ld, or
arms and munitions of war it might itself manufacture or provide for the
public service.

No one, it is believed, would think a moment of deriving the power of
Congress to make needful rules and regulations in relation to property
of this kind from this clause of the Constitution. Nor can it, upon any
fair construction, be applied to any property, but that which the new
Government was about to receive from the confederated States. And if
this be true as to this property, it must be equally true and limited as
to the territory, which is so carefully and precisely coupled with
it--and like it referred to as property in the power granted. The
concluding words of the clause appear to render this construction
irresistible; for, after the provisions we have mentioned, it proceeds
to say, "that nothing in the Constitution shall be so construed as to
prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular State."

Now, as we have before said, all of the States, except North Carolina
and Georgia, had made the cession before the Constitution was adopted,
according to the resolution of Congress of October 10, 1780. The claims
of other States, that the unappropriated lands in these two States
should be applied to the common benefit, in like manner, was still
insisted on, but refused by the States. And this member of the clause in
question evidently applies to them, and can apply to nothing else. It
was to exclude the conclusion that either party, by adopting the
Constitution, would surrender what they deem their rights. And when the
latter provision relates so obviously to the unappropriated lands not
yet ceded by the States, and the first clause makes provision for those
then actually ceded, it is impossible, by any just rule of construction,
to make the first provision general, and extend to all territories,
which the Federal Goverenment might in any way afterwards acquire, when
the latter is plainly and unequivocally confined to a particular
territory; which was a part of the same controversy, and involved in the
same dispute, and depended upon the same principles. The union of the
two provisions in the same clause shows that they were kindred subjects;
and that the whole clause is local, and relates only to lands, within
the limits of the United States, which had been or then were claimed by
a State; and that no other territory was in the mind of the framers of
the Constitution, or intended to be embraced in it.