iginally the Southern States committed themselves to the policy of
slavery restriction, by a compact in the nature of a contract for a
consideration. By their own votes, they relinquished all pretence of
right to any slaves beyond the jurisdiction of the original States.
Slaveholders, as such, voluntarily shut themselves out of the new
States, in consideration of the right of recovering their fugitive
slaves in whatever part of America they might take refuge. The object,
as I have clearly shown, was to secure to slavery in the original
States the right of recovering fugitives, whether their escape should
be from one of those States to another, or to the Territories and new
States; but to make that the limit, both of the right of recovery on
one side, and of the obligation to permit or allow it, on the other.

It follows, then:

_First_: That as between the new States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin, no right of reclamation exists, or can exist,
there being no power in Congress, as the South admit, to alter the
compact in the ordinance of 1787, which denies this right.

_Second_: That no person, escaping from those States into any other
State or Territory, can be reclaimed as a fugitive slave, because no
person can be held as a slave under their laws.

_Third_: That no slave escaping from the slave States of Missouri,
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, or Florida, into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, or Missouri, can be lawfully reclaimed as a fugitive slave,
because Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Florida are not
_original_ States.

_Fourth_: If slaves escape from any State or Territory other than the
original States, into the States of the northwestern territory, no
lawful power can touch them. The moment they reach those States they
become free, because labor or service cannot lawfully be claimed of
them in an original State.

_Fifth_: After the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slaves escaping from
Arkansas and Missouri, for example to Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and
Minnesota, could be reclaimed, but escaping to Illinois, Wisconsin,
Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, they could not be. And the Congress of
1820 so understood it. The particular in which the Missouri proviso
was altered in copying from the ordinance of 1787, is proof enough of
this.

But did the framers of the Government intend to distinguish in this
manner between new and original slave States? Certainly not; and the
reason is, the