nternal
slave-trade having scarcely existed, while that with Africa had been
allowed. But of one consequence which has followed from the slave
representation, pervading the whole organic structure of the
Constitution, they certainly were not prescient; for if they had been,
never--no, never would they have consented to it.

The representation, ostensibly of slaves, under the name of persons,
was in its operation an exclusive grant of power to one class of
proprietors, owners of one species of property, to the detriment of
all the rest of the community. This species of property was odious in
its nature, held in direct violation of the natural and inalienable
rights of man, and of the vital principles of Christianity; it was all
accumulated in one geographical section of the country, and was all
held by wealthy men, comparatively small in numbers, not amounting to
a tenth part of the free white population of the States in which it
was concentrated.

In some of the ancient, and in some modern republics, extraordinary
political power and privileges have been invested in the owners of
horses but then these privileges and these powers have been granted
for the equivalent of extraordinary duties and services to the
community, required of the favored class. The Roman knights
constituted the cavalry of their armies, and the bushels of rings
gathered by Hannibal from their dead bodies, after the battle of
Cannae, amply prove that the special powers conferred upon them were
no gratuitous grants. But in the Constitution of the United States,
the political power invested in the owners of slaves is entirely
gratuitous. No extraordinary service is required of them; they are, on
the contrary, themselves grievous burdens upon the community, always
threatened with the danger of insurrections, to be smothered in the
blood of both parties, master and slave, and always depressing the
condition of the poor free laborer, by competition with the labor of
the slave. The property in horses was the gift of God to man, at the
creation of the world; the property in slaves is property acquired and
held by crimes, differing in no moral aspect from the pillage of a
freebooter, and to which no lapse of time can give a prescriptive
right. You are told that this is no concern of yours, and that the
question of freedom and slavery is exclusively reserved to the
consideration of the separate States. But if it be so, as to the mere
question of right betw