-nebraska Act made clear to the North that the South would accept no limitations for slavery The position oi the Southern leaders, in which they had the substantial backing of their constituents, was that slaves were property and that the Constitution, having guaranteed the protection of property to all the Citizens of the commonwealth, a slaveholder was depnved of his constitutional rights as a Citizen if his control of this portion of his property was in any way inter fered With or restricted The argument in behalf of this extreme Southern claim had been shaped most eloquently and most forcibly by John C Calhoun during the years between 1830 and 1850 The Calhoun opinion was represented a few years later in the Presidential candidacy of John C Breckin ridge The contention of the more extreme of the Northern opponents of slavery voters, whose spokes men were William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, James G Birney, Owen Lovejoy, and others, was that the Constitution in so far as it recognised slavery (which it did only by implication) was a compact With evil They held that the Fathers had been led into this compact unwittingly and Without full realisation of the responsibilities that they were assuming for the perpetuation of a great wrong They refused to accept the view that later generations of American Citizens were to be bound for an indefi nite period by this error of Judgment on the part of the Fathers They proposed to get rid of slavery. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.