Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/183

 protection of life and property in the South that Robert B. Elliott had occasion to speak. He showed that the argument upon the pending bill had proceeded upon a question of constitutional law, the opponents denying that its provisions were warranted by the Constitution of the United States, and questioning the data upon which the proposed bill was founded. The probable efficacy of the bill, as a measure of relief and protection for the loyal men of the South from the extraordinary system of oppression to which they were subjected, had not been assailed. Elliott, therefore, undertook to prove that the proposed bill was not obnoxious to the spirit of the Constitution, that it was founded on reason, and that in view of the state of affairs then existing in the South, it was, as a measure of protection, not only warranted, but imperatively demanded.

For his first task, Elliott was compelled to sustain the position that the government of the United States has the right, under the Constitution, to protect a citizen of the United States in the exercise of his vested rights as an American citizen, by the exercise of direct force, or the assertion of immediate jurisdiction through its courts, without the appeal of the State in which the citizen is domiciled. Asserting the legal maxim that where power is given the means of its execution are implied, he sought to establish that the power had been given by Article IV of the Constitution, which imposes upon the Federal Government the duty to protect the States against domestic violence. He attempted, moreover, to establish by the authority of the preamble to the Constitution the violence of the "presumption that the majority of the people of a State may be oppressively subordinated to the minority." To support his own constructions of the Constitution, Elliott quoted Justice Story on this same issue, pointed out the inconsistencies in the argument of his chief opponent, defined within the meaning of the Constitution a republican form of govern-