Excerpt from Protection to Slave Property: Speech of Hon. A. G. Brown, of Mississippi in Defence of His Proposition for Immediate Congressional Protection to Slave Property in the Territories, With the Reply of Senator Fitch; Delivered in the Senate of the United States March 6, 1860

But, Mr. President, not only does this Government refuse that sort of protection to slave property in the Territories, to which I think it entitled, but it has denied us protection everywhere. It totally ignores the very species of property which constitutes the great moneyed interest of the country. There is directly and indirectly de pendent upon the security of that property, investments of more than forty hundred millions of dollars. Destroy our worth of slaves and you destroy the value of the soil on which they work you destroy the value of all our machinery our stock becomes worth less commerce is broken up; our cities dwindle and perish; and yet, sir, this great interest - the greatest individual interest under the Government - gets no protection from the Federal head. How differ ently does it act towards others! Wherever your property goes, on the land or upon the sea, Government stretches over it the strong arm of its power and protects it.

Sir, it was but yesterday that I saw the stereotyped boast that the' last night, or the night before, seventeen slaves had been spirited to Canada by the underground railroad; The colonial statistics show that thousands and thousands of slaves have been carried from the slaveholding States of this Union and secreted in Canada, and it is in vain that we complain to this Government. Suppose that the agents of the underground railroad were to boast every morning that last night they carried away seventeen head of horses from New York, one hundred head of hor'ned cattle from Illinois, and five hundred sheep from Michigan suppose the underground railroad managers were con stantly boasting that Canada was being made a receptacle for your stolen goods: what would the Senator from New York say? What would New York herself say? What would all the non-slaveholding States say? They would goto the President and demand that he discharge his duty, by notifying the British Government that, unless the stolen property was given up, non-intercourse would be declared, and if its colony persisted in receiving and concealing the stolen goods of American citizens, this Government would resent the outrage, even by the shedding of blood.

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