Begged leave to explain the reason of this clause.  In some of the Northern States, they have emancipated all their slaves.  If any of our slaves, said he, go there and remain there a certain time, they would, by the present laws, be entitled to their freedom, so that their masters could not get them again.  This would be extremely prejudicial to the inhabitants of the Southern States, and to prevent it, this clause is inserted in the Constitution.  Though the word slave be not mentioned, this is the meaning of it.  The Northern delegates, owing to their particular scruples on the subject of slavery, did not choose the word slave to be mentioned.

But even if TWO clauses are immoral that is enough for our purpose, and shews that no honest man should engage to uphold them.  Who has the right to construe and expound the laws?  Of course the Courts of the Nation.  The Constitution provides (Article 3, Section 2,) that the Supreme Court shall be the final and only interpreter of its meaning.  What says the Supreme Court?  That this clause does relate to slaves, and order their return.  All the other courts concur in this opinion.  But, say some, the courts are corrupt on this question.  Let us appeal to the people.  Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand answer, that the courts have construed it rightly, and almost as many cheerfully support it.  If the unanimous, concurrent, unbroken practice of every department of the Government, judicial, legislative, and executive, and the acquiescence of the people for fifty years, do not prove which is the true construction, then how and where can such a question ever be settled?  If the people and the courts of the land do not know what they themselves mean, who has authority to settle their meaning for them?

If the Constitution is not what history, unbroken practice, and the courts prove that our fathers intended to make it, and what too, their descendants, this nation say they did make it, and agree to uphold,—­who shall decide what the Constitution is?

This is the sense then in which the Nation understand that the promise is made to them.  The Nation understand that the judge pledges himself to return fugitive slaves.  The judge knows this when he takes the oath.  And Paley expresses the opinion of all writers on morals, as well as the conviction of all honest men, when he says, “that a promise is binding in that sense in which the promiser thought at the time that the other party understood it.”

OBJECTION II.

A promise to do an immoral act is not binding:  therefore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, does not bind one to support any provisions of that instrument which are repugnant to his ideas of right.  And an abolitionist, thinking it wrong to return slaves, may as an office-holder, innocently and properly take an oath to support a Constitution which commands such return.