8.  THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES RECOGNIZES THIS POWER BY THE MOST CONCLUSIVE IMPLICATION.  In Art. 1, sec. 3, clause 1, it prohibits the abolition of the slave trade previous to 1808:  thus implying the power of Congress to do it at once, but for the restriction; and its power to do it unconditionally, when that restriction ceased.  Again; In Art. 4, sec. 2, “No person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from said service or labor.”  This clause was inserted, as all admit, to prevent the runaway slave from being emancipated by the laws of the free states.  If these laws had no power to emancipate, why this constitutional guard to prevent it?

The insertion of the clause, was the testimony of the eminent jurists that framed the Constitution, to the existence of the power, and their public proclamation, that the abolition of slavery was within the appropriate sphere of legislation.  The right of the owner to that which is rightfully property, is founded on a principle of universal law, and is recognized and protected by all civilized nations; property in slaves is, by general consent, an exception; hence slaveholders insisted upon the insertion of this clause in the United States’ Constitution, that they might secure by an express provision, that from which protection is withheld, by the acknowledged principles of universal law.[A] By demanding this provision, slaveholders consented that their slaves should not be recognized as property by the United States’ Constitution, and hence they found their claim, on the fact of their being “persons, and held to service.”

[Footnote A:  The fact, that under the articles of Confederation, slaveholders, whose slaves had escaped into free states, had no legal power to force them back,—­that now they have no power to recover, by process of law, their slaves who escape to Canada, the South American States, or to Europe—­the case already cited, in which the Supreme Court of Louisiana decided, that residence “for one moment,” under the laws of France emancipated an American slave—­the case of Fulton, vs. Lewis, 3 Har. and John’s Reps., 56, where the slave of a St. Domingo slaveholder, who brought him to Maryland in ’93, was pronounced free by the Maryland Court of Appeals—­are illustrations of the acknowledged truth here asserted, that by the consent of the civilized world, and on the principles of universal law, slaves are not “property,” and that whenever held as property under law, it is only by positive legislative acts, forcibly setting aside the law of nature, the common law, and the principles of universal justice and right between man and man,—­principles paramount to all law, and from which alone, law derives its intrinsic authoritative sanction.]