By adopting the common law within its exclusive jurisdiction Congress would carry out the principles of our glorious Declaration, and follow the highest precedents in our national history and jurisprudence.  It is a political maxim as old as civil legislation, that laws should be strictly homogeneous with the principles of the government whose will they express, embodying and carrying them out—­being indeed the principles themselves, in preceptive form—­representatives alike of the nature and the power of the Government—­standing illustrations of its genius and spirit, while they proclaim and enforce its authority.  Who needs be told that slavery makes war upon the principles of the Declaration, and the spirit of the Constitution, and that these and the principles of the common law gravitate toward each other with irrepressible affinities, and mingle into one?  The common law came hither with our pilgrim fathers; it was their birthright, their panoply, their glory, and their song of rejoicing in the house of their pilgrimage.  It covered them in the day of their calamity, and their trust was under the shadow of its wings.  From the first settlement of the country, the genius of our institutions and our national spirit have claimed it as a common possession, and exulted in it with a common pride.  A century ago, Governor Pownall, one of the most eminent constitutional jurists of colonial times, said of the common law, “In all the colonies the common law is received as the foundation and main body of their law.”  In the Declaration of Rights, made by the Continental Congress at its first session in ’74, there was the following resolution:  “Resolved, That the respective colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage according to the course of that law.”  Soon after the organization of the general government, Chief Justice Ellsworth, in one of his decisions on the bench of the United States Supreme Court, said:  “The common law of this country remains the same as it was before the revolution.”  Chief Justice Marshall, in his decision in the case of Livingston vs. Jefferson, said:  “When our ancestors migrated to America, they brought with them the common law of their native country, so far as it was applicable to their new situation, and I do not conceive that the revolution in any degree changed the relations of man to man, or the law which regulates them.  In breaking our political connection with the parent state, we did not break our connection with each other.” [Hall’s Law Journal, new series.] Mr. Duponceau, in his “Dissertation on the Jurisdiction of Courts in the United States,” says, “I consider the common law of England the jus commune of the United States.  I think I can lay it down as a correct principle, that the common law of England, as it was at the time of the Declaration of Independence, still continues to be the national law of this country,