and acts of cession.  The severities of a long and terrible discipline had taught them to guard at all points legislative grants, that their exact import and limit might be self-evident—­leaving no scope for a blind “faith,” that somehow in the lottery of chances there would be no blanks, but making all sure by the use of explicit terms, and wisely chosen words, and just enough of them.  The Constitution of the United States with its amendments, those of the individual states, the national treaties, the public documents of the general and state governments at that period, show the universal conviction of legislative bodies, that when great public interests were at stake, nothing should be left to be “implied.”

Further:  suppose Maryland and Virginia had expressed their “implied faith” in words, and embodied it in their acts of cession as a proviso, declaring that Congress should not “exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever over the District,” but that the “case” of slavery should be an exception:  who does not know that Congress, if it had accepted the cession on those terms, would have violated the Constitution; and who that has ever studied the free mood of those times in its bearings on slavery—­proofs of which are given in scores on the preceding pages—­can for an instant believe that the people of the United States would have altered their Constitution for the purpose of providing for slavery an inviolable sanctuary; that when driven in from its outposts, and everywhere retreating discomfited before the march of freedom, it might be received into everlasting habitations on the common homestead and hearth-stone of this free republic?  Besides, who can believe that Virginia made such a condition, or cherished such a purpose, when at that very moment, Washington, Jefferson, Wythe, Patrick Henry St. George Tucker, and almost all her illustrious men, were advocating the abolition of slavery by law.  When Washington had said, two years before, Maryland and Virginia “must have laws for the gradual abolition of slavery and at a period not remote;” and when Jefferson in his letter to Price, three years before the cession, had said, speaking of Virginia, “This is the next state to which we may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and oppression—­a conflict in which THE SACRED SIDE IS GAINING DAILY RECRUITS;” when voluntary emancipations on the soil were then progressing at the rate of between one and two thousand annually, (See Judge Tucker’s “Dissertation on Slavery,” p. 73;) when the public sentiment of Virginia had undergone, and was undergoing so mighty a revolution that the idea of the continuance of slavery as a permanent system could not be tolerated, though she then contained about half the slaves in the Union.  Was this the time to stipulate for the perpetuity of slavery under the exclusive legislation of Congress?