[Footnote A:  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 I do not find the precise time when this law was repealed, probably when Virginia became the chief slave breeder for the cotton-growing and sugar-planting country, and made young men and women “from fifteen to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.]

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.

In the “Washington (D.C.) City Laws,” page 138, is “AN ACT to prevent horses from being cruelly beaten or abused.”  Similar laws have been passed by corporations in many of the slave states, and throughout the civilized world, such acts are punishable either as violations of common law or of legislative enactments.  If a legislature can pass laws “to prevent horses from being cruelly abused,” it can pass laws to prevent men from being cruelly abused, and if it can prevent cruel abuse, it can define what it is.  It can declare that to make men work without pay is cruel abuse, and can PROHIBIT it.

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,