hese ideas are universally repudiated in the free States. It is not my
purpose to discuss the social or moral relations of slavery, but simply
to consider under what circumstances the Constitution originated, and
what was the clear intent of those who adopted it as the organic or
fundamental law of the country. The last assumption taken by the
seceding States grows out of the first four, and therefore it becomes a
question of vital interest, what did the framers of the Constitution
mean? We must remember that while names remain the same, the things
which they represent in time go through a radical change. Slavery is not
the same that it was when the Constitution was formed, nor are the
original slave States the same. If freedom at the North has made great
strides, so also has slavery South. Our country now witnesses a mighty
difference in free and slave institutions from what originally was seen.
The stand-point of slavery and freedom has altogether changed, not from
local legislation, but from natural causes, inherent in these two
diverse states of society. New interests, new relations, new views of
commerce, agriculture, and manufactures now characterize our country. It
will not do then to infer, from the existing state of things, what was
originally the respective condition of the slaveholding and the free
States, or what was in fact the import of that agreement, called the
Constitution, which brought about the Federal Union. The framers of the
Constitution did not reason so much as to what they should do for
posterity as for the generation then living. As fallible men, much as
they would wish to legislate wisely for the future, yet their very
imperfection of knowledge precluded them from knowing fully what fifty
or a hundred years hence would be the development of slavery or freedom.
Their actions must have reference to present wants, and consult
especially existing conditions of society. While they intended that the
Constitution should be the supreme law of the land, yet they wisely put
into the hands of the people the power of amending it at any such time
as circumstances might make it necessary. The question then at issue
between the North and the South is not what the Constitution should
read, not what it ought to be, to come up to the supposed interests of
the country; but what it does read. How is the Constitution truly to be
interpreted? All parties should acquiesce in seeking only to find out
the literal impor