fellow-citizens and members of the
sovereignty, a class of beings whom they had thus stigmatized; whom,
as we are bound, out of respect to the State sovereignties, to assume
they had deemed it just and necessary thus to stigmatize, and upon
whom they had impressed such deep and enduring marks of inferiority
and degradation; or, that when they met in convention to form the
Constitution, they looked upon them as a portion of their
constituents, or designed to include them in the provisions so
carefully inserted for the security and protection of the liberties
and rights of their citizens. It cannot be supposed that they intended
to secure to them rights, and privileges, and rank, in the new
political body throughout the Union, which every one of them denied
within the limits of its own dominion. More especially, it cannot be
believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included
in the word citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution which
might compel them to receive them in that character from another
State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges
and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of
the special laws and from the police regulations which they
considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to
persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one
State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they
pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without
obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where
they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation,
unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man
would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech
in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens
might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to
keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done
in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and
slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among
them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.

It is impossible, it would seem, to believe that the great men of the
slaveholding States, who took so large a share in framing the
Constitution of the United States, and exercised so much influence in
procuring its adoption, could have been so forgetful or regardless of