Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/142

1803. with all the changes made by the House except the limitation of time, which the Senate further reduced to one year. This change reconciled the House, not very cheerully, to recede, and March 23 the Bill, as it passed the Senate, became law by a vote of fifty-one to forty-five. With the passage of this Act and its twin statute for collecting duties in the ceded territory, the precedent was complete. Louisiana received a government in which its people, who had been solemnly promised all the rights of American citizens, were set apart, not as citizens, but as subjects lower in the political scale than the meanest tribes of Indians, whose right to self-government was never questioned.

By these measures the Executive and the Legislature recorded their decision in regard to the powers of government over national territory. The Judiciary was not then consulted; but twenty-five years afterward, in the year 1828, Chief-Justice Marshall was in his turn required to give an opinion, and he added the final authority of the Supreme Court to the precedent. With characteristic wisdom he claimed for the government both the constitutional and the extra-constitutional powers in question. The case concerned the rights of the inhabitants of Florida, who he said—


 * "Do not participate in political power; they do not share in the government till Florida shall become a State. In the mean time Florida continues to be a territory of the United States, governed by virtue of that clause in the