slave States, have, in flagrant violation of the letter and spirit and obvious policy of the Constitution, enacted in behalf of slavery, that vice would, ere this, have disappeared from our land.  Look, for instance, at the laws enacted in the fact of the clause:  “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States”—­laws too, which the States that enacted them, will not consent to repeal, until they consent to abandon slavery.  It is by these laws, that they shut out the colored people of the North, the presence of a single individual of whom so alarms them with the prospect of a servile insurrection, that they immediately imprison him.  Such was the view of the Federal Constitution taken by James Wilson one of its framers, that, without, as I presume, claiming for Congress any direct power over slavery in the slave States, he declared that it possessed “power to exterminate slavery from within our borders.”  It was probably under a like view, that Benjamin Franklin, another of its framers, and Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and other men of glorious and blessed memory, petitioned the first Congress under the Constitution to “countenance the restoration to liberty of those unhappy men,” (the slaves of our country).  And in what light that same Congress viewed the Constitution may be inferred from the fact, that, by a special act, it ratified the celebrated Ordinance, by the terms of which slavery was forbidden for ever in the North West Territory.  It is worthy of note, that the avowed object of the Ordinance harmonizes with that of the Constitution:  and that the Ordinance was passed the same year that the Constitution was drafted, is a fact, on which we can strongly rely to justify a reference to the spirit of the one instrument for illustrating the spirit of the other.  What the spirit of the Ordinance is, and in what light they who passed it, regarded “republics, their laws and constitutions,” may be inferred from the following declaration in the Ordinance of its grand object:  “For extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis wherever these Republics, their laws and constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said territory, &c.; it is hereby ordained and declared that the following articles, &c.”  One of these articles is that, which has been referred to, and which declares that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory.”

You will perhaps make light of my reference to James Wilson and Benjamin Franklin, for I recollect you say, that, “When the Constitution was about going into operation, its powers were not well understood by the community at large, and remained to be accurately interpreted and defined.”  Nevertheless, I think it wise to repose more confidence in the views, which the framers of the Constitution took of the spirit and principles of that instrument, than in the definitions and interpretations of the pro-slavery generation, which has succeeded them.