Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/134

100 the Revolution, and formed the foundations upon which our whole system of American government rests.” But Mr. Douglas skips rather nimbly over the significant fact, that the same “author of the Declaration of Independence” put into that plan a proviso, excluding slavery from the territories. Was that a mere accident? Mr. Jefferson showed thereby conclusively that, in his opinion, the exclusion of slavery by Congressional legislation was by no means inconsistent with the spirit of “popular sovereignty” which Mr. Douglas discovers in the plan of 1784, but this does not disturb Mr. Douglas. “The fifth article,” says he, “relating to the prohibition of slavery, having been rejected by Congress, never became a part of the Jeffersonian plan of government for the territories, as adopted April 23, 1784.”

Although with a large numerical majority in its favor (16 to 7), this article did, indeed, fail to obtain a constitutional majority, the vote of New Jersey not being counted in consequence of there being but one delegate from that State present; yet it had been drawn up by Mr. Jefferson, introduced by Mr. Jefferson and sustained by Mr. Jefferson's vote. Nevertheless, Mr. Douglas persists in calling a plan, from which the peculiar Jeffersonian feature had been struck out, the “Jeffersonian plan.” This, indeed, is the play of Hamlet with the character of Hamlet omitted. “This charter compact,” proceeds Mr. Douglas, “with its fundamental conditions which were unalterable without joint consent of the people interested in them, as well as of the United States, then stood upon the statute book unrepealed and irrepealable, when on the 14th day of May, 1787, the federal convention met at Philadelphia.” Does Mr. Douglas not know that on the 16th of March, 1785, a proposition was introduced in Congress by Rufus King, to exclude slavery from the States described in the resolve