5.  THE COMPETENCY OF THE LAW-MAKING POWER TO ABOLISH SLAVERY, HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED BY ALL THE SLAVEHOLDING STATES, EITHER DIRECTLY OR BY IMPLICATION.  Some States recognize it in their Constitutions, by giving the legislature power to emancipate such slaves as may “have rendered the state some distinguished service,” and others by express prohibitory restrictions.  The Constitution of Mississippi, Arkansas, and other States, restrict the power of the legislature in this respect.  Why this express prohibition, if the law-making power cannot abolish slavery?  A stately farce indeed, with appropriate rites to induct into the Constitution a special clause, for the express purpose of restricting a nonentity!—­to take from the law-making power what it never had, and what cannot pertain to it!  The legislatures of those States have no power to abolish slavery, simply because their Constitutions have expressly taken away that power.  The people of Arkansas, Mississippi, &c. well knew the competency of the law-making power to abolish slavery, and hence their zeal to restrict it.

The slaveholding States have recognised this power in their laws.  Virginia passed a law in 1786 to prevent the importation of Slaves, of which the following is an extract:  “And be it further enacted that every slave imported into this commonwealth contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act, shall upon such importation become free.”  By a law of Virginia, passed Dec. 17, 1792, a slave brought into the state and kept there a year, was free.  The Maryland Court of Appeals, Dec., 1813 [case of Stewart vs.  Oakes,] decided that a slave owned in Maryland, and sent by his master into Virginia to work at different periods, making one year in the whole, became free, being emancipated by the above law.  North Carolina and Georgia in their acts of cession, transferring to the United States the territory now constituting the States of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, made it a condition of the grant, that the provisions of the ordinance of ’87 should be secured to the inhabitants, with the exception of the sixth article which prohibits slavery; thus conceding, both the competency of law to abolish slavery, and the power of Congress to do it, within its jurisdiction. (These acts show the prevalent belief at that time, in the slaveholding States, that the general government had adopted a line of policy aiming at the exclusion of slavery from the entire territory of the United States, not included within the original States, and that this policy would be pursued unless prevented by specific and formal stipulation.)