nd in the construction of
this power by all the departments of the Government, it has been held to
authorize the acquisition of territory, not fit for admission at the
time, but to be admitted as soon as its population and situation would
entitle it to admission. It is acquired to become a State, and not to be
held as a colony and governed by Congress with absolute authority; and
as the propriety of admitting a new State is committed to the sound
discretion of Congress, the power to acquire territory for that purpose,
to be held by the United States until it is in a suitable condition to
become a State upon an equal footing with the other States, must rest
upon the same discretion. It is a question for the political department
of the Government, and not the judicial; and whatever the political
department of the Government shall recognize as within the limits of the
United States, the judicial department is also bound to recognize, and
to administer in it the laws of the United States, so far as they apply,
and to maintain in the Territory the authority and rights of the
Government, and also the personal rights and rights of property of
individual citizens, as secured by the Constitution. All we mean to say
on this point is, that, as there is no express regulation in the
Constitution defining the power which the General Government may
exercise over the person or property of a citizen in a Territory thus
acquired, the court must necessarily look to the provisions and
principles of the Constitution, and its distribution of powers, for the
rules and principles by which its decision must be governed.

Taking this rule to guide us, it may be safely assumed that citizens of
the United States who migrate to a Territory belonging to the people of
the United States, cannot be ruled as mere colonists, dependent upon the
will of the General Government, and to be governed by any laws it may
think proper to impose. The principle upon which our Government rests,
and upon which alone they continue to exist, is the union of States,
sovereign and independent within their own limits in their internal and
domestic concerns, and bound together as one people by a General
Government, possessing certain enumerated and restricted powers,
delegated to it by the people of the several States, and exercising
supreme authority within the scope of the powers granted to it,
throughout the dominion of the United States. A power, therefore, in the
Gener