SPEECH...DELIVERED AT ROCHESTER, MONDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1858.
[Washington: Buell & Blanchard, 1858]. 7, [1]pp. Disbound. Caption title [as issued]. Very Good.
This is Seward's famous speech declaring the slavery dispute "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." It was also published in New York during this year. Seward explains to northern laboring men why slavery threatens them: "The laborers who are enslaved are all negroes... But this is purely accidental. The principle of the system is, that labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, grovelling, and base; and that the laborer, equally for his own good and for the welfare of the State, ought to be enslaved. The white laboring man, whether native or foreigner, is not enslaved, only because he cannot, as yet, be reduced to bondage." This type of argument, coupled with dark forebodings of a Slave Power Conspiracy to capture control of the Government, propelled the new Republican Party to a northern popular majority.
Sabin 79576. 540 NUC 0442951 [7]. Dumond 101 and LCP 9306-7 [New York printing only]. Item #7272
Price: $125.00