Constitution, Congress prohibit slavery, or any other kind of property existing when the Constitution was made, and still exists in any of the States, that is a violation of one of the vital rights of republican equality with the States. If a State come into the Union, thus shorn of her Sovereign equality with the other States, thus under Congressional duress, it is a violation of that equality of the States which is one of the foundations of our system.

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If Congress has the right to prohibit slave property in the Territories, she has the same right to prohibit any other kind of property, wherever it may be, within the jurisdiction of the Union. The Constitution declares that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation." Congress certainly has no power under this clause to purchase or forfeit slaves for the public use of either holding or emancipating them. The "public use" contemplated by the Constitution, is for carrying on the business of government in its legitimate sphere of action. This certainly does not extend so far as to enable the government to become a great slave holder or emancipator. She must hold before she can emancipate; and if the power to purchase and hold slaves exists at all, it is without limit-she can hold at discretion. The greatest pro-slavery propagandist in the South does not claim for the government of the United States such a power.

The treaty making power of this government may acquire territory. It is contended that the power to acquire, necessarily carries with it the power to preserve; that the power to preserve being unrestricted, the treaty may prohibit slavery, and the government must execute the treaty; or if the treaty makes no provision, the Congress may decide what laws are best calculated to preserve; that she may prohibit slavery as being "necessary and proper" to preserve the territory or to carry out the treaty.

This position is clearly untenable. In the first place, it confounds the different departments and powers of the government. The President and Senate constitute the treaty making power. They may acquire territory by treaty, but when acquired, they can not legislate over it. Their power ends when the acquisition is made, and there the power of Congress begins. When acquired, the territory must be governed by the stipulations of the treaty, so far as it does not conflict with the Constitution of the United States. To the extent of such conflict, the treaty is void; because the treaty making power itself is conferred and limited by the Constitution; it must be governed by the express provisions of that Constitution which creates it, and which recognizes slaves as property co-extensively with the Union, unless prohibited by the States, and guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."

The Constitution can not mean that either the holding or carrying Africans, already slaves, is the depriving of a person of liberty, because the slave is recognized as property by previous law and fact, and is placed upon an equal footing of security with life and liberty. If the Constitution mean that a slave has been deprived of the liberty to which it refers, then the slave could claim his freedom by due process of law under the Constitution itself; there would be no necessity for an act of Congress respecting either the Territories or the States. But it has always been known and acted upon, that the liberty referred to by the Constitution is not the liberty of the slave it recognizes as property. The decision of the Supreme Court, therefore, correctly announces the fact and principle, that the word citizen, or people, in the Constitution, does not include the African race. They were not referred to or included by the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution of the United States, as having and political rights whatever.

However unjust this may appear, it is sustained by a precedent of the highest authority. The Almighty declared to the children of Israel, "Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; yet this referred to the children of Israel only, and did not include the bondmen or slaves owned by them; for in

the same connection immediately afterwards, He declared, "For they are my servants which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt, they shall not be bondmen. Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen round about thee; of them shall ye buy, and of their families which they begat in your land, and they shall be your possession and ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children forever; but over your brother, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor." Thus the great Jehovah himself excluded the slave from all political existence. Although He commanded liberty to be proclaimed throughout the land to every inhabitant, the bondmen or slaves were not recognized as inhabitants. Under the same divine law, they were held as slaves forever.

The Constitution provides for the acquisition of territory, and confers certain powers upon Congress for admitting new States into the Union, not allowing any inequality concerning either the territories or the States. When it was adopted, slavery existed in all the States and territories but in one of each; can it then be supposed that the people intended to provide for having themselves or their children prohibited from carrying their slaves or other property into their own territories? If they desired or intended such a result, would they not have made a direct express constitutional

provision to that effect? If they did not intend to prohibit slavery by a direct Constitutional provision from those then belonging to the Union, but intended to prohibit it in territories afterwards acquired, or intended to confer that power in either case upon Congress, would they not have made a plain express constitutional provision directly in point, and thus have saved the country from the dangers resulting from such an interpretation of their intentions?

Before the Constitution was adopted, Virginia had expressly prohibited slavery in the territory ceded by her to the United States, and the cession had been accepted. It was not therefore such a new and unimportant question as to justify us in the conclusion that the power was intended to be conferred upon Congress in the secondary or implied powers. The question of slavery has always been one of the first magnitude in American politics.

Virginia had the right to prohibit slavery in the north-west, because she was the sole owner and sovereign over the soil and sovereign over her people. It is contended that the government of the United States, for the same reasons, by virtue of the same powers, has the same rights over her territories. The cases are not at all analogous. The territories of the United States are held as the property and for the benefit of the people of all the states, and must be governed by Congress, not according to the idea of original absolute