Houses of Congress from the slaveholding States; and so are, in immensely disproportionate numbers, the commanding officers of the army and navy; the officers of the customs; the registers and receivers of the land offices, and the post-masters throughout the slaveholding States.—­The Biennial Register indicates the birth-place of all the officers employed in the government of the Union.  If it were required to designate the owners of this species of property among them, it would be little more than a catalogue of slaveholders.’”

It is confessed by Mr. Adams, alluding to the national convention that framed the Constitution, that “the delegation from the free States, in their extreme anxiety to conciliate the ascendency of the Southern slaveholder, did listen to a compromise between right and wrong—­between freedom and slavery; of the ultimate fruits of which they had no conception, but which already even now is urging the Union to its inevitable ruin and dissolution, by a civil, servile, foreign, and Indian war, all combined in one; a war, the essential issue of which will be between freedom and slavery, and in which the unhallowed standard of slavery will be the desecrated banner of the North American Union—­that banner, first unfurled to the breeze, inscribed with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.”

Hence, to swear to support the Constitution of the United States, as it is, is to make “a compromise between right and wrong,” and to wage war against human liberty.  It is to recognize and honor as republican legislators, incorrigible men-stealers, MERCILESS TYRANTS, BLOOD THIRSTY ASSASSINS, who legislate with deadly weapons about their persons, such as pistols, daggers, and bowie-knives, with which they threaten to murder any Northern senator or representative who shall dare to stain their honor, or interfere with their rights!  They constitute a banditti more fierce and cruel than any whose atrocities are recorded on the pages of history or romance.  To mix with them on terms of social or religious fellowship, is to indicate a low state of virtue; but to think of administering a free government by their co-operation, is nothing short of insanity.

Article IV., Section 2, declares,—­“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 such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

Here is a third clause, which, like the other two, makes no mention of slavery or slaves, in express terms; and yet, like them, was intelligently framed and mutually understood by the parties to the ratification, and intended both to protect the slave system and to restore runaway slaves.  It alone makes slavery a national institution, a national crime, and all the people who are not enslaved, the body-guard over those whose liberties have been cloven down.  This agreement, too, has been fulfilled to the letter by the North.