all the States,
decided that this was a constitutional obligation. How is it now? The
North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their natural
character, they commenced with the fraudulent fiction that fugitives
were entitled to habeas corpus, entitled to trial by jury in the State
to which they fled. They pretended to believe that our fugitive slaves
were entitled to more rights than their white citizens; perhaps they
were right, they know one another better than I do. You may charge a
white man with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not
require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is nothing to
determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he fled,
and then he is to be delivered up upon demand. White people are
delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves. Slaves, black
people, you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes
have been invented to defeat your plain constitutional obligations.

Senators, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations
and the duties of the federal government. I am content and have ever
been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not
believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I
would have voted for it as a proposition _de novo_, yet I am bound to it
by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by
established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given
to it, and intend to give to it, unfaltering support and allegiance, but
I choose to put that allegiance on the true ground, not on the false
idea that anybody's blood was shed for it. I say that the Constitution
is the whole compact. All the obligations, all the chains that fetter
the limbs of my people, are nominated in the bond, and they wisely
excluded any conclusion against them, by declaring that "the powers not
granted by the Constitution to the United States, or forbidden by it to
the States, belonged to the States respectively or the people."

Now I will try it by that standard; I will subject it to that test. The
law of nature, the law of justice, would say--and it is so expounded by
the publicists--that equal rights in the common property shall be
enjoyed. Even in a monarchy the king can not prevent the subjects from
enjoying equality in the disposition of the public property. Even in a
despotic government this principle is recognized. It was the blood and