Was the Confederate Soldier a Rebel? poses, either can disregard any one provision, and expect, nevertheless, the others to ob serve the rest! I intend for one, to regard and maintain, and carry out to the fullest extent, the Constitution of the United States, which I have sworn to support in all its parts, and all its provisions. It is writ ten in the Constitution : ' No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation there in, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.' That is as much a part of the Con stitution as any other. ... I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat, that if the Northern States refuse willfully and deliber ately to carry into effect that part of the Constitution, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. A bargain cannot be broken on one side and bind the other side. I say to you, gentlemen in Virginia, as I said on the shores of Lake Erie and in the city of Boston . . . that you of the South have as much right to receive your fugitive slaves as the North has to any of its privi leges of navigation and commerce." * Mr. Webster, in the eighteen years since his speech on the Calhoun resolutions, had become better acquainted with the Constitu tion, and was too great and broadened a statesman to be enslaved by any erroneous preconceptions of it. It has been shown that the separate col onies, as such, united in a war for indepen dence and entered into a confederation — "a league of friendship " — by separate sovereignties, and later into a closer Union, by the adoption of a new Constitution; that the Constitution was a compact between the same sovereign States, in which certain definite and limited powers were granted to the government created by it; that all pow ers not delegated were reserved to the States;
- From a pamphlet copy quoted by Stephens.
that in ratifying conventions, several States, notably New York, Rhode Island, and Vir ginia, declared the right to withdraw from the compact, should it appear necessary for the happiness of the people, of which each State, being sovereign, was the only judge; that delegated all thepowers States were understood reserved that toall and unvested in themselves severally. This res ervation is secured in the tenth amend ment of the Constitution, which says : " The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respec tively or to the people." These facts in our government history are, in the language of Alexander Stephens, " the deep footprints of truth impressed upon the lower strata of our political foundation and growth, and must stand forever against bare assertion and speculative theory. They are marks which discussion cannot obliterate, argument cannot remove, sophistry cannot obscure, time cannot erase, and which even wars cannot destroy. . . . They will stick to the very fragments of the rocks of our primitive formation, and bear unerring tes timony to the ages to come of the true char acter of our institutions." As the proverb goes, " There is a skeleton in every house." This wondrous fabric of the fathers was not an exception. There was a skeleton locked in the closet of the Constitution. It was not the result of acci dent or oversight. It was deliberately placed there, with the forethought, knowl edge, and consent of the builders, no one protesting, — the skeleton was slavery. In the fourth article of the Constitution it was provided that " no person held to ser vice or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in con sequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered np on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." Slavery, the enforced servitude of the
