their owners, in some way and at some time, felt satisfied that the creatures had mind, feeling, souls, family affections, hopes, joys, sorrows---something that made them more than hogs or horses. Shall the Slaveholders require us to be more heartless and mean than they, and treat those beings as property which they themselves have never been able to treat so?
But there is another view of this branch of the subject, more unanswerable still. The citizens of Slave States, have a political power in the general government beyond their single votes and this violates the equality between American Citizens. Mr. Lincoln instanced Maine & South Carolina. Both these states have the same number of members of Congress, of Presidential electors, the same control therefore in National affairs. But Maine has more than twice as many free white citizens as South Carolina. The citizen of South Carolina is therefore twice as good or influential [and a fraction over,] as a free white citizen in a Free State. The State in which the number of negroes is the smallest, in proportion, still
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a voter in that State equal to one man and a tenth in a free State.
The basis of representation as fixed in the U.S. Constitution, making five negroes equal to three whites, had fixed this inequality. This Mr. Lincoln did not object to. It was ``in the bond'' and he would live faithfully by it. But certainly the Free States have the ``
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'' to say whether or not more partners should be taken in on such terms. For himself he was unwilling that his neighbor, living on an equality by his side in Illinois, should by moving over into Kansas be elevated into a state of superiority over himself and become a man and a tenth, whereas before he was formerly only one man, like himself!
If this is ``equal rights'' for the Kansas settler, he would be glad to know what became of his own rights, and the rights of the people of the Free States; while they were thus made into only fractions of men, by the creation of new Slave States. It is said that the adoption or rejection of slavery in Kansas and Nebraska, concerns the people of those Territories alone---it is no business of ours. This is false, said Mr. Lincoln, it concerns our dearest rights, our equality with the citizens of those territories---which we are entitled to by every consideration of justice and constitutional guarantees.
The
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of the people of Kansas and Nebraska to make themselves superior in political power and privilege to the individual citizens of the Free States, was thus effectually riddled, exposed