11 Carolina emigrants.” I should expect it, from the well-known sound sense and robustly independent character of the good old North State. The free, u tender, and open” spirit which George Fox found among the honest planters of Albemarle, has not died out there, and it is not satisfied with inferiority and ' stagnation. Let them get rid of slavery, and they can live at home without - - either. And when we have got at the cause which keeps down the comparative population, prosperity, and consequence of North Carolina, we can answer'the same question in other applications. We can tell why the growth of beautiful Kentucky keeps no better pace with her sister Ohio across the river, not so large and scarcely so fertile, yet the latter, though starting later, now nearly tripling the free population of the former. We can tell why Virginia, in the first half century of the Federal Government, increased her population from about three-quarters of a million to about a million and a quarter, while New York, on a much smaller territory, enlarged her numbers from about 340,000 to nearly two millions and a half, and her estimated property had become nearly three times as -great as that of the State the most favored by nature of any in this Union. We can tell why Maryland, most eligibly situated, has 27 free inhabitants to the square mile, and bleak and barren Massachusetts 98. We can explain how it came about that Michigan, in ten years before 1840, increased her free population Ql^per cent.; and Arkansas, erected into a State about the same time, only 200 per cent. Washington saw the difference between Pennsylvania and Virginia in his day, and his infallible discernment descried the cause to be in the laws for abolishing slavery: “laws,” said he, for once too hopefully, “which there is nothing more certain than that Maryland and Virginia must have, and that at a period not remote.” And his august wisdom pointed out the proper method of relief, as well as the crying need. “There is one only proper and effectual mode,” he wrote to Robert Morris, “by which it can be accomplished, and that is, by legislative authority; and this, as far as my suffrage will go, (mark it, George Washington’s suffrage for abolition,) shall never be wanting.” An institution so salutary and beneficial to the body politic, the gentleman from North Carolina would have extended into Territories and States as yet untouched by its influences, and he offered his own scheme for that purpose, (page 5.) Upon that I will not now detain the committee with any of my remarks. I may have an opportunity to do so hereafter, when the question of extending slavery into new territory may come up. But as to two or three things which, he said about it, I must briefly throw in my caveat at the present time; The gentleman said: “The supposition that the States would exclude from all the Territories of the United States an institution which prevailed so generally among them, seems improbable in itself, and those wrho maintain it may well be required to furnish the evidence. There is not, sir, in the w7hole Constitution any one clause, wThich, either directly or indirectly, favors the idea that slavery was to be limited to the States where it then existed, or to be excluded from any part of the territory of the United States,” (page 5.) I think, Mr. Chairman, that the Constitution, had it been faithfully executed, agreeably to the sense of the convention which framed and of the people who adopted it, contains enough safeguards against such a wrong, and that, construed in its true meaning and spirit, it could never have been used to extend the benefits (if they were such) of the original compromises—compromises bad enough, any way, for the free States—to new parties, not embraced in the original partnership. The gentleman, it seems, thinks otherwise, and, unfortunately, he has recent constructions in his favor. The past has come and gone. We may have opportunity to look at the question further, when further usurpations, as I esteem them, shall be attempted upon the liberties which that instrument was expected to secure to the freemen who ratified it. Enlightened by the dismal experience wre have*
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