property or to his, it would be rendered more or less valueless, in proportion to the difficulty of holding it without such protection.  In the case of property in the labor of man, or what is usually called slave property, the insecurity would be so great that the owner could not ordinarily retain it.  Therefore, though the right would remain, the remedy being withheld, it would follow that the owner would be practically debarred by the circumstances of the case, from taking slave property into a territory where the sense of the inhabitants was opposed to its introduction.  So much for the oft repeated fallacy of forcing slavery upon any community.”

And in a subsequent part of the same speech, the matter was treated of in this wise: 

“The South had not asked Congress to extend slavery into the territories, and he in common with most other Southern statesmen, denied the existence of any power to do so.  He held it to be the creed of the Democracy, both in the North and the South, that the general government had no constitutional power either to establish or prohibit slavery anywhere; a grant of power to do the one must necessarily have involved the power to do the other.  Hence it is their policy not to interfere on the one side or the other, but protecting each individual in his constitutional rights, to leave every independent community to determine and adjust all domestic questions as in their wisdom may seem best.”

In other speeches made elsewhere, in New England and in New York the equality of the South as joint owners was declared and maintained, as I had often done before the people of Mississippi and in the Senate of the United States when the subject was in controversy.  The position taken by me in 1850, in the form of an amendment offered to one of the compromise measures of that year, was intended to assert the equal right of all property to the protection of the United States, and to deny to any legislative body the power to abridge that right.  The decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case has fully sustained our position in the following passage: 

“If Congress itself cannot do this, (prohibit slavery in a Territory,) if it is beyond the powers conferred on the Federal Government—­it will be admitted, we presume, that it could not authorize a territorial government to exercise them. It could confer no power on any local government established by its authority, to violate the provisions of the Constitution.

“And if the Constitution recognizes the right of property of the master in a slave; and makes no distinction between that description of property and other property owned by a citizen, no tribunal, acting under the authority of the United States, whether legislative, executive, or judicial, has a right to draw such a distinction, or deny to it the benefit of the provisions and guarantees which have been provided for the protection of private property against the encroachments of the government.”