e, by conquest, or by treaty, attached to the domain of the
United States.

Hence the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the ordinance of
1787, prohibiting slavery in what was called the territory of the
Northwest, and the so-called Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery
north of the parallel 36 deg. 30'. The Wilmot proviso was for the same
reason unconstitutional. The General government never had and has not
any power to exclude slavery from the Territories, any more than to
abolish it in the States. But slavery being a local institution,
sustained neither by the law of nature nor the law of nations, no
citizen migrating from a slave State could carry his slaves with him,
and hold them as slaves in the Territory. Rights enacted by local law
are rights only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters
into a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they are
carried enacts to the contrary. The only persons that could be held as
slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves or the children of
those who were slaves in the Territory when it passed to the United
States. The whole controversy on, slavery in the Territories, and
which culminated in the civil war, was wholly unnecessary, and never
could have occurred had the constitution been properly understood and
adhered to by both sides. True, Congress could not exclude slavery
from the Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold
slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded, for the
inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from the States after
the cession to the United States, were too few to be counted.

The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of
naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was very
proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one State from
gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage over another; but
the General government has itself no power to naturalize a single
foreigner, or in any case to say who shall or who shall not be
citizens, either of a State or of the United States, or to declare who
may or may not be electors even of its own officers. The convention
ordains that members of the house of representatives shall be chosen by
electors who have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most
numerous branch of the State legislature, but the State determines
these qualifications, and who do or do no