any question of the fidelity of their successors to engagements so solemnly undertaken, both expressed and implied. It is of vital importance, in considering the subsequent political history of the country, to bear in mind this contemporaneous exposition of the powers of the General Government, and of the rights of the States. It recognized a fact, in law, which, by right, admitted of no dispute. It estab lished a principle of inherent and inestimable virtue, in reference to the future well-being of our political system. It determined the point that the system should be republican in reality, as well as in profession, instead of a practical despotism under the shadowy guise of a republican name. The original Confederation had been nothing more than a league between sovereign and independent States, for their mutual protection and welfare. The Constitution created a General Government-legislative, executive, and judicial-conferring upon it certain powers which could not be exercised conveniently and wisely, by the States in Congress, under their earlier compact. Those powers were defined and restricted by the terms of the frame of government, and all which were not expressly granted by that instrument remained with the several States, under their separate constitutions and laws, in all their original vigor and extent. The object of the Union was the more effectual administration of the common interest. The design of the Constitution was to protect the people, the source of power, against the Government, that is, the agents of the people, to whom that power was periodically intrusted; so that the written record should be a continual protest against every possible assumption of arbitrary authority. The Southern States, in becoming members of the Union, no more yielded, therefore, any control over their domestic in⚫stitution, than the Northern States granted power to the General Government to regulate the almshouses within their several jurisdictions. To prevent all misapprehension, however, on the part of those who either were ignorant of the purpose of the Constitution, or who disregarded its provisions, the MASSACHUSETTS AND THE CONSTITUTION. 29 resolution of 1790, already cited, declared a principle, which, in its general application, must have been well understood throughout the country; for, without that reservation of their original rights to the States, contained in the amendments to the Constitution (Art. X.),' the struggle which ensued, upon the proffer of that instrument to the acceptance of the States, would have ended in its rejection. The introduction of that article was the turning-point. with the Convention of Massachusetts, which had previously given decided indications of a majority averse to the proposed Union; and this principle, no matter what might be its specific application, in one section of the country or another, was of as vital value to the North as to the South. For it restrained the exercise of central authority within specific limits, and, by opposing diverse local barriers to arbitrary encroachments. upon public liberty, it maintained the spirit and the form of popular independence. The question was not of the personal bondage of the blacks, but of the political freedom of white men. The former was an existing fact, and uncontrollable, except at the option of those with whom were the legal right and the special concern. The other was a point in which the masters of slaves, and those who declined to assume any such mastery, had an equal interest as citizens. The one was not within the purview of the constitutional problem at all, except as an incident of the relations of the individual slaveholder, not of his State, to the system of government. But, by the determination of the other, the individual citizen remained a republican and a freeman. He was thus personally divested of no one of his existing social or political rights, while the congregated freemen of the several States recognized a government representative of themselves, collectively and severally, as citizens both of the national and local system. To the authority of the latter they had been long accustomed, 1 "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." and it enjoyed the popular approbation. They made the former also answerable to the sovereign will of the people; granting it powers necessary to its own action, but not in conflict with any which were necessary to the administration of the appropriate State authority. In short, it was this clause alone which would prevent a political party in office, and able to find a pretext for the assemblage of a sufficient military force, from converting its power into a perpetual usurpation, upon that pretext, or any other invented for the occasion. When such an event takes place, public liberty is at an end. interference with the rights reserved to either State was a step in the line of such a catastrophe. Every such movement each and all the States were profoundly interested to check and to avert. Hence, the fundamental objection to any anti-slavery organization, because revolutionary in its tendency, and which, when used for political purposes, becomes such in action. In striking at the rights of slaveholders, it violates equally, in principle, those of citizens who are not slaveholders, and endangers the whole civil system by undermining the basis of all constitutional security. It was not, therefore, because they were slaveholdersthe mere accident of their condition—but in regard to their capacity as citizens and freemen, that the most enlightened and liberal statesmen of the country have refused, from the beginning of the government, to engage in a moral or political crusade against the inhabitants of the South. The struggle to effect the emancipation of the negro was a violent breach of the guaranty afforded to the master by the Constitution. If that charter was broken in regard to one section, it could have no vital force to secure protection to another. The defence of the Constitution in every particular, therefore, was the common cause of all who desired to uphold the Government in its integrity; and until a comparatively recent period, this was a cause which actively engaged the general public sympathy. Under the old articles of "Confederation and Perpetual Union," agreed upon July 9th, 1778, the first THE RENDITION OF FUGITIVE SLAVES. 31 section, after that declaring the name of the Confederacy, is the following: "ART. II.—Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled." No similar provision was contained in the Constitution agreed upon by the General Convention of the several States; but the article already cited, and well deserving frequent repetition, was proposed by Congress among other amendments, and was made part of the Constitution when that was adopted by the several State Conventions or Legislatures, as follows: "ART. X.-The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Upon the main point under consideration, therefore, there could exist no legal doubt. Slavery itself was purely an affair of State jurisdiction, over which the nation had no pretence of control. The rendition of fugitive slaves was, on the other hand, a matter of national obligation, for the discharge of which Congress made such provision as was deemed adequate for the purpose. In this view the whole nation acquiesced, with the exception of here and there an "anarchic" philanthropist ; and the magistrates in every State continued for many years to administer the statute of rendition, in the comparatively few cases which came before them. This quiet state of things continued undisturbed until mobs, encouraged by State legislation, had begun to set aside constitutional obligations; and men who excused their fanaticism, under the pretext of a higher law, of which they conceived, than the actual laws of their country, which were to be seen and read of all men, secretly enticed such negroes as they could reach to flight, and surreptitiously conveyed them to some secure asylum. Indeed, the general question of slavery appears scarcely to have been introduced into Congress earlier than the year 1836. Memorials had been occasionally presented to one or other branch of that body, during the interval between 1790 and the latter period. But they had uniformly confined their requests either to the abolition of the African slave trade, or of that carried on between the States; or, at a later date, to its exclusion from the territories; taking the latter turn, after a convention of the inhabitants of Indiana, part of the tract included within the Ordinance of 1787, had petitioned Congress for the suspension of that restriction in regard to its own domain, as yet in the condition of a territory. As early as 1827, a memorial was offered in favor of the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, all consideration of which was refused in the House by a large majority. In 1831, Mr. John Quincy Adams presented a number of petitions of a similar tenor from inhabitants of Pennsylvania. But he declared that he deemed it his duty to say that he would not support the prayer of the memoralists; saying, also, that he hoped the subject would not be discussed in the House, and that whatever might be his opinion of slavery in general, or of slavery in the District, yet, “the most salutary medicine, unduly administered, was the most deadly poison." The committee to which these petitions were referred was discharged from further consideration of the subject at its request. In thus presenting a petition, with the object of which he did not agree, Mr. Adams evinced opinions on that point, which he so signally vindicated in 1844, and which had previously guided the conduct of his illustrious predecessor, Fisher Ames.' In 1792, that gentleman had of 1 The occasion which brings the names of these distinguished persons together recalls the high tribute paid by the one to the extraordinary powers of the other. Mr. Adams had had the good fortune to listen to the great orators of the British Parliament at its most brilliant period-to Burke and Pitt and Sheridan and Fox-indeed to the speeches of the ablest men of the day in Europe and at home; and he pronounced the opinion: "There could be no doubt of it; of all that he had ever heard, Mr. Ames's speech on the British Treaty was surely the most eloquent." |