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I mean to say that Congress can hereafter decide whether any states, slave or free, can be framed out of Texas. If they should never be framed out of Texas, they never could be admitted.

William H. Seward

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William H. Seward
Age: 71 †
Born: 1801
Born: May 16
Died: 1872
Died: October 10
Diplomat
Former Governor Of New York
Lawyer
Politician
Florida
New York
William Henry Seward
William Seward
Slave
Congress
Whether
Free
Framed
States
Admitted
Mean
Hereafter
Never
Texas
Decide

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But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.
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There is a higher law than the Constitution.
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The whole hope of human progress is suspended on the ever-growing influence of the Bible.
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I speak on due consideration because Britain, France, and Mexico, have abolished slavery, and all other European states are preparing to abolish it as speedily as they can.
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The right to have a slave implies the right in some one to make the slave that right must be equal and mutual, and this would resolve society into a state of perpetual war.
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But the Constitution was made not only for southern and northern states, but for states neither northern nor southern, namely, the western states, their coming in being foreseen and provided for.
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It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.
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Whatever policy we adopt, there must be an energetic prosecution of it. For this purpose it must be somebody's business to pursue and direct it incessantly.
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Idea is a noble one — an idea that fills and expands all generous souls the idea of equality — the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.
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The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.
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But you answer, that the Constitution recognizes property in slaves. It would be sufficient, then, to reply, that this constitutional recognition must be void, because it is repugnant to the law of nature and of nations.
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I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.
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The two systems slave and free-labor are incompatible. They have never permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.
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I know and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.
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I deem it established, then, that the Constitution does not recognize property in man, but leaves that question, as between the states, to the law of nature and of nations.
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Sir, there is no Christian nation, thus free to choose as we are, which would establish slavery.
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The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.
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Revolutions never go backward.
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It is the maintenance of slavery by law in a state, not parallels of latitude, that makes its a southern state and the absence of this, that makes it a northern state.
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The United States are a political state, or organized society, whose end is government, for the security, welfare, and happiness of all who live under its protection.
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