olation of the letter
and spirit and obvious policy of the Constitution, enacted in behalf of
slavery, that vice would, ere this, have disappeared from our land.
Look, for instance, at the laws enacted in the fact of the clause: "The
citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and
immunities of citizens in the several States"--laws too, which the
States that enacted them, will not consent to repeal, until they consent
to abandon slavery. It is by these laws, that they shut out the colored
people of the North, the presence of a single individual of whom so
alarms them with the prospect of a servile insurrection, that they
immediately imprison him. Such was the view of the Federal Constitution
taken by James Wilson one of its framers, that, without, as I presume,
claiming for Congress any direct power over slavery in the slave States,
he declared that it possessed "power to exterminate slavery from within
our borders." It was probably under a like view, that Benjamin Franklin,
another of its framers, and Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration
of Independence, and other men of glorious and blessed memory,
petitioned the first Congress under the Constitution to "countenance the
restoration to liberty of those unhappy men," (the slaves of our
country). And in what light that same Congress viewed the Constitution
may be inferred from the fact, that, by a special act, it ratified the
celebrated Ordinance, by the terms of which slavery was forbidden for
ever in the North West Territory. It is worthy of note, that the avowed
object of the Ordinance harmonizes with that of the Constitution: and
that the Ordinance was passed the same year that the Constitution was
drafted, is a fact, on which we can strongly rely to justify a reference
to the spirit of the one instrument for illustrating the spirit of the
other. What the spirit of the Ordinance is, and in what light they who
passed it, regarded "republics, their laws and constitutions," may be
inferred from the following declaration in the Ordinance of its grand
object: "For extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious
liberty, which form the basis wherever these Republics, their laws and
constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the
basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever
hereafter shall be formed in the said territory, &c.; it is hereby
ordained and declared that the following articles, &c." O