the House of Representatives.  Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the Constitution did not mean a negro slave.  It was clear; it was plain.  Not only the federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States, decided that this was a constitutional obligation.  How is it now?  The North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their natural character, they commenced with the fraudulent fiction that fugitives were entitled to habeas corpus, entitled to trial by jury in the State to which they fled.  They pretended to believe that our fugitive slaves were entitled to more rights than their white citizens; perhaps they were right, they know one another better than I do.  You may charge a white man with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is nothing to determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he fled, and then he is to be delivered up upon demand.  White people are delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves.  Slaves, black people, you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes have been invented to defeat your plain constitutional obligations.

Senators, the Constitution is a compact.  It contains all our obligations and the duties of the federal government.  I am content and have ever been content to sustain it.  While I doubt its perfection, while I do not believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I would have voted for it as a proposition de novo, yet I am bound to it by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers.  I have given to it, and intend to give to it, unfaltering support and allegiance, but I choose to put that allegiance on the true ground, not on the false idea that anybody’s blood was shed for it.  I say that the Constitution is the whole compact.  All the obligations, all the chains that fetter the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that “the powers not granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people.”

Now I will try it by that standard; I will subject it to that test.  The law of nature, the law of justice, would say—­and it is so expounded by the publicists—­that equal rights in the common property shall be enjoyed.  Even in a monarchy the king can not prevent the subjects from enjoying equality in the disposition of the public property.  Even in a despotic government this principle is recognized.  It was the blood and the money of the whole people (says the learned Grotius, and say all the publicists) which acquired the public property, and therefore it is not the property of the sovereign.  This right of equality being, then, according to justice and natural equity, a right belonging to all States, when did we give it up?  You say Congress has a right to pass rules and regulations concerning the Territory and other property of the United States.  Very well.  Does that exclude those whose blood and money paid for it?  Does “dispose of” mean to rob the rightful owners?  You must show a better title than that, or a better sword than we have.