t subject to any one class or
portion of the people, to the exclusion of others, politically and
constitutionally equals; but every citizen would, if any _one_ could
claim it, have the like rights of purchase, settlement, occupation, or
any other right, in the national territory.

Nothing can be more conclusive to show the equality of this with every
other right in all the citizens of the United States, and the iniquity
and absurdity of the pretension to exclude or to disfranchise a
portion of them because they are the owners of slaves, than the fact
that the same instrument, which imparts to Congress its very existence
and its every function, guaranties to the slaveholder the title to his
property, and gives him the right to its reclamation throughout the
entire extent of the nation; and, farther, that the only private
property which the Constitution has _specifically recognised_, and has
imposed it as a direct obligation both on the States and the Federal
Government to protect and _enforce_, is the property of the master in
his slave; no other right of property is placed by the Constitution
upon the same high ground, nor shielded by a similar guaranty.

Can there be imputed to the sages and patriots by whom the
Constitution was framed, or can there be detected in the text of that
Constitution, or in any rational construction or implication deducible
therefrom, a contradiction so palpable as would exist between a pledge
to the slaveholder of an equality with his fellow-citizens, and of the
formal and solemn assurance for the security and enjoyment of his
property, and a warrant given, as it were _uno flatu_, to another, to
rob him of that property, or to subject him to proscription and
disfranchisement for possessing or for endeavoring to retain it? The
injustice and extravagance necessarily implied in a supposition like
this, cannot be rationally imputed to the patriotic or the honest, or
to those who were merely sane.

A conclusion in favor of the prohibitory power in Congress, as
asserted in the eighth section of the act of 1820, has been attempted,
as deducible from the precedent of the ordinance of the convention of
1787, concerning the cession by Virginia of the territory northwest of
the Ohio; the provision in which ordinance, relative to slavery, it
has been attempted to impose upon other and subsequently-acquired
territory.

The first circumstance which, in the consideration of this provision,
impresses i