en I have admitted
that all have the same constitutional rights in the Territories, I have
by no means admitted that men from the South have a right to hold slaves
in the Territories. You may go, and take your slaves with you, if you
have a mind to run the risk; I say you shall not take your slave laws
with you.

I say that slavery is but the creation of some local enactment, and that
no property can exist in a human being, unless it is made so by some
law. This opinion was entertained by the founders of this Republic, and
by nearly every statesman in this country, until very recently. We hear
much said about the constitutional rights of the South; it is thundered
in our ears from the beginning to the end of the session of Congress.
What is meant by this stereotyped expression, I do not exactly
comprehend; and, I presume, many who make use of the phrase do not
understand it. If you mean by this that the Constitution of the United
States gives you the right to go into the Territories belonging to the
people of this country, and take with you not only your human chattels,
but also your bloody slave laws, I say, you have no such constitutional
rights. The Constitution of the United States nowhere recognises slaves
as property. The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that
slaves are not property under the Constitution. The Constitution gives
you the right to reclaim your slaves, if they escape into any other
State; this is all the right it gives you, and all there is in the
Constitution that can by any possibility be construed to apply to
slaves. To contend that there is any power given in the Constitution
which enables the slaveholder to take his slaves with him into a
Territory, and not only his slaves, but his slave laws, and the slave
laws of all the slave States, is an assumption of power that I am not
willing to concede to him. It is claimed that if persons from the slave
States are not permitted to go into the Territories, and take with them
their slaves and slave laws, the rights of the slave States are
violated. This cannot be. If you claim to take into the Territories the
laws of the slave States, and not only the laws, but the Constitution of
a slave State, I claim, also, that I will take the Constitution of my
State, which says there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude; and if you do not permit this, the rights of my State are
violated, if your doctrine be true.

The emigrants from ev