You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings, will be ready for all these things; and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave trade revived with all its horrors, a slave code enforced in our Territories, and a new Dred Scott decision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North.
This Government is expressly charged with the duty of providing for the general welfare.

We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare.

We believe--nay, we know, that this is the only thing that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself....
[Sidenote] Lincoln Cincinnati Speech, Sept.

17, 1859.

Debates, pp.
267-8.
I say we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so.