“It has sometimes been objected to the Declaration, that it deals too much in abstractions. But this was its characteristic excellence; for upon those abstractions hinged the justice of the cause. Without them our Revolution would have been but successful rebellion. Right, truth, justice are all abstractions. The Divinity that stirs within the soul of man is abstraction. The Creator of the universe is a spirit, and all spiritual nature is abstraction. Happy would it be, could we answer with equal confidence another objection, not to the Declaration, but to the consistency of the people by whom it was proclaimed!”[30]
These same views were enforced again by Mr. Adams in his oration at Newburyport, July 4, 1837. There he uses words which reveal the limits of Popular Sovereignty. Thus he speaks:—
“The sovereign authority conferred upon the people of the Colonies by the Declaration of Independence could not dispense them, nor any individual citizen of them, from the fulfilment of all their moral obligations.… The people who assumed their equal and separate station among the powers of the earth, by the laws of Nature’s God, by that very act acknowledged themselves bound to the observance of those laws, and could neither exercise nor confer any power inconsistent with them.”[31]
Then alluding to the self-imposed restraints upon the sovereignty which was established, our teacher says:—
“The Declaration acknowledged a rule of Right paramount to the power of independent states itself, and virtually disclaimed all power to do Wrong. This was a novelty in the moral philosophy of nations, and it is the essential point of difference between the system of government announced in the Declaration of Independence and those systems which had until then prevailed among men.… It was an experiment upon the heart of man. All the legislators of the human race until that day had laid the foundations of all government among men in Power; and hence it was that in the maxims of theory, as well as in the practice of nations, sovereignty was held to be unlimited and illimitable. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed another law, … a law of Right, binding upon nations as well as individuals, upon sovereigns as well as upon subjects.… In assuming the attributes of sovereign power, the Colonists appealed to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions, and neither claimed nor conferred authority to do anything but of Right.”[32]
Such is the irresistible testimony of John Quincy Adams. On the other side are arrayed John C. Calhoun, Stephen A. Douglas, and Eli Thayer. Choose you between these two sides.
Enough, perhaps, has been said. But I shall not leave this question merely on reason and high authority, decisive as they may be. I appeal, further, to the practice of the National Government, which from the beginning has sanctioned the Prohibition of Slavery in the Territories. The pretension of Popular Sovereignty is altogether a modern invention, unknown to our fathers.
The positive Prohibition of Slavery in the Territories was proposed in the Continental Congress by Mr. Jefferson, as early as 1784. Thus did the hand which drew the Declaration of Independence first assert the practical application of its principles within the jurisdiction of Congress; and here the Popular Sovereignty of the Declaration receives most instructive illustration. Although the proposition had in its favor a majority of all the delegates then present, and also a majority of all the States then present, yet, under the rules of the Continental Congress, it failed for the moment. But there is no evidence that anybody questioned the power of Congress, or claimed Sovereignty for any handful of squatters.
The following year, in the absence of Mr. Jefferson, the Prohibition was proposed by Rufus King, a delegate from Massachusetts. It was afterwards embodied by Nathan Dane, another delegate from Massachusetts, in the Ordinance for the Government of the Northwest Territory; and finally, on the 13th of July, 1787, a day ever memorable in the annals of Human Freedom, it was carried with only one vote in the negative, and became the corner-stone of those imperial States destined to exercise such controlling influence in our history. Thus early did our Commonwealth, through its faithful Representatives, insist upon Prohibition by Congress. This was before the National Constitution.