Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v6.djvu/44

 2 2 SPEECHES [Feb. 27

their understanding upon the direct question of Federal control of slavery in the Federal Ter- ritories. But there is much reason to believe that their understanding upon that question would not have appeared different from that of their twenty-three compeers, had it been mani- fested at all.

For the purpose of adhering rigidly to the text, I have purposely omitted whatever understand- ing may have been manifested by any person, however distinguished, other than the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution ; and, for the same reason, I have also omitted whatever understanding may have been mani- fested by any of the "thirty-nine" even on any other phase of the general question of slavery. If we should look into their acts and declara- tions on those other phases, as the foreign slave- trade, and the morality and policy of slavery generally, it would appear to us that on the direct question of Federal control of slavery in Federal Territories, the sixteen, if they had acted at all, would probably have acted just as the twenty- three did. Among that sixteen were several of the most noted antislavery men of those times, — as Dr. Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gou- verneur Morris, — while there was not one now known to have been otherwise, unless it may be John Rutledge, of South Carolina.

The sum of the whole is that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one — a clear majority of the whole — cer- tainly understood that no proper division of local from Federal authority, nor any part of the Con- stitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal Territories ; while