nt amendment thereto,
"having for its object any interference with slavery, shall originate
with any State that does not recognize that relation within its
own limits, or shall be valid without the assent of every one of
the States composing the Union." No Southern man, during the long
agitation of the slavery questions extending from 1820 to 1860,
had ever submitted so extreme a proposition as that of Mr. Adams.
The most precious muniment of personal liberty never had such deep
embedment in the organic law of the Republic as Mr. Adams now
proposed for the protection of slavery. The well-grounded jealousy
and fear of the smaller States had originally secured a provision
that their right to equal representation in the Senate should never
be taken from them even by an amendment of the Constitution. Mr.
Adams now proposed to give an equal safeguard and protection to
the institution of slavery. Yet the proposition was opposed by
only three members of the committee of thirty-three,--Mason W.
Tappan of New Hampshire, Cadwallader C. Washburn of Wisconsin,
and William Kellogg of Illinois.

After a consideration of the whole subject, the majority of the
committee made a report embodying nearly every objectionable
proposition which had been submitted. The report included a
resolution asking the States to repeal all their personal-liberty
bills, in order that the recapture and return of fugitive slaves
should in no degree be obstructed. It included an amendment to
the Constitution as proposed by Mr. Adams. It offered to admit
New Mexico, which then embraced Arizona, immediately, with its
slave-code as adopted by the Territorial Legislature,--thus confirming
and assuring its permanent character as a slave State. It proposed
to amend the Fugitive-slave Law by providing that the right to
freedom of an alleged fugitive should be tried in the slave State
from which he was accused of fleeing, rather than in the free State
where he was seized. It proposed, according to the demand of Mr.
Toombs, that a law should be enacted in which all offenses against
slave property by persons fleeing to other States should be tried
where the offense was committed, making the slave-code, in effect,
the test of the criminality of the act,--an act which, in its
essential character, might frequently be one of charity and good
will.

These propositions had the precise effect which, in cooler moments,
their authors would have anticipated. They