It is said that the manifold abominations perpetrated in the District are no grievances to the petitioners, and therefore they have no right to ask for their removal.  But the right guaranteed by the Constitution, is a right to ask for the redress of grievances, whether personal, social, or moral.  And who, except a slaveholder, will dare to contend that it is no grievance that our agents, our representatives, our servants, in our name and by our authority, enact laws erecting and licensing markets in the Capital of the Republic, for the sale of human beings, and converting free men into slaves, for no other crime, than that of being too poor to pay United States’ officers the JAIL FEES accruing from an iniquitous imprisonment?

Again, it is pretended that the objects prayed for, are palpably unconstitutional, and that therefore the petitions ought not to be received.  And by what authority are the people deprived of their right to petition for any object which a majority of either House of Congress, for the time being, may please to regard as unconstitutional?  If this usurpation be submitted to, it will not be confined to abolition petitions.  It is well known that most of the slaveholders now insist, that all protecting duties are unconstitutional, and that on account of the tariff the Union was nearly rent by the very men who are now horrified by the danger to which it is exposed by these petitions!  Should our Northern Manufacturers again presume to ask Congress to protect them from foreign competition, the Southern members will find a precedent, sanctioned by Northern votes, for a rule that “no petition, memorial, resolution, or other paper, praying for the IMPOSITION OF DUTIES FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF MANUFACTURES, shall be received by the House, or entertained in any way whatever.”

It does indeed, require Southern arrogance, to maintain that, although Congress is invested by the Constitution with “exclusive jurisdiction, in all cases whatsoever,” over the District of Columbia, yet that it would be so palpably unconstitutional to abolish the slave-trade, and to emancipate the slaves in the District, that petitions for these objects ought not to be received.  Yet this is asserted in that very House, on whose minutes is recorded a resolution, in 1816, appointing a committee, with power to send for persons and papers, “to inquire into the existence of an inhuman and illegal traffic in slaves, carried on, in and through the District of Columbia, and report whether any, and what means are necessary for putting a stop to the same:”  and another, in 1829, instructing the Committee on the District of Columbia to inquire into the expediency of providing by law, “for the gradual abolition of slavery in the District.”