moral obligation, to provide for its own welfare. If such stipulations have not usually been made among independent nations, their absence may prove that the public interest has not required them, but it does not prove the want of a right to make them.

Each of the American States, when its people adopted the national Constitution, possessed the right that belongs to every political society, of determining what persons should be permitted to enter its territories. Each of them had a complete right to judge for itself how far it would go, in recognizing or aiding the laws or institutions of the other States. It is obvious, moreover, that States which are in general independent of each other, but which propose to enter into national relations with each other under a common government, for certain great political and social ends, may have reasons for giving a particular effect to each other's laws, or for sustaining each other's institutions, which do not operate with societies not standing in such a relation; and that these reasons may be of a character so grave and important, as to amount to a moral obligation. Thus independent and disconnected nations are ordinarily under no obligation to support or guarantee each other's forms of government. But the American States, in entering into the new Union under their national Constitution, found that a republican form of government in every State was a thing so essential to the welfare and safety of all of them, as to make it both a necessity and a duty for all to guarantee that form of government to each other.

In the same way, although nations in general do not recognize the relation of master and servant prevailing by the law of another country, so far as to stipulate for the surrender of persons escaping from that relation, the American States found themselves surrounded by circumstances so imperative, as to make it both a necessity and a duty to make with each other that stipulation. These circumstances I shall now briefly state.

I have already referred to all the known proceedings in the Convention on this subject, and have stated to what extent those proceedings justify the opinion that the Constitution could not have been formed without this provision.' But there is higher evidence both of its necessity and its propriety than anything that may have been said by individuals or delegations. The States were about to establish a more perfect Union, under a peculiar form of national government, the effect of which would necessarily bring them into closer relations with each other, multiplying greatly the means and opportunities of intercourse, and enabling them to act on each other's internal condition with an influence that would be nearly irresistible, unless it should be arrested by constitutional barriers. Among the features of their internal condition, the relation of master and servant, or the local institution of servitude, was one that must either be placed under national cognizance.

1 I am not aware of any more positive evidence than that above given in the text, that this clause

of the Constitution was expressly
made in the Convention a condition
of assent by any of the States.

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or be left exclusively to the local authority of each State. There was no middle or debatable ground, which it could with safety be suffered to occupy. The African race, although scattered throughout all of the States, was placed in very different circumstances in different parts of the country. There could have been no national legislation with respect to that race, concerning the time or mode of emancipation, the tenure of the master's right, or the treatment of the slave, that would not have been forced to adapt itself to an almost endless variety of circumstances in different localities. At the same time, it was one of the fundamental principles on which the whole Constitution was proposed to be founded, that, where the national authority could not furnish a uniform rule, its legislative power was not to extend. Whatever required one rule in Massachusetts and another rule in Virginia, for the exigencies of society, was necessarily left to the separate authority of the respective States. It was upon matters on which the States could not legislate alike, but on which the national power could furnish a safe and advantageous uniform rule, that the want of a national Constitution was felt, and for these alone was its legislative power to be created.

We may suppose, then, that the framers of the Constitution had sought to bring the relation of master and servant, or the condition of the African race, within the States, under the cognizance of national legislation; and we may imagine, for the purposes of the argument, that consent had been given

by every one of the States. The power must have remained dormant, or its exercise would have been positively mischievous. It never could have been exercised beneficially for either of the two races; not only because it could not have followed any uniform system, but because the confusions and jealousies which must have attended any attempt to legislate specially, must either have totally obstructed the power, or must have made its exercise absolutely pernicious. These consequences, which the least reflection will reveal, may serve to show us, far better than any declarations or debates, why the framers of the Constitution studiously avoided acquiring any power over the institution of slavery in the States; why the representatives of one class of States could not have consented to give, and the representatives of another class could never have desired to obtain, such a power for the national Constitution.

But it may be asked, and the question is often prompted by a feeling of pity towards individual cases of hardship,- Why did not the framers of the Constitution content themselves with the negative position, which leaves the institution of slavery to the uncontrolled direction of every State in which it is found? Why did they establish a rule that obtains nowhere else among distinct communities, and require that the fugitive from this relation of a purely local character, who has committed no crime, and has fled only to acquire a natural liberty, shall be restored to the dominion of the local law which declares him to be a slave? Why should the States

which had abolished, or were about to abolish, this relation, consent to the use of force within their own territories, for the purpose of upholding the relation in other States? These questions are pertinent to the estimate which mankind may be called upon to form concerning the provisions of our national Constitution, and they admit of an answer.

The most material answer to them is, that, without some stipulation on the part of the States where slavery was not to exist that their free territory should not be made the means of a practical interference with the relation in other States, the mere concession of the abstract principle that slavery was to be exclusively under the control of State authority would have been of no real value to any one of the States, or to any of their inhabitants, of either race. But some active security for this principle was of the utmost importance, not merely as a concession which would secure the formation of the new Union, but as a means to secure the beneficent working of the Constitution after its acceptance had been obtained. It was as important to the black race as it was to the whites; for it is not to be doubted, that the continuance of a division into separate States, and the firm maintenance of an exclusive local authority over the domestic relations of their inhabitants, have been the cause, under the Divine Providence, of a far higher civilization, and consequently of a far better condition of the subjected race, than could have been attained in the same localities if the States had been in all respects resolved into one consolidated republic.