ance of 1787, another point may be alluded to
here. In a very able speech made by Mr. Upham of Massachusetts, in
opposition to the Kansas and Nebraska bill in the House of
Representatives on 10th of May 1854, the point is made, that the
prohibition of slavery in the ordinance of 1787, and the provisions of
the Constitution regarding slavery, were the result of a bargain between
the North and the South, by which the North gained on one hand exclusion
of slavery from the North-west territory, and the right first to tax,
and after twenty years to prohibit the African slave trade, and the
South on the other hand gained the right to representation in slaves,
the right to continue to import them for twenty years, and the right
forever to reclaim fugitive slaves. According to this theory, the slave
representation, the reclamation of fugitive slaves, and the right to
twenty years of the African slave trade, were, to use Mr. Upham's
language "the equivalent paid by the free States to the Slave States, in
consideration of the abandonment by the Slave States of all claim to
extend their slavery beyond their own limits." It is undoubtedly true,
that the ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution were almost concurrent
acts, but the facts of history will not sustain Mr. Upham's assumption
of a bargain to the extent stated, yet it has sufficient basis to
warrant the point, that the ordinance of 1787 was a compact and a
compromise, and was never intended by the South as a concession of any
right or power in Congress arbitrarily to prohibit slavery in any
territory of the United States. It may be true that for their consent to
have slavery excluded from the North-west territory, the South received
an equivalent, but the exclusion and the equivalent applied only to the
North west territory, and as to all territory thereafter acquired, the
question remained the same as before the ordinance of 1787, and must
depend on the Constitution itself, unaffected by the precedent of the
ordinance. Let us consider the question under the Constitution.

It was resolved at the Republican Convention of 1856 in Philadelphia,
and I do not understand the Republican party of 1860 to have abandoned
the position, "That the Constitution of the United States confers upon
Congress sovereign power over the territories of the United States for
their government, and that in the exercise of this power, it is both
_the right_ and _the duty_ of Congress _to prohibit_ in th