[Footnote C:  Virginia made slaves real estate by a law passed in 1705. (Beverly’s Hist. of Va., p. 98.) I do not find the precise time when this law was repealed, probably when Virginia became the chief slave breeder for the cotton-growing and sugar-planting country, and made young men and women “from fifteen to twenty-five” the main staple production of the State.]

The law of Louisiana requires the master to give his slaves a certain amount of food and clothing, (Martin’s Digest, 610.) If it can oblige the master to give the slave one thing, it can oblige him to give him another:  if food and clothing, then wages, liberty, his own body.  Such laws exist in most slaveholding governments.

By the slave laws of Connecticut, under which slaves are now held, (for even Connecticut is still a slave State,) slaves might receive and hold property, and prosecute suits in their own name as plaintiffs:  [This last was also the law of Virginia in 1795.  See Tucker’s “Dissertation on Slavery,” p. 73.] There were also laws making marriage contracts legal, in certain contingencies, and punishing infringements of them, ["Reeve’s Law of Baron and Femme,” p. 310-1.] Each of the laws enumerated above, does, in principle, abolish slavery; and all of them together abolish it in fact.  True, not as a whole, and at a stroke, nor all in one place; but in its parts, by piecemeal, at divers times and places; thus showing that the abolition of slavery is within the boundary of legislation.

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 Constitutions 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, formally to construct a special clause, and with appropriate rites induct it into the Constitution, for the express purpose of restricting a nonentity!—­to take from the lawmaking 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 fact that these and other States have inhibited their legislatures from the exercise of this power, shows that the abolition of slavery is acknowledged to be a proper subject of legislation, when Constitutions impose no restrictions.