d make regulations respecting the public domain, was
demanded by the exigencies of an exhausted treasury and a disordered
finance, for relief by sales, and the preparation for sales, of the
public lands; and the last clause, that nothing in the Constitution
should prejudice the claims of the United States or a particular
State, was to quiet the jealousy and irritation of those who had
claimed for the United States all the unappropriated lands. I look in
vain, among the discussions of the time, for the assertion of a
supreme sovereignty for Congress over the territory then belonging to
the United States, or that they might thereafter acquire. I seek in
vain for an annunciation that a consolidated power had been
inaugurated, whose subject comprehended an empire, and which had no
restriction but the discretion of Congress. This disturbing element of
the Union entirely escaped the apprehensive previsions of Samuel
Adams, George Clinton, Luther Martin, and Patrick Henry; and, in
respect to dangers from power vested in a central Government over
distant settlements, colonies, or provinces, their instincts were
always alive. Not a word escaped them, to warn their countrymen, that
here was a power to threaten the landmarks of this federative Union,
and with them the safeguards of popular and constitutional liberty; or
that under this article there might be introduced, on our soil, a
single Government over a vast extent of country--a Government foreign
to the persons over whom it might be exercised, and capable of binding
those not represented, by statutes, in all cases whatever. I find
nothing to authorize these enormous pretensions, nothing in the
expositions of the friends of the Constitution, nothing in the
expressions of alarm by its opponents--expressions which have since
been developed as prophecies. Every portion of the United States was
then provided with a municipal Government, which this Constitution was
not designed to supersede, but merely to modify as to its conditions.

The compacts of cession by North Carolina and Georgia are subsequent
to the Constitution. They adopt the ordinance of 1787, except the
clause respecting slavery. But the precautionary repudiation of that
article forms an argument quite as satisfactory to the advocates for
Federal power, as its introduction would have done. The refusal of a
power to Congress to legislate in one place, seems to justify the
seizure of the same power when another place