labor, that Congress refused to allow the petitions of Indiana while a territory, which petitions were approved by William Henry Harrison, for a suspension for a term of years of the sixth article of the ordinance of 1787, prohibiting slavery. It was a compact to which all the States were parties, and by its express terms, could not be repealed or suspended without their common consent.

Second—The prohibition of the ordinance, applied to territory substantially free from slavery, and which it was well understood was not adapted to slave labor. It raised no such question, as would have been raised, if it had been applied to territory where slavery then largely existed, or which was adapted to negro slave labor. It is, therefore, no precedent for Congressional action in such a case. The precedent of one case is not a rule of decision for another, unless the two are substantially alike. This noble ordinance of 1787, then rather affirmed a principle of freedom, than imposed a necessary practical prohibition, for it may be well to know, that notwithstanding the ordinance, there were as late as 1810, in Indiana, 237 slaves, and as late as 1820, in Illinois, 917 slaves, but upon a soil fitted by nature for the vigorous growth of freedom, African slavery, the tree of tropic climes, could not grow, and it withered and died, as it had done before in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

In connexion with the ordinance of 1787, another point may be alluded to here. In a very able speech made by Mr. Upham of Massachusetts, in opposition to the Kansas and Nebraska bill in the House of Representatives on 10th of May 1854, the point is made, that the prohibition of slavery in the ordinance of 1787, and the provisions of the Constitution regarding slavery, were the result of a bargain between the North and the South, by which the North gained on one hand exclusion of slavery from the North-west territory, and the right first to tax, and after twenty years to prohibit the African slave trade, and the South on the other hand gained the right to representation in slaves, the right to continue to import them for twenty years, and the right forever to reclaim fugitive slaves. According to this theory, the slave representation, the reclamation of fugitive slaves, and the right to twenty years of the African slave trade, were, to use Mr. Upham's language "the equivalent paid by the free States to the Slave States, in consideration of the abandonment by the Slave States of all claim to extend their slavery beyond their own limits." It is undoubtedly true, that the ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution were almost concurrent acts, but the facts of history will not sustain Mr. Upham's assumption of a bargain to the extent stated, yet it has sufficient basis to warrant the point, that the ordinance of 1787 was a compact and a compromise, and was never intended by the South as a concession of any right or power in Congress arbitrarily to prohibit slavery in any territory of the United States. It may be true that for their consent to have slavery excluded from the North-west territory, the South received an equivalent, but the exclusion and the equivalent applied only to the North west territory, and as to all territory thereafter acquired, the question remained the same as before the ordinance of 1787, and must depend on the Constitution itself, unaffected by the precedent of the ordinance. Let us consider the question under the Constitution.

It was resolved at the Republican Convention of 1856 in Philadelphia, and I do not understand the Republican party of 1860 to have abandoned the position, "That the Constitution of the United States confers upon Congress sovereign power over the territories of the United States for their government, and that in the exercise of this power, it is both the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories, those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."

This sweeping assertion of sovereign power in Congress over citizens of the United States in territories, of course affirms that Congress can do for the territories all or even more than a State government can do for a State. Mr. John Pettit, late United States Senator from Indiana, has made the broadest assertion of Congressional sovereignty, for he has said and endeavored to prove that it is "absolute, unconditional, unlimited authority"; such, in fact, as would enable the Federal government to sell the citizens of the territories into slavery. Power to do an act is one thing—a constitutional right to do it is another. I do not concede Mr. Pettit's authority for Congressional sovereignty, even though he be one of Mr. Buchanan's Judges in Nebraska, but it is interesting to note, by way of parenthesis, how wonderfully Republican doctrine on one extreme, and Buchanan or Breckinridge doctrine on the other, work together to a common center, Congressional or Federal government despotism.

It is vain to look for any express warrant for any such power in the Constitution, except in the language of the 3d section of the 4th article, declaring that—"The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property of the United States."

Assuming that this is a grant of power to govern the people of United States territory, in the ordinary sense of sovereign legislative power, such as that possessed by the States for example, this anomalous conclusion would follow: that there are under the Constitution two distinct systems of government—one a strictly defined and limited Federal government over the States, with a right of representation in the governed; another a municipal government, almost arbitrary in its character over the citizens in the territories as mere colonists, without any right of representation in the governed. There is no foundation for this conclusion. When the Constitution was adopted, the territories were recognized as incipient or inchoate States. It was with reference to them that the power to admit new States was incorporated in the Constitution. People migrating to those territories carried with them the inherent rights of self-government and the guarantees of the Constitution. The Constitution was intended for the territories as much as for the States that made it. Congress has no power but what it derives from the Constitution. If it can acquire territory and govern it, it can do so only by virtue of and in accordance with the Constitution. We cannot suppose that the framers of the Constitution, or the people of the States who spake through it, looking as many of them did, to the fair lands of the west, as their own future homes and the homes of brothers and children, where fortunes broken in the revolutionary struggle might be retrieved, would impose on themselves or those brothers and children a colonial bondage to the Federal government, worse than that from which they had just escaped. Jealousy of the power of the Federal government, as already shown, had been the great drawback to the confederacy and to the formation of the Constitution, and had carefully guarded in the Constitution the rights of the States as to all matters of internal sovereignty, and it must be so construed as equally to guard the rights of the people of the territories or inchoate States, or the Constitution becomes incongruous and inconsistent. Power of exclusive legislation was conferred on Congress, as to certain defined localities acquired for specific purposes, such as a seat of government, arsenals, &c., all other powers of legislation were Federal, not municipal—powers to govern the States or their people for national or Federal purposes, not powers to govern the people in the States for internal or