[212] In asserting that freedom is national, Mr. Sumner may perhaps mean that it is the duty of the National Government to exclude slavery from all its territories, and to admit no new State in which there are slaves. If this be his meaning, we should reply, that it is as foreign from the merits of the Fugitive Slave Law, which he proposed to discuss, as it is from the truth. The National Government has, indeed, no more power to exclude, than it has to ordain, slavery; for slavery or no slavery is a question which belongs wholly and exclusively to the sovereign people of each and every State or territory. With our whole hearts we respond to the inspiring words of the President's Message: "If the friends of the Constitution are to have another struggle, its enemies could not present a more acceptable issue than that of a State, whose Constitution clearly embraces a republican form of government, being excluded from the Union because its domestic institutions may not, in all respects, comport with the ideas of what is wise and expedient entertained in some other State."
[213] Chap. ii § x.
[214] Madison Papers, p. 1448.
[215] One member seems to have been absent from the House.
[216] Annals of Congress; 2d Congress, 1791-1793, p. 861.
[217] This error was by no means a capital one.
[218] Speech in the Senate, in 1855.
[219] Speech in Boston, October 3d, 1850.
[220] Mr. Sumner has a great deal to say, in his speech, about "the memory of the fathers." When their sentiments agree with his own, or only seem to him to do so, then they are "the demi-gods of history." But only let these demi-gods cross his path or come into contact with his fanatical notions, and instantly they sink into sordid knaves. The framers of the Constitution of the United States, says he, made "a compromise, which cannot be mentioned without shame. It was that hateful bargain by which Congress was restrained until 1808 from the prohibition of the foreign slave trade, thus securing, down to that period, toleration for crime." . . . . "The effrontery of slaveholders was matched by the sordidness of the Eastern members." . . . . "The bargain was struck, and at this price the Southern States gained the detestable indulgence. At a subsequent day, Congress branded the slave trade as piracy, and thus, by solemn legislative act, adjudged this compromise to be felonious and wicked."
But for this compromise, as every one who has read the history of the times perfectly well knows, no union could have been formed, and the slave trade might have been carried on to the present day. By this compromise, then, the Convention did not tolerate crime nor the slave trade; they merely formed the Union, and, in forming it, gained the power to abolish the slave trade in twenty years. The gain of this power, which Congress had not before possessed, was considered by them as a great gain to the cause of humanity. If the Eastern members, from a blind and frantic hatred of slavery, had blasted all prospects of a union, and at the same time put the slave trade beyond their power forever, they would have imitated the wisdom of the abolitionists, who always promote the cause they seek to demolish.