Primary Sources
Challenging Slavery, 1819-1820
In the midst of heated debates over whether Missouri should be admitted as into the Union as a slave state (and Maine as a free state), Senator Rufus King stood on the floor of the Senate and delivered a speech that left southern slaveholders “seized with cramps:”
"... And now, Mr. President, I approach a very delicate subject. I regret the occasion that renders it necessary for me to speak of it, because it may give offence, where none is intended. But my purpose is fixed...
Mr. President, I have yet to learn that one man can make a slave of another; if one man cannot do so, no number of individuals can have any better right to do it, and I hold that all laws and compacts imposing any such condition upon any human being are absolutely void, because contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God, by which he makes his way known to man, and is paramount to all human control..."
Rufus King
United States Senate, February 11, 1820
