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has been done on this head. At the risk of repetition, I now gather it together. The assumption that Slave-masters, under the Constitution, may take their slaves into the Territories, and continue to hold them as in the States, stands on two pretensions — first, that man may hold property in man, and, secondly, that this property is recognized in the Constitution. But we have seen that the pretended property in man stands on no reason, while the two special arguments by which it has been asserted, first an alleged inferiority of race, and secondly the ancient curse of Ham, are grossly insufficient to uphold such a pretension, And we have next seen that this pretension has as little support in the Constitution as in reason; that Slavery is of such an offensive character, that it can find support only in "positive" sanction, and words of "irresistible clearness;" that this benign rule, questioned in the Senate, is consistent with the principles of an advanced civilization; that no such "positive" sanction, in words of "irresistible clearness," can be found in the Constitution, while, in harmony with the Declaration of Independence, and the Address of the Continental Congress, the cotemporaneous declarations in the Convention, and especially the act of the Convention in substituting "service" for "servitude," on the ground that the latter expressed "the condition of slaves," all attest that. the pretension that man can hold property in man was carefully, scrupulously, and completely excluded from the Constitution, so that it has no semblance of support in that sacred text; nor is this pretension, which is unsupported in the Constitution, helped by the two arguments, one in the nameof State Equality, and the other in the name of Popular Sovereignty, both of which are properly put aside.
Sir, the true principle, which, reversing the assumptions of Slave-masters, makes Freedom national and Slavery sectional, while every just claim of the Slave States is harmonized with the irresistible predominance of Freedom under the Constitution, has been declared at Chicago. Not questioning the right of each State, whether South-Carolina or Turkey, Virginia or Russia, to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, the Convention there assembled has explicitly announced Freedom to be "the normal condition of all the Territory of the United States," and has explicitly denied "the authority of Congress, of a Terri-
