the States. In each of them there is a complete and efficient government. Each has its history, unbroken since the first settlers laid the foundations of a State. In each there is a centre of civilization, a source of law, and the public conscience of an organized self-governing community. Each of them can act, and does act, upon the condition of the African race within its own limits, according to its own judgment of the exigencies of the case; and it is a fact capable of easy verification, that, in the progress of three quarters of a century, this local power has effected for that race what no national legislature could have accomplished. For, if we look back to the period when the Constitution of the United States was adopted, and suppose it to have acquired the means of acting on the institution of slavery within the States, we shall see that, if the national authority had approached the subject of emancipation at all, it must have applied the same rule in South Carolina as in Pennsylvania, and at the same time. But the emancipation of the half a million of slaves held in widely different proportions in the various subdivisions of the country, or of their still more numerous descendants, by a single and uniform measure comprehending them all, would at no time since the Constitution was adopted have been a merciful or defensible act. Nothing could have remained, therefore, for the national power to do, but to attempt such legislation as might tend to regulate and ameliorate the condition of servitude; and such legislation must have been wholly ineffectual, and would

soon have been abandoned, or been superseded by schemes that must have increased the evils which they aimed to remove.

In thus placing a high value upon the exclusive power of the separate States over this the most delicate and embarrassing of all the social problems involved in their destiny, I have not forgotten that, since the adoption of the national Constitution, nine slave States have been added to the Union, and that the slaves have increased to more than three millions. This increase, however, has not been in a greater ratio than that of the white population, nor greater than it must have been under any form of polity which the thirteen original States might have seen fit to adopt in the year 1787, unless that polity had had a direct tendency to restrain the growth of the country, and to prevent the settlement of new regions. As it is, it is to be remembered that, wherever the institution of slavery has gone, there has gone with it the system of State government, the power and organization of a distinct community, and consequently a better civilization than could have been the lot of distant provinces of a great empire, or distant territories of a consolidated republic.

These considerations will account for that apparent inconsistency which has sometimes attracted the attention of those who view the institutions of the United States from a distance, and without a suffi

1 In 1790, the slaves numbered 697,897, and the whites 3,172,464. In 1850, the slaves had increased

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to 3,204,313, and the whites to 19,533,068.

cient knowledge of the circumstances in which they originated. It has been occasionally made a matter of reproach, that a people who fought for political and personal freedom, who proclaimed in their most solemn papers the natural rights of man, and who proceeded to form a constitution of government that would best secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, should have left in their borders certain men from whom those rights and blessings are withheld. But in truth the condition of the African slaves was neither forgotten nor disregarded by the generation who established the Constitution of the United States; and it was dealt with in the best and the only mode consistent with the facts and with their welfare. The Constitution of the United States does not purport to secure the blessings of liberty to all men within the limits of the Union, but to the people who established it, and their posterity. It could not have done more; for the slaveholding States could not, and ought not, to have entered a Union which would have conferred freedom upon men incapable of receiving it, or which would have required those States to surrender to a central and insufficient power that trust of custody and care which, in the providence of God, had been cast upon their more effectual local authority. The reproach to which they would have been justly liable would have been that which would have followed a desertion of the duty they owed to those who could not have cared for themselves, and whose fate would have been made infinitely worse by a consolidation

of all government into a single community, or by an attempt to extend the principles of liberty to all men. The case is reduced, therefore, to the single question, whether the people of the United States should have foregone the blessings of a free republican government, because they were obliged by circumstances to limit the application of the maxims of liberty on which it rests. On this question, they may challenge the judgment of the world.

CHAPTER XVI.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE OF DETAIL, CONCLUDED. GUARANTY OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT AND INTERNAL TRANQUILLITY. - OATH TO SUPPORT THE CONSTITUTION. MODE OF AMENDMENT. RATIFICATION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF CONSTITUTION. SIGNING BY THE MEMBERS OF THE CON

VENTION.

THE

THE power and duty of the United States to guarantee a republican form of government to each State, and to protect each State against invasion and domestic violence, had been declared by a resolution, the general purpose of which has been already described. It should be said here, however, that the objects of such a provision were two; first, to prevent the establishment in any State of any form of government not essentially republican in its character, whether by the action of a minority or of a majority of the inhabitants; second, to protect the State against invasion from without, and against every form of domestic violence.' When the committee of detail came to give effect to the resolution, they prepared an article, which made it the duty of the United States to guarantee to each State a republican form of government, and to protect each State against invasion, without any application from its

1 Elliot, V. 332, 333.