"Had the result of that election been otherwise, and had not the [Democratic] party triumphed on the dogma which they had thus introduced, we should never have heard of a doctrine so utterly at variance with all truth; so utterly destitute of all legal logic; so founded on error, and unsupported by anything like argument, as is the opinion of the Supreme Court."

He says, further:

"I should like, if I had time, to attempt to demonstrate the fallacy of that opinion. I have examined the view of the Supreme Court of the United States on the question of the power of the Constitution to carry slavery into free territory belonging to the United States, and I tell you that I believe any tolerably respectable lawyer in the United States can show, beyond all question, to any fair and unprejudiced mind, that the decision has nothing to stand upon except assumption, and bad logic from the assumptions made. The main proposition on which that decision is founded, the corner-stone of it, without which it is nothing, without which it fails entirely to satisfy the mind of any man, is this: that the Constitution of the United States recognises property in slaves, and protects it as such. I deny it. It neither recognises slaves as property, nor does it protect slaves as property."

The Senator here, you see, says that the whole decision is based on that assumption, which he pronounces false. He says that the Constitution does not recognise slaves as property, nor protect them as property, and his reasoning, a little further on, is somewhat curious. He

says:

"On what do they found the assertion that the Constitution recognises slaves as property? On the provision of the Constitution by which Congress is prohibited from passing a law to prevent the African slave trade for twenty years; and therefore they say the Constitution recognises slaves as property."

I should think that was a pretty fair recognition of it. On this point the gentleman declares:

"Will not anybody see that this constitutional provision, if it works one way, must work the other? If by allowing the slave trade for twenty years, we recognise slaves as property, when we say that at the end of twenty years we will cease to allow it, or may cease to do so, is not that denying them to be property after that period elapses?"

That is the argument. Nothing but my respect for the logical intellect of the Senator from Maine could make me treat this argument as serious, and nothing but having heard it myself would make me believe that he ever uttered it. What, sir! The Constitution of our country says to the South, "you shall count as the basis of your representation five slaves as being three white men; you shall be protected in the natural increase of your slaves; nay, more, as a matter of compromise you may increase their number if you choose, for twenty years, by importation; when these twenty years are out, you shall stop.' The Supreme Court of the United States says, "well; is not this a recognition of slavery, of property in slaves?" "Oh, no," says the gentleman, "the rule must work both ways; there is a converse to the proposition." Now, sir, to an ordinary, uninstructed intellect, it would seem that the converse of the proposition was simply that at the end of twenty years you should not any longer increase your numbers by importation; but the gentleman says the converse of the proposition is that at the end of the twenty years, after you have, under the guarantee of the Constitution, been adding by importation to the previous number of your slaves, then all those that you had before, and all those that, under that Constitution, you have imported, cease to be recognised as

property by the Constitution, and on this proposition he assails the Supreme Court of the United States a proposition which he says will occur to anybody!

Mr. FESSENDEN. Will the Senator allow me? W

Mr. BENJAMIN. I should be very glad to enter into this question' with the Senator now, but I fear it is so late that I shall not be able to get through to-day.

Mr. FESSENDEN. I suppose it is of no consequence.

Mr. BENJAMIN. What says the Senator from Vermont, [Mr. CoL LAMER,] who also went into this examination somewhat extensively? I read from his printed speech:

do not say that slaves are never property. I do not say that they are, or are not. Within the limits of a State which declares them to be property, they are property, because they are within the jurisdiction of that government which makes the declaration; but I should wish to speak of it in the light of a member of the United States, Senate, and in the language of the United States Constitution. If this be property in the States, what is the nature and extent of it? I'insist that the Supreme Court have often decided, and everybody has understood, that! slavery is a local institution, existing by force of State law; and of course that law can give it no possible character beyond the limits of that State. I shall, no doubt, find the idea better expressed in the opinion of Judge Nelson, in this same Dred Scott decision. I prefer to read his language. He declares:

ແ Every State or nation possesses an exclusive sovereignty and jurisdiction within her own territory; and her laws affect and bind all property and persons residing within it. It may regulate the manner and circumstances under which property is held, and the condition, capacity, and state of all persons therein; and also the remedy and the modes of administering justice. And it is equally true that no State or nation can affect or bind property out of its territory, or persons not residing within it. No State, therefore, can enact laws to operate beyond its own dominions; and, if it attempts to do so, may be lawfully refused obedience. Such laws can have no authority extra-territorially. This is the necessary result of the independence of distinct and separate sovereigntics.'

Here is the law; and under it exists the law of slavery in the different States. By virtue of this very principle it cannot extend one inch beyond its own territorial limits: A State cannot regulate the relation of master and slave, of owner and property, the manner and title of descent, or anything else, one inch beyond its territory. Then you cannot, by virtue of the law of slavery, if it makes slaves property in a State, if you please, move that property out of the State. It ends whenever you pass from that State. You may pass into another State that has a like law; and if you do, you hold it by virtue of f that law; but the moment you pass beyond the limits of the slaveholding States, all title to property called property in slaves there ends. Under such a law slaves cannot be carried as property into the Territories, or anywhere else beyond the States authorizing it. It is not property anywhere else. If the Constitution of the United States gives any other and further character than this to slave property, let us acknowledge it fairly, and end all strife about it. If it does not, I ask, in all candor, that men on the other side shall say so, and let this point be settled. What is the point we are to inquire into? It is this: does the Constitution of the United States, make slaves property beyond the jurisdiction of the States authorizing slavery? If it only acknowledges them as property within that jurisdiction, it has not extended the property one inch beyond the State line; but if, as the Supreme Court seems to say, it does recognise and protect them as property further than State limits, and more than the State laws do, then, indeed, it becomes like other property. The Supreme Court rest this claim upon this clause of the Constitution: 'No person, held to service or labor in one State under the laws thereof, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. Now the question is, does that guaranty it? Does that make it the same as other property? The very fact that this clause makes provision on the subject of persons bound to service, shows that the framers of the Constitution did not regard it as other property. It was a thing that needed some provision; other property did not. The insertion of such a provision shows that it was not regarded as other property. If a man's horse stray from Delaware into Pennsylvania, he can go and get it. Is there any provision in the Constitution for it? No. How came this to be there, if a slave is property? If it is the same as other property, why have any provision about it?"

It will undoubtedly have struck any person, in hearing this passage read from the speech of the Senator from Vermont, whom I regret not

to see in his seat to-day, that the whole argument, ingeniously as it is put, rests upon this fallacy if I may say so with due respect to himthat a man cannot have title in property wherever the law does not give him a remedy or process for the assertion of his title; or, in other words, his whole argument rests upon the old confusion of ideas which considers a man's right and his remedy to be one and the same thing. I have already shown to you, by the passages I have cited from the opinions of Lord Stowell and of Judge Story, how they regard this subject. They say that the slave who goes to England, or goes to Massachusetts, from a slave State, is still a slave-that he is still his master's property; but that his master has lost control over him, not by reason of the cessation of his property, but because those States grant no remedy to the master by which he can exercise his control.. There are numerous illustrations upon this point-illustrations furnished by the copy-right laws, illustrations furnished by patent laws. Let us take a case-one that appeals to us all. There lives now a man in England who from time to time sings to the enchanted ear of the civilized world strains of such melody that the charmed senses seem to abandon the grosser regions of earth, and to rise to purer and serener regions above. God has created that man a poet. His inspiration is his; his songs are his by right divine; they are his property, so recognised by human law. Yet here in these United States men steal Tennyson's works and sell his property for their profit; and this because, in spite of the violated conscience of the nation, we refuse to give him. protection for his property.

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Examine your Constitution; are slaves the only species of property there recognised as requiring peculiar protection? Sir, the inventive genius of our brethren of the North is a source of vast wealth to them and vast benefit to the nation. I saw a short time ago in one of the New York journals, that the estimated value of a few of the patents now before us in this Capitol for renewal was $40,000,000. I cannot believe that the entire capital invested in inventions of this character in the United States can fall short of one hundred and fifty or two hundred million dollars. On what protection does this vast property rest? Just upon that same constitutional protection which gives a remedy to the slave owner when his property is also found outside of the limits of the State in which he lives.

Without this protection, what would be the condition of the northern inventor? Why, sir, the Vermont inventor protected by his own law would come to Massachusetts, and there say to the pirate who had stolen his property, "render me up my property or pay me value for its use. The Senator from Vermont would receive for answer, if he were the counsel of this Vermont inventor, "Sir, if you want protection for your property go to your own State; property is governed by the laws of the State within whose jurisdiction it is found; you have no property in your invention outside of the limits of your State; you cannot go an inch beyond it." Would not this be so? Does not every man see at once that the right of the inventor to his discovery, that the right of the poet to his inspiration, depends upon those principles of

eternal justice which God has implanted in the heart of man, and that wherever he cannot exercise them it is because man, faithless to the trust that he has received from God, denies them the protection to which they are entitled?

Sir, follow out the illustration which the Senator from Vermont himself has given; take his very case of the Delaware owner of a horse riding him across the line into Pennsylvania. The Senator says: "Now, you' see that slaves are not property like other property; if slaves were property like other property, why have you this special clause in your Constitution to protect a slave? You have no clause to protect the horse, because horses are recognised as property everywhere." Mr. President, the same fallacy lurks at the bottom of this argument, as of all the rest. Let Pennsylvania exercise her undoubted jurisdiction over persons and things within her own boundary; let her do as she has a perfect right to do-declare that hereafter, within the State of Pennsylvania, there shall be no property in horses, and that no man shall maintain a suit in her courts for the recovery of property in a horse; and where will your horse owner be then? Just where the English poet is now; just where the slaveholder and the inventor would be if the Constitution, foreseeing a difference of opinion in relation to rights in these subject-matters, had not provided the remedy in relation to such property as might easily be plundered. Slaves, if you please, are not property like other property in this: that you can easily rob us of them; but as to the right in them, that man has to overthrow the whole history of the world, he has to overthrow every treatise on jurisprudence, he has to ignore the common sentiment of mankind, he has to repudiate the authority of all that is considered sacred with man, ere he can reach the conclusion that the person who owns a slave, in a country where slavery has been established for ages, has no other property in that slave than the mere title which is given by the statute law of the land where it is found.

I never heard this question disputed before; I never heard a suggestion that slaves were not protected as property by the Constitution of the United States till I heard it from the Senator from Maine here the other day. In the sixteenth volume of Peters's Reports there is the report of a case which occurred between the States of Maryland and Pennsylvania. It was elaborately argued. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sent her attorney general into the room below to affirm her. right to the legislation which she had passed. Although the suit was in the name of an individual, really it was the rights of Maryland that were concerned, and it was the State of Maryland that was interested in the decision. The case is known by the title in the law-books of Prigg versus the State of Pennsylvania. Every judge on the bench gave his decision in that case. Every judge on the bench concurred in the decision. Judge Story delivered the opinion of the court; the other judges delivering their individual opinions, where they did not precisely agree with the general language of the court. Amongst those judges was Judge McLean, one of the dissentient judges in the Dred Scott case. Let us hear what he says about slaves being

property under the Constitution. I shall read a short passage, a paragraph or two only. I take this out of his statement of his opinion at page 661, of 16th Peters. He quotes the clause of the Constitution that protects us in our rights to fugitive slaves, and he says:

"It was designed to protect the rights of the master, and against whom? Not against the State, nor the people of the State in which he resides; but against the people and the legisla tive action of other States, where the fugitive from labor might be found. Under the confederation, the master has no legal means of enforcing his RIGHTS in a State opposed to slavery. A disregard of rights thus asserted was deeply felt in the South. It produced great excite ment, and would have led to results destructive of the Union. To avoid this, the constitu tional guarantee was essential."

Now what is this guarantee? He tells us, at page 671 of the same volume:

"I cannot perceive how any one can doubt that the remedy given in the Constitution, if, indeed, it give any remedy without legislation, was designed to be a peaceful one; a remedy sanctioned by judicial authority; a remedy guarded by the forms of law. But the inquiry is reiterated, is not the master entitled to his property? I answer that he is. His right is guar antied by the Constitution; and the most summary means for its enforcement is found in the act of Congress. And neither the State nor its citizens can obstruct the prosecution of this right."

That was Judge McLean's language. When I find language like this, even from the minority of the court in the Dred Scott case, when I find the entire court, man for man, concurring that the constitutional rights of the South are guarantied in slaves as property by this clause in the Constitution, I must express my intense surprise at hearing the Senator from Maine declare that the Dred Scott decision was not to be supported, because it rested for a corner-stone on the assumption that slaves were recognised by the Constitution as property, which assumption he denied.

But, Mr. President, all these gentlemen who thus fail in the slightest degree to impugn the opinion of the court by argument, attempt to shake its authority by an assertion entirely destitute of the slightest foundation. Every Senator who has spoken on the subject of this decision has declared that the court said it was without jurisdiction to determine it, and then determined it. I say that all the judges declared that they had jurisdiction of the merits, and determined that point before they decided the merits; and I am prepared to prove it. There was not a judge on the bench who did not declare that he had jurisdiction of the merits. There were some of the judges who declared that they had jurisdiction of no other question, and Judge McLean was one of them. He said the question of jurisdiction was not before them at all, and so did Judge Catron; and both those judges said that the court had nothing before them but the merits. Every judge said that he had the merits before him. I will prove it.

When this decision was first published; when, as I am sorry to say, two of the judges of that court so far forgot the proprieties of their judicial station as to send forth a minority opinion to forestall the pub-, lic judgment, and to produce among the people of the country the impression that the integrity of their judiciary was no longer to be relied upon, and thus to subvert one of the foundations of our Government; when those opinions first went abroad, they were seized upon by the