It is an
irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it
means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become
either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.
Either the cotton- and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar
plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free-labor, and
Charleston and New Orleans become marts of legitimate merchandise alone,
or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York
must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the
production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets
for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend
this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final
compromises between the slave and free States, and it is the existence
of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when
made, vain and ephemeral. Startling as this saying may appear to you,
fellow-citizens, it is by no means an original or even a modern one. Our
forefathers knew it to be true, and unanimously acted upon it when
they framed the Constitution of the United States. They regarded the
existence of the servile system in so many of the States with sorrow and
shame, which they openly confessed, and they looked upon the collision
between them, which was then just revealing itself, and which we are now
accustomed to deplore, with favor and hope.
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