Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/846

 Convention to amend their Constitution, and adopt all necessary means for giving effect to the popular will.

It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest judicial tribunal known to our laws, that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is, therefore, at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia aud South Carolina. Without this, the equality of the sovereign States composing the Union would be violated, and the use and enjoyment of a Territory acquired by the common treasure of all the States would be closed against the people and the property of nearly half the members of the confederacy. Slavery can therefore never be prohibited in Kansas except by means of a constitutional provision, and in no other manner can this be obtained so promptly, if a majority of the people desire it, as by admitting it into the Union under its present Constitution.

On the other hand, should Congress reject the Constitution, under the idea of affording the disaffected in Kansas a third opportunity of prohibiting slavery in the State, which they might have done twice before if in the majority, no man can foretell the consequences.

If Congress, for the sake of those men who refused to vote for delegates to the Convention when they might have excluded slavery from the Constitution, and who afterwards refused to vote on the 21st December last, when they might, as they claim, have stricken slavery from the Constitution, should now reject the State because slavery remains in the Constitution, it is manifest that the agitation upon this dangerous subject will be renewed in a more alarming form than it has ever yet assumed.

Every patriot in the country had indulged the hope that the Kansas and Nebraska act would put a final end to the slavery agitation, at least in Congress, which had for more than twenty years convulsed the country and endangered the Union. This act involved greal and fundamental principles, and if fairly carried into effect will settle the question. Should the agitation be again revived, should the people of the sister States be again estranged from each other with more than their former bitterness, this will arise from a cause, so far as the interests of Kansas are concerned, more trifling and insignificant than has ever stirred the elements of a great people into commotion. To the people of Kansas, the only practical difference between admission or rejection depends simply upon the fact whether they can themselves more speedily change the present Constitution if it does not accord with the will of the majority, or frame a second Constitution to be submitted to Congress hereafter. Even if this were a question of mere expediency, and not of right, the small difference of time, one way or the other, is of not the least importance, when contrasted with the evils which must necessarily result to the whole country from a revival of the slavery agitation.

In considering this question, it should never be forgotten that, in proportion