Then, and not till then, when universal darkness and despair prevail, can you perpetuate slavery, and repress all sympathies, and all human and benevolent efforts among freemen, in behalf of the unhappy portion of our race doomed to bondage.”
This, no doubt, was Henry Clay the man, speaking the language of his heart, and he spoke it, too, at a time when he must have known that the slave-holding interest was growing very sensitive, and that its distrust and disfavor might become fatal to all his ambitions as a candidate for the presidency. Knowing this, he said things which might have come from the most uncompromising and defiant enemy of slavery. Yet this was the same man who had helped to strengthen the law for the recovery of fugitive slaves; who had opposed the exclusion of slavery from new states; who at the beginning of the Adams administration had given the British government to understand that further negotiations for common action for the suppression of the slave-trade would be useless, as the Senate would not confirm such treaties; who, after having made that anti-slavery speech, would lend himself to a negotiation with a foreign government for the mutual surrender of fugitive slaves and military and naval deserters; who would, at a later period, vehemently denounce the abolitionists, again oppose the exclusion of slavery from new territories, again strengthen the fugitive-slave law, while in the intervals repeating his denunciations of slavery, and again declaring himself in favor of gradual emancipation.
