takes it away, and it alone.  Maryland and Virginia adopted the Constitution before they ceded to the United States the territory of the District.  By their acts of cession, they abdicated their own sovereignty over the District, and thus made room for that provided by the United States’ constitution, which sovereignty was to commence as soon as a cession of territory by states, and its acceptance by Congress, furnished a sphere for its exercise.  That the abolition of slavery is within the sphere of legislation, I argue.

2.  FROM THE FACT, THAT SLAVERY, AS A LEGAL SYSTEM, IS THE CREATURE OF LEGISLATION.  The law, by creating slavery, not only affirmed its existence to be within the sphere and under the control of legislation, but also, the conditions and terms of its existence, and the question whether or not it should exist.  Of course legislation would not travel out of its sphere, in abolishing what is within it, and what had been recognized to be within it, by its own act.  Cannot legislatures repeal their own laws?  If law can take from a man his rights, it can give them back again.  If it can say, “your body belongs to your neighbor,” it can say, “it belongs to yourself.”  If it can annul a man’s right to himself, held by express grant from his Maker, and can create for another an artificial title to him, can it not annul the artificial title, and leave the original owner to hold himself by his original title?

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