opened in the wilderness the pathway of civilization, and made its waste places to blossom like the rose, than to trust these priceless treasures to the keeping of many of the merchant princes of our eastern cities, whose warehouses and whose homes are palaces, "whose ledger is their Bible and whose gold is their God"; or to the still worse keeping of such Federal administrations as that of James Buchanan—a man in whose veins, according to his own boast, never flowed a drop of democratic blood.

It is not to such men I would commit the welfare of the territories of the United States. Rather let freeborn white men govern them in their own way, unawed by Federal armies sustaining Lecompton Constitutions, and I have no fear of the domestic institutions that will be formed in the territories, nor any fears for the Union and the Constitution.

To sum up what I have said on this part of my argument, the proposition is simply this: The Constitution, considered as a whole, and interpreted as it should be, as the act of a moral person, made for great moral and political ends, and not by the mere technical rules which lawyers or impracticable theorists would apply to it, requires that the people of a territory or inchoate State of the United States, preparatory to their admission to the rank of a full grown State within the Union, shall have as full power, through a legislature of their own choosing, to deal with the subject of domestic slavery, and with other subjects of domestic concern, as is possessed by the people of States in the Union. In other words, I say, that whatever may be the right and duty of Congress under the Constitution to guard and protect the territories from internal or foreign violence, and to maintain their allegiance to the Union, it is neither the right nor duty of Congress, under the Constitution, to interfere with the question of slavery or any other domestic question, so long as the people of the territories are faithful to their allegiance to the Constitution and the Federal Republic.

I now proceed to state and confirm by brief historic evidence a proposition already implied in what I have said upon the compromise character of the Constitution and the ordinance of 1787. It is this: The action of the Federal government on the subject of slavery has been essentially compromise action. It recognizes the principle of the co-existence and extension of Free States and Slave States, under and within the confederacy, leaving the ultimate of the question of abolition or extension, not with the Congress, but with the people of the several States. Congress has never rightfully taken sides on this question; for while on the one hand slavery has been forbidden in some territories, it has been permitted in others. Slave territory and free territory have alike been acquired by treaty, and Slave States and Free States alike admitted to the Union. The action of Congress is therefore no precedent for absolute slavery prohibition or indefinite slavery extension. Having never been exercised but by way of compromise it commits the government to neither extreme and is not a conclusive precedent for the constitutional power of Congress over the subject.

I shall briefly notice the facts of history bearing on this proposition.

The territory now covered by the States of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, was ceded to the United States by North Carolina and Georgia prior to 1803, and accepted by the United States, on the condition that Congress should extend over it a government, and ultimately divide it into States, on the principles of the ordinance of 1787, except as to slavery, and territorial governments were afterwards organized over it as slave territory. While, therefore, Congress had in 1787 assumed, by a compact of the original States, to prohibit slavery north-west of the Ohio River, it had also within twelve years after the adoption of the ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution, by express contract agreed not to prohibit it in all territory south of the Ohio, and by the admission of Kentucky and Tennessee as Slave States prior to 1800, could not prohibit it there.

Up then to the time of the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, the Ohio River was the compromise line between free and slave territory—a line of agreement, rather than arbitrary legislation.

Louisiana was all slave territory, and by the 3d article of the treaty for its acquisition, its inhabitants were to come into the Union as soon as possible on equal terms with other citizens, and in the meantime their rights of religion, liberty and property were to be maintained and protected.

In this territory, the boundaries of which were subsequently defined by treaties with Spain and Great Britain, were included the present States of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, and the territories of Kansas, Nebraska, &c.

Soon after this acquisition, territorial governments were organized over the southern portion of the territory, without prohibition of slavery. In 1812, Louisiana was admitted as a Slave State, and Arkansas and Missouri were subsequently organized as territories without prohibition of slavery.

In 1819, Florida was acquired by treaty with Spain, with the same stipulation, as in the treaty in regard to Louisiana, that the inhabitants were to have the rights and privileges of citizens of the United States and be admitted into the Union; and soon after the territory of Florida was organized without prohibition of slavery.

From 1787 until the Missouri question came up, no successful attempt was made by Congress to prohibit slavery in any territory of the United States. In 1817, Missouri applied for admission to the Union. Her admission as a Slave State was strenuously contested, and to the act authorizing her to form a State Constitution was appended a provision applying the 6th or anti-slavery section of the ordinance of 1787 to all the territory ceded by Louisiana, outside of the limits of Missouri, and north of 36 deg. 30 min. north latitude, or the southern boundary of Missouri. The adoption of this act, fixing a geographical line between Free States and Slave States, has been called a compromise. The proposition was beyond doubt made in the spirit of compromise, and received the support of compromise men, but the North who insisted upon the exclusion of Missouri with a slave constitution, generally voted against the act in its final passage, and the South, for the sake of getting Missouri in with a slave constitution, as generally voted for it. The compromise was not acceptable to either side, and when Missouri presented her Constitution in 1821 for the approval of Congress, her admission was again opposed by Northern men, and made conditional upon her declaration by solemn act of her legislature, that a clause of her Constitution relating to free negroes and mulattoes, should not be construed to authorize any law violating the privileges and immunities of any citizen of either of the States of the Union, under the Constitution of the United States. Missouri made the declaration required, and by proclamation of the President, became a State on August 10th, 1821. The resolution of Congress of 2d March, 1821, was beyond doubt the real condition or compromise upon which Missouri was admitted, and it was in this compromise and not in that of 1820, that Henry Clay took part. Strange as it may seem; it is nevertheless true, that notwithstanding the alleged compromise of 1820, an attempt was made in 1821 by Northern men in Congress to override that compromise,—that "sacred compact," that "plighted faith," that "landmark of freedom,"—and to keep Missouri out of the Union, because she had adopted in her Constitution a provision to prevent free negroes or mulattoes from coming to or settling in the State—a provision which is contained in the present Constitutions of Indiana