e owner of a slave which no State law could in any way
regulate, control or restrain. Consequently the owner of a slave had the
same right to seize and repossess him in another State, as the local
laws of his own State conferred upon him, and a State law which
penalized such seizure was held unconstitutional.[216] Congress had the
power and the duty, which it exercised by the act of February 12,
1793,[217] to carry into effect the rights given by this Section,[218]
and the States had no concurrent power to legislate on the subject.[219]
However, a State statute providing a penalty for harboring a fugitive
slave was held not to conflict with this clause since it did not affect
the right or remedy either of the master or the slave; by it the State
simply prescribed a rule of conduct for its own citizens in the exercise
of its police power.[220]

Section 3. New States may be admitted by the Congress into this
Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the
Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction
of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the
Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

Doctrine of the Equality of the States

"Equality of constitutional right and power is the condition of all the
States of the Union, old and new."[221] This doctrine, now a truism of
Constitutional Law, did not find favor in the Constitutional Convention.
That body struck out from this section, as reported by the Committee on
Detail, two sections to the effect that "... new States shall be
admitted on the same terms with the original States. But the Legislature
may make conditions with the new States concerning the public debt which
shall be subsisting."[222] Opposing this action, Madison insisted that
"the Western States neither would nor ought to submit to a union which
degraded them from an equal rank with the other States."[223]
Nonetheless, after further expressions of opinion _pro_ and _con_, the
Convention voted nine States to two to delete the requirement of
equality.[224] Prior to this time, however, Georgia and Virginia had
ceded to the United States large territories held by them, upon
condition that new States should be formed therefrom, and admitted to
the Union on an equal footing with the original States.[225] With the
admission of Louisiana in 1812, the principle of equality was extended
to States created out of territory purchase