over the territories. It is, in truth, a power denied to the states, not delegated to Congress, and must, in the language of the Constitution, be "reserved to the people." The federal and state governments having carved out their respective portions from the mass of political powers, the residue remains to the people, and among these is the sovereignty over the territories.

The people hold the territories as tenants in common, and all or any part of them may enter these territories from any and all parts of the United States, and take with them their property. They may enact laws for their personal protection and the preservation of their property, but they cannot exclude others who come after them from the possession and enjoyment of equal rights with themselves.

The first who enter the territory cannot assume a sovereignty which belongs to all. The specific exercise of sovereignty over the question of slavery is held in abeyance until the people of the territory ask admission into the Union as a state, according to the Constitution; and being admitted, the state becomes sovereign within her limits. The power of sovereignty here passes from the people to the state, and the state, in the exercise of this sovereignty, may exclude slavery if she thinks proper. Up to this period, no power exists to exclude it but in the people, acting through a convention of the states. Many political rights were delegated to the states, and many others to the United States. But the people wisely reserved the sovereignty of the territories to themselves. Am I asked, what is to be done if the first inhabitants of a territory undertake to exclude slavery? I reply, that they are not more likely to exclude a slaveholder than a non-slaveholder; certainly they have no more right to exclude one than the other. Suppose these early inhabitants should undertake to exclude all who were not slaveholders, what would you do? You would, if you thought proper, enter the territory without regard to such impotent pretence. If you were forcibly ejected, you would call it revolution. But it would be no more revolution thus to expel you, than if the same power were to expel me. Our rights being equal, our remedies would be the same. All are equals; all have equal rights, whether citizens of the slave or free states; and whenever the Constitution fails to afford equal protection to all, the powers of the Government are at an end-the days of the republic are numbered. What I contend for are constitutional rights. I do not say that these rights may not be wrested from me by force, or that a mal-administration may not render them nugatory. But I do not anticipate such a state of things; I rely upon the Constitution to protect me; and shall not admit a doubt that it will prove efficient for that purpose. I have heard the question asked, Suppose the legislative council of a territory refuses to pass laws to protect slave property, what shall we do in that case? Suppose this council refuses to pass laws to protect the lives, characters, and personal liberty of the citizens, what would you do? Suppose the first settlers in a territory take possession of its government, and refuse to pass laws to give protection to the persons and property of any others than themselves, what would you do? You tell me that such suppositions are not admissible, and so I think. It is inadmissible to suppose that legislators in any part of the world neglect the important office of giving protection to the lives and property of the citizens. Fidelity to the oaths they take would exact this, though justice slum

bered in their breasts. All these suppositions are based on the hypothesis that discriminations may rightfully be made against slaveowners and slave property, which I am far, very far, from admitting. No such discrimination can be made. The same oath, the same conscience, that binds the law-maker to give protection to you and your property, binds him in an equal degree to give protection to me and mine. And I no more fear than you, that this oath or this conscience will be violated. Our rights are precisely equal. I admit that by force, fraud, and perjury, I may lose my rights, and by the same means you may lose yours. I shall not admit, as some southern men have done, a right in the people of the territory to exclude me and my constituents from a full participation in the use and occupancy of these territories. There is something so monstrous in such a proposition that the mind recoils instantly on beholding it. Suppose you receive (as you probably will within the next week) the Mexican treaty ratified, and that you proceed, before the close of this session of Congress, to organize a territorial government in New Mexico and California; will the present inhabitants of these territories have the right to exclude whom THEY please? Do gentlemen mean seriously to contend, that after fighting out this war, at the expense of more than fifty millions of dollars, and the sacrifice of more than five thousand precious lives, we are not now to settle in the territories acquired by this vast expense and sacrifice, until the Mexicans inhabitants shall be willing to grant us leave? Do they mean to assert that the victorious and proud-hearted American is to go, cap in hand, to the miserable, cringing Mexican peon, and ask his permission to settle on the soil won by the valor of our troops at Buena Vista, or before the walls of Mexico? Truly, sir, there is something new in the law of nations-this doctrine that the conqueror may only use his conquests as the whims and caprices of the conquered may choose to dictate. I should like to hear gentlemen who hold these doctrines advancing them to our southern soldiers. I should be glad to know what response a member of the 1st Mississippi rifles, or the South Carolina Palmetto regiment, would make to a member of Congress who would tell him that he could not take his property to California until the Indians and Mexicans in that country gave him special leave to do so. Having conquered the country, they doubtless concluded, as I have done, that if the Mexicans remained, they would do so by the special grace of the conqueror. The conclusion, Mr. Chairman, to which my own mind has arrived on the several points involved, are briefly these: That every citizen of the United States may go to the territories, and take with him his property -be it slaves, or any other description of property. That neither the United States Congress nor Territorial Legislature has any power or authority to exclude him; and that the power of legislation, by whomsoever exercised, in the territories, whether by Congress or the Territorial Legislature, must be exerted for the equal benefit of all-for the southern slaveholder no less than for the northern dealer in dry goods.

One other view of the subject, and I am done.

Not only, sir, is the law, but the justice and morality of this territorial question with the South. Shall the southern soldier, who shed his blood in the acquisition of territory, be told he has no right to the fruits of his own victory; that his toils have been bootless to himself and his

posterity; that the citizens of Massachusetts, who looked on with cold indifference, sympathized with our enemies, and received the intelligence of our triumphs with secret pain, have acquired every right--rights purchased with blood; and that he who shed that blood, and yielded up his life on the battle-field, got nothing for himself, and left no inheritance to his children. Go, sir, to the other end of this capitol, and witness a meeting of the Senate; you may see a modest, retiring gentleman, a young man, a young senator, but an old soldier, as he enters that chamber, leaning on his staff. He is lame; his blood stained the battle-field of Buena Vista: shall the gallant and intrepid Davis be told that he has no right to settle in New Mexico or California with his property; that this is a right reserved to the senator from Ohio (Mr. Corwin), who would have greeted him on this the field of his glory, with "bloody hands, and welcomed him to a hospitable grave?" A few days since, you may have seen, in this city, another soldier of this war, a major-general in your army-a gentleman, a scholar, a statesman, and a slaveholder. On the breaking out of this war, he gave himself wholly to his country-perilled his life-severed the ties that bound him to his family and friendssacrificed the enjoyments of domestic quiet-abandoned a home blessed with all the comforts that affection could bestow or wealth could purchase, to encounter the hardships of a military camp in a distant and inhospitable country; and must he be told to stand back and witness the fruits of his toil-lavished upon the sympathising friends of Mexico? Must Major-General Quitman be thrust aside, that place may be given to General Appleton Howe? Must the general who fought the battle yield the fruits of his victory to one who remained at home, sympathizing with his country's enemies, and refusing the last solemn tribute of respect to a son of Massachusetts--a son who yielded up his life in defence of his country's honor, nobly defending his country's flag?

General Taylor, whom you would make President even against his will, is himself a slaveholder, an extensive cotton planter, in my own district. Suppose he should desire to remove his slaves to New Mexico or California is he to be told, that after all his toils, his dangers and privations after having "won an empire"-he shall be an outcast, without the poor privilege of occupying the very soil which his skill and valor won for his country? But why specify individual instances, when there is not a battle-field, from Palo Alto to Agua Nueva, nor one, sir, from the castle of San Juan to the inner walls of the city of Mexico, that is not crimsoned with southern blood; not a field from which the disembodied spirits of southern patriots have not ascended, where their bones do not now lie bleaching? Shall the fathers, brothers, sons of these men, be expelled from the country purchased with their lives, and baptized in their blood, and see it given to a miscreant who "played such fantastic tricks before high heaven as made the angels weep"-a wretch who, to gratify the malignity of a vicious heart, libelled his species, insulted the ashes of a fallen patriot, and wrote infamy on his own. brazen front? The hour that witnesses this black injustice will date an era in the decline of this great republic. The vote by which this foul wrong is consummated will unhinge the Constitution, and leave our country at the mercy of the winds and waves of popular fury. I am not authorized to speak for the entire South; but for my own gallant little state, I can and will speak. She never will submit to a wrong like this;

no, sir; never, never, never! There she stands, on the broad platform of the Constitution; weak in numerical force, strong in the consciousness of her own just cause, fresh from the field of her glory, still dripping with the blood of her best sons; and there she will stand, until the shock that drives her from that position shall crumble the Constitution beneath her feet. She hates injustice, and loves the Constitution; she cherishes the memory of her fallen sons with all the fondness of paternal affection, and she will see justice done their memory; she will demand justice, according to the Constitution, for their families and friends. No power on earth can deprive them of this but the power of despotism. When that is exerted, the tocsin will sound; the spirit of Washington will depart; the Constitution will pass away as the baseless fabric of a vision; anarchy will reign triumphant. May God, in His mercy, preserve us from such a calamity!

SLAVERY NO INCREASE OF THE POLITICAL POWER OF THE SOUTH.

On the 1st of August, 1848, Mr. ROBERT C. SCHENK, of Ohio, in the course of a speech on the Oregon bill, in the House of Representatives, said:

"But, sir, regarding this as a political question purely, or one, if you will, of political power, there is a thing connected with slavery to which we cannot and will not be blind. It is the advantage in federal representation which it gives. This much we do know in the free states, if we know nothing else: that a man at the South, with his hundred slaves, counts sixty-one in the weight of influence and power upon this floor, while the man at the North, with his hundred farms, counts but one. Sir, we want no more of that; and, with the help of God, and our own firm purpose, we will have no more of it. Therefore, above all, it is that we want no more slave territory. That is a sufficient and conclusive reason, if there were no other; and it might as well be distinctly understood first as last.

"Sir, shall I illustrate to show that we understand this matter? There is the district of the honorable gentleman from South Carolina, who would amend so as to extend slavery into Oregon. I have not consulted the census to see how it may be in his particular case, but he probably represents some five or six, or eight thousand voters. Now, there are about eighteen thousand voters in my district-eighteen thousand free white male adult citizens. These eighteen thousand freemen have one voice and one vote-I would it were an abler one-on this floor. The five thousand or eight thousand in South Carolina have the same. On every bill or resolution, or other subject of legislation here, the eighteen thousand in Ohio can say aye or no once and no more-while one-third or one-half that number in South Carolina have also their aye or no. We do not complain of this. I wish it were not so. But so it was arranged, so agreed that it should be, by our fathers when they framed the Constitution; and we will hold by that agreement in all good faith, and submit to it as part of the price paid for this Union. But let there be no more slave territory to make more slave states, to give us more of this slave representation and inequality of weight in the councils of the nation."

GOVERNOR BROWN promptly responded, exposing the fallacy of slavery

increasing the representative power of the South. Having offered an amendment pro formá, he proceeded to say:-The South had contended for the constitutional right of her citizens to emigrate to the territories with their property, and the error into which Northern gentlemen were continually falling, was in attempting to discriminate between slave and other property. The Constitution made no such discrimination, and it was not in the power of Congress to do so. Mr. B. said his principal object in rising at this time was to correct an error very common of Northern politicians, and into which the remarkably astute gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Schenk] had just fallen. That gentleman had stated, with great earnestness and apparent candor, that the slave states had an undue or disproportionate political influence in this House, in consequence of the slave population within their limits. Exactly the converse of this proposition was true. The slave states lose political influence, in consequence of the slaves within their limits. In the gentleman's state, as in all the free states, the entire population, white and black, were enumerated, and all were taken into the account in fixing the ratio of representation. A free negro in Ohio counted as much as a white man, in the general enumeration of her population, and so he did in Mississippi, and in every other state: but how was it with slaves? Under the Constitution, two-fifths of the whole number were excluded, the rule being to compute the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, and then add three-fifths of all other persons, in other words, slaves. Now, what was the practical operation of this rule? Certainly not to increase our power and influence here. In his (M. B.'s) state, a little over one-half of the whole population were slaves. Of these, two-fifths are excluded in fixing the ratio of representation. Two-TENTHS of the entire population are left out of the enumeration, and our political influence diminished by that amount; and yet the gentleman stands up here and misleads the public mind, by asserting that slavery increases the political power of the South.

Mr. SCHENK. Does the gentleman represent the slaves in his district? Mr. BROWN. I represent three-fifths of them; the other two-fifths have no representative.

Mr. SCHENK. Do the slaves vote?

Mr. BROWN. Certainly not: nor do the women and children. Yet women and children are included in the enumeration, and are represented. The free negroes in the gentleman's district do not vote, yet they are all counted in fixing the ratio of representation. The gentleman represents all the negroes in his district, though they do not vote. I only represent three-fifths of the negro slaves in my district, and the political power of the district to the extent of the remaining two-fifths is diminished.

Mr. SCHENK. Do you not represent them as property?

Mr. BROWN. I cannot allow the gentleman to change the issue. Does he not regard them as people--as population? Set them free, and you do not increase thereby their civil rights, but you would give them their full weight in representation. At present they have a mixed character they are property, it is true; but then, they are persons. By the laws of the land, they may commit crimes, and crimes may be committed against them. It is murder, unlawfully and wickedly to kill a