Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845 Page: 45 of 56
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still beckon them onward. If you consider the projects
which I have intimated utopian and chimerical, tell me if
there is one of them which has not been seriously proposed
and urged, and whether either of them or all together are a
whit more improbable than the present increase of slavery
would have been deemed when the Constitution was framed,
or than the annexation of Texas was regarded not many
years, and not very many months, ago.
With this rapid and imperfect sketch of the successive results
of the annexation of Texas, if it can be effected, and if
the policy in which it originated can be successfully carried
on, I wish to combine a view of the opposite results which
might be confidently anticipated, if the iniquitous scheme
could now be defeated. If it were defeated, the advantages
of a victory would inure to the Free States, since it must
.have been won by their spirited and united exertions, and it
would prove a triumph of their principles.- In such an event,
they would for the first time feel their own strength, and their
formidable and so long unconquerable adversary would feel
it also; and from that time forward, both would act upon the
conviction that the political power of the country had changed
hands, that the future course of slavery must be retrograde,
and that its abolition was inevitable. A policy worthy of
free states, intrusted for its execution to the worthy representatives
of free states, would at once pervade the action of the
national government ; the Constitution would in time be
purged of its pernicious compromises; the blessed influence
of a practical regard to equal rights would be witnessed
in the entire system of legislation; our citizens would have
it in their power, and would find themselves induced by their
interests and by all higher motives, to become republicans;
they would be content to improve, until they could exhaust
them, the almost boundless and endless resources of their
present territory ; and would furnish to the world an unparalleled,
and as yet unimagined, example of what three
hundred millions of freemen may become and do, when intelligence
and skill and industry, under the guidance and
control of Christian morality, shall exert their full and lasting
influence upon the human condition.
I proceed to a view of the subject, which I have reserved
as the last in order, because in its nature it is distinct from
all the others, and because in my own judgment it is comparatively
the least entitled to consideration. I see, however,
from the evidence around me, that others regard it in a different
light and ascribe to it much practical importance. To
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Phillips, Stephen C. Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845, book, January 1, 1845; Boston. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth2361/m1/45/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.