s limits. As the
territory was free from the blight of slavery when acquired, your
Commissioners could not assent to its being changed into slave soil by
an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

_Fourth._--The second section of the proposed amendments gives to the
slave States an absolute negative upon the acquisition of free
territory in every possible mode by which it can be acquired; and in
giving reciprocally the same right to free States as to acquiring
slave territory, also fetters the operations of the General Government
both in peace and war, depriving it to some extent of the exercise of
perfect sovereignty, and at the same time sanctioning, and
perpetuating in the organic law, an odious discrimination in favor of
an institution peculiar to the slave States, and at variance with the
humane principles of the age. The free States do not need any such
veto power in their favor, and the slave States would not demand it
except to maintain and preserve for slavery a balance of power
hitherto claimed, and to some extent exercised by them, for which they
secure by this amendment a constitutional perpetuation. No
well-founded objection seems to exist in regard to the acquisition of
free territory, unless it be that it is obtained in order to convert
it into slave soil; and your Commissioners could not consent to give
to a single interest, that of slavery, a negative upon such
acquisitions. They have always regarded slavery as a local
institution, depending solely upon the laws of the States in which it
was permitted for its existence; and they did not deem it expedient or
just to recognize it as, or elevate it to, the rank of a positive
governmental power, by clothing it with the right to interrupt one of
the ordinary and most essential functions of the Government. Slavery,
except as a limited basis of representation, has now no political
power or authority under the Constitution; the wise and good men who
framed that instrument cautiously withheld it in all other respects;
and your Commissioners find in the history of the aggressions of the
slave interest, only additional reasons for confining it within its
original limits.

_Fifth._--To so much of the third article as declares that the
Constitution nor any amendment of it, shall be so construed as to give
Congress the power to regulate, abolish, or control slavery within any
State, there was no objection, as it has never been seriously claimed
that a