en the territory of a sovereign power is spoken of, it
refers to that tract of country which is under the political
jurisdiction of that sovereign power. Thus Chief Justice Marshall (in
United States _v._ Bevans, 3 Wheat., 386) says: "What, then, is the
extent of jurisdiction which a State possesses? We answer, without
hesitation, the jurisdiction of a State is coextensive with its
territory." Examples might easily be multiplied of this use of the
word, but they are unnecessary, because it is familiar. But the word
"territory" is not used in this broad and general sense in this clause
of the Constitution.

At the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the United States
held a great tract of country northwest of the Ohio; another tract,
then of unknown extent, ceded by South Carolina; and a confident
expectation was then entertained, and afterwards realized, that they
then were or would become the owners of other great tracts, claimed by
North Carolina and Georgia. These ceded tracts lay within the limits
of the United States, and out of the limits of any particular State;
and the cessions embraced the civil and political jurisdiction, and so
much of the soil as had not previously been granted to individuals.

These words, "territory belonging to the United States," were not
used in the Constitution to describe an abstraction, but to identify
and apply to these actual subjects matter then existing and belonging
to the United States, and other similar subjects which might
afterwards be acquired; and this being so, all the essential qualities
and incidents attending such actual subjects are embraced within the
words "territory belonging to the United States," as fully as if each
of those essential qualities and incidents had been specifically
described.

I say, the essential qualities and incidents. But in determining what
were the essential qualities and incidents of the subject with which
they were dealing, we must take into consideration not only all the
particular facts which were immediately before them, but the great
consideration, ever present to the minds of those who framed and
adopted the Constitution, that they were making a frame of government
for the people of the United States and their posterity, under which
they hoped the United States might be, what they have now become, a
great and powerful nation, possessing the power to make war and to
conclude treaties, and thus to acquire territory. (See Cerre _