Excerpt from Political Record of Stephen a Douglas on the Slavery Question, Vol. 1: A Tract Issued by the Illinois Republican State Central Committee The true intent and meaning of the Ne braska bill was declared to be not to legis late slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the peo ple perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way, Subject only to the Constitution of the United States. This was the stump speech in the belly of the bill, as Mr. Benton justly char acterized it. Oh the 15th of February, 1854, Senator Chase offered an amendment to the bill, in order to allow the people to exclude slavery while in a Territorial condition, if they wanted to. The amendment was as follows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.