There is a question upon which men differ: namely, whether emancipation is the most prudent or the most effectual means to enforce violated law and suppress the insurrectionary movement.

It is my opinion that a majority of the people of the loyal States believe, at this moment, that emancipation is the necessary and proper means to effect the above objects. But whether this opinion be well founded or not is immaterial to the present question. According to Chief-Justice Marshall's decision, when it is the right and duty of the Government to perform an act, (as here to enforce law and suppress insurrection,) it "must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means." If Congress believes, that, in order to enforce law and suppress insurrection, it is necessary and proper to take and cancel all claims to life-long service or labor held in the Slave States, and if claims to service or labor, whether for years or for life, held by one inhabitant of the United States against another, be a species of property not specially exempted by the Constitution from seizure for public use, then an Act of Emancipation is strictly constitutional.

Congress is to be allowed to select the means; Congress is to be the judge of the necessity and propriety of these means: Congress, not the Supreme Court; not even the People in their primary meetings; but the People constitutionally represented in their National Legislature; the People, speaking by the voice of those whom their votes have elected to that Legislature, there to act for them.

If Congress believes that Emancipation is no longer a question of sectional interference, but of national preservation, it has the right to judge, and the constitutional right to act upon that judgment. And if Congress can properly allege, as motive for taking and cancelling a multitude of life-long claims to service, the preservation of the national existence, can a consideration of greater magnitude be imagined for any legislative act?

In proceeding, however, to consummate such a measure, it is evidently most fitting and proper, that, in the preamble to an Act of Emancipation, there should be set forth, lucidly and succinctly, the causes and considerations which impelled to so solemn and momentous an act.

As to the just compensation provided by the Constitution to be paid, when private property is taken for public use, it is here to be remarked,—

  1. If, when a minor is drafted, a father or an apprentice-master has no claim against the Government for service lost, it may be argued with some plausibility, that, under similar circumstances of public exigency, a slave-owner has no claim when his slave is freed. But the argument fairly applies only in cases in which a slave is drafted for military service, and returned to slavery when that service terminates. In case of wholesale taking and cancelling of life-long claims to service, a fair construction of the Constitution may be held to require, as a general rule, that just compensation should be made to the claimants.
  2. But to Congress, by the Constitution, is expressly given the power to declare the punishment of treason, without any limitation as to the confiscation of personal property, including, of course, claims in the nature of choses in action. Congress may, therefore, take and cancel claims to service owned by Rebel slave-owners without any compensation whatever. Under the feudal law, a serf, owing service to a noble guilty of treason, became, because of his master's guilt, released from such service.
  3. If, because of the present insurrection, set on foot by claimants of service or labor, such claims, from precariousness of tenure or otherwise, have diminished in market-value, that diminution may be properly taken into account in estimating just compensation.

These various considerations converge to this,—that a Preamble and Act of Emancipation, somewhat in the terms following, may be constitutionally enacted.

A Bill to emancipate Persons of African Descent held to Service or Labor in certain of the United States.

Whereas there is now flagrant, in certain of the United States, an insurrection of proportions so gigantic that there has been required, to hold it in check, an increase of the army and navy of the United States to an extent seldom paralleled in the history of the world;