The Road To Civil War
Democrats, unwilling to let these Republican proclamations go unchallenged, mounted a strong defense of their own, especially in response to the conspiracy charges. Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana refuted Senator Fessenden's argument in a speech to President Buchanan:
Judah P. Benjamin
Senator [Fessenden] . . . says the Constitution does not recognize slaves as property, nor protect them as property, and his reasoning, a little further on, is somewhat curious . . . . Nothing but my respect for the logical intellect of the Senator from Maine [Fessenden] could make me treat this argument as serious, and nothing but having heard it myself would make me believe that he ever uttered it.[30]
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