3. The abolition of slavery has always been considered within the appropriate sphere of legislation.  Almost every civilized nation has abolished slavery by law.  The history of legislation since the revival of letters, is a record crowded with testimony to the universally admitted competency of the law-making power to abolish slavery.  It is so manifestly an attribute not merely of absolute sovereignty, but even of ordinary legislation, that the competency of a legislature to exercise it, may well nigh be reckoned among the legal axioms of the civilized world.  Even the night of the dark ages was not dark enough to make this invisible.

The Abolition decree of the great council of England was passed in 1102.  The memorable Irish decree, “that all the English slaves in the whole of Ireland, be immediately emancipated and restored to their former liberty,” was issued in 1171.  Slavery in England was abolished by a general charter of emancipation in 1381.  Passing over many instances of the abolition of slavery by law, both during the middle ages and since the reformation, we find them multiplying as we approach our own times.  In 1776 slavery was abolished in Prussia by special edict.  In St. Domingo, Cayenne, Guadaloupe and Martinique, in 1794, where more than 600,000 slaves were emancipated by the French government.  In Java, 1811; in Ceylon, 1815; in Buenos Ayres, 1816; in St. Helena, 1819; in Colombia, 1821; by the Congress of Chili in 1821; in Cape Colony, 1823; in Malacca, 1825; in the southern provinces of Birmah, in 1826; in Bolivia, 1826; in Peru, Guatemala, and Monte Video, 1828, in Jamaica, Barbadoes, Bermudas, Bahamas, the Mauritius, St. Christopher’s, Nevis, the Virgin Islands, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Vincents, Grenada, Berbice, Tobago, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Honduras, Demarara, and the Cape of Good Hope, on the 1st of August, 1834.  But waving details, suffice it to say, that England, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Prussia, and Germany, have all and often given their testimony to the competency of the law to abolish slavery.  In our own country, the Legislature of Pennsylvania passed an act of abolition in 1780, Connecticut, in 1784; Rhode Island, 1784; New-York, 1799; New-Jersey, in 1804; Vermont, by Constitution, in 1777; Massachusetts, in 1780; and New Hampshire, in 1784.

When the competency of the law-making power to abolish slavery, has thus been recognised every where and for ages, when it has been embodied in the highest precedents, and celebrated in the thousand jubilees of regenerated liberty, is it forsooth an achievement of modern discovery, that such a power is a nullity?—­that all these acts of abolition are void, and that the millions disenthralled by them, are, either themselves or their posterity, still legally in bondage?