Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/588

 rights are inchoate, and they do not possess the peculiar attributes of sovereignty. Their relation to the general government is very imperfectly defined by the constitution; and it will be found, upon examination, that in that instrument the only grant of power concerning them is conveyed in the phrase, "congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property belonging to the United States." Certainly this phraseology is very loose, if it were designed to include in the grant the whole power of legislation over persons, as well as things. The expression, the "territory and other property," fairly construed, relates to the public lands, as such; to arsenals, dockyards, forts, ships, and all the various kinds of property which the United States may and must possess.

But surely the simple authority to dispose of and regulate these does not extend to the unlimited power of legislation; to the passage of all laws, in the most general acceptation of the word; which, by-the-by, is carefully excluded from the sentence. And, indeed, if this were so, it would render unnecessary another provision of the constitution, which grants to Congress the power to legislate, with the consent of the states, respectively, over all places purchased for the "erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dock-yards," etc. These being the property of the United States, if the power to make "needful rules and regulations concerning "them includes the general power of legislation, then the grant of authority to regulate "the territory and other property of the United States" is unlimited, wherever subjects are found for its operation, and its exercise needed no auxiliary provision. If, on the other hand, it does not include-such power of legislation over the "other property" of the United States, then it does not include it over their "territory;" for the same terms which grant the one, grant the other. "Territory" is here classed with property, and treated as such; and the object was evidently to enable the general government, as a property-holder — which, from necessity it must be — to manage, preserve and "dispose of" such property as it might possess, and which authority is essential almost to its being. But the lives and persons of our citizens, with the vast variety of objects connected with them, cannot be controlled by an authority which is merely called into existence for the purpose of making rules and regulations for the disposition and management of properly.

Such, it appears to me, would be the construction put upon this provision of the constitution, were this question now first presented for consideration, and not controlled by imperious circumstances. The original ordinance of the congress of the confederation, passed in 1787, and which was the only act upon this subject in force at the adoption of the constitution, provided a complete frame of government for the country north of the Ohio, while in a territorial, condition, and for its eventual admission in separate states into the Union. And the persuasion that this ordinance contained within itself all the necessary means of execution, probably prevented any direct reference to the subject in the constitution, further than vesting in congress the right to admit the states formed under it into the Union. However, circumstances arose which required