FEBRUARY, 1820. Admission of Missouri. H. or R. the United States, for the slaves were considered supreme tribunal has lately declared a different and protected as property on both sides of the Spanish line, and the emigrants from the United States found the additional quantity of granted land they could acquire for every slave, made their removal advantageous. Who, then, under these circumstances, would have thought the property of slaves insecure by the provision in the treaty for the maintenance and security of property? Anterior to the treaty of cession the citizens of the old United States received large sums of money for slaves sold and transported by the avenue of the Mississippi to Louisiana; and had the treaty preserved a total silence, with regard to the protection of property, it would be irreconcileable with justice that we should first sell those slaves to the inhabitants, and, after securing the price, proceed opinion? How easy also might the obligation of the State magistrates and judges to execute the laws of the Union be established, although denied by the most respectable authorities in the States? Indeed, the admission of precedent as authority on such topics would ripen the confederacy into that condition, at no very distant period, in which it might be asserted that the powers of Congress, like those of the British Parliament, had their base in precedent, and not in the grants of our written Constitution. I am, however, wrong in wasting time in exceptions against the improper use of precedents; for, with the admission that precedents could as well have place in giving birth to political power as in the regulation of confessed powers, the restrictionists will acquire nothing serviceable to emancipate them, or lessen their utility or value to them, because precedents are in no case valuable by emancipating their descendants. We are asked unless considered as adjustments, on mature delibto bind, limit, or manacle the proposed State of eration, of contested questions; whereas, the peoMissouri. Are we to do so because we are more ple of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, having consented trustworthy respecting their own interests than to all the regulations sought for by Congress, and themselves? We have legislated over the people of that Territory for seventeen years, and, during all that time, our humanity slumbered. We suffered slaves to pass the Mississippi, and thereby enhanced the price of our lands; and, in propor- be restricted, and the question now first presents tion as we anticipate the closing the land sales, and the cessation of our interest in permitting slaves to go, our humane sympathies are excited until we at last become so willing to prohibit slavery that we contemplate a new sort of State, with only a portion of the features and capacities retained by the other parties to our great compact. I will now give attention to what gentlemen who favor the restriction have urged, on the score of precedent. They say they are authorized, from the restrictions imposed on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, to build the power of Congress to adopt the amendment of the gentleman from New York on precedents. Precedents may be useful to impart to free government uniform and steady nerves, and to guard against the encroachments of prejudice and passion. There can, however, be no precedent in relation to the powers of our national compact of such antiquity as to acquire any great portion of authority when unaccompanied by demonstrations of their orthodoxy; for the Constitution was only adopted in 1787, since which, and until this Winter, the history and journal of the Convention have been secret. But, in subscribing to the authority and utility of precedents, it should be remembered that they are not to transcend their legitimate sphere. When a jurisdiction, power, or authority, is found or known to exist, precedents are interposed, that it may not be perverted by the use of arbitrary discretion; but this jurisdiction or power must be shown to exist before we admit its need of precedents for its regulation. An attempt is here made, not to regulate the powers and business of Congress by precedents, but to derive those powers also from the same source. If precedents were lawful weapons in accomplishing such an object, how easy would be the task of showing that the State Legislatures could pass bankrupt laws, which they have always done, although the 16th CON, 1st SESS.-41 those regulations being called into existence, as it were, by their request, the question of the power of Congress was not disputed or discussed. It is admitted that the people of Missouri are unwilling to itself as to our Constitutional power to impose the restriction without their consent. The view which I have submitted suffices, in my humble opinion, to show that the position assumed by the restrictionists is not susceptible of aid from precedents, and if it was, that there are no legitimate or proper precedents to aid it; and here I would be willing to rest this topic, were it not for the strange and objectionable inferences which gentlemen strive to deduce from the ordinance of 1787, for the government of the territory northwest of the Ohio river. The fourth section of that ordinance declares "that certain articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original States and the people and States of that Territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent:" and the sixth article declares that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the territory." Gentlemen insist that this article restrained the people of Ohio, and the other States formed in that Territory, from adopting any provision inconsistent with it in their State constitutions, without the consent of Congress, and at the same time afforded an instance of the authority of Congress thus to restrain the new States. This aspect of the ordinance is certainly plausible at first view, but not dangerous; for the idea of a power in Congress not only to impose on the people of a State a constitution not dictated by, or growing out of the federal compact, but to impose such arbitrary constitution on a people before they have sprung into existence, as was the case with regard to the then future or expected communities of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, is apt to shock the imagination, and stimulate such further inquiry as must obviate the error. I contend that the sixth article of the ordinance, whatever be its mode of expression, was temporary 31040 |