Record Data
Transcription
“Don't Care.”
Mr. DOUGLAS has been charged with saying that he did not care whether slavery was voted up or voted down. What he meant and what he said he explains in his Milwaukee speech. In his first speech on the Lecomption [Lecompton] constitution he said the people of Kansas had a right to a slave State or a free State, as they wished. “I then referred,” he goes on to say, “to the fact that I was urged to wait till the election took place on the slavery clause, three weeks afterwards, and I went on to show that that vote could not have the slightest effect on my action, for the reason that I was against the constitution, whether that clause was voted up or voted down. In that connection I said I cared not whether the slavery clause was voted up or voted down, for the reason that I was against it either way. Now, would you supposed that Wm. H. Seward, a Senator from New York, who was present and listened to my speech, would have dared to have changed it and perverted it so as to represent me as saying that I did not care whether slavery was voted up or voted down? Would you have supposed that Abraham Lincoln would have been guilty of the trickery of thus changing my meaning? They knew that the idea I expressed in that declaration was, that whether the slavery clause was voted up or down made no difference as to my opposition to Lecompton I expected no opinion about the merits of slavery.”
