A crowd of reflections, suggested by the preceding testimony, presses for utterance.  The right of petition ravished and trampled by its constitutional guardians, and insult and defiance hurled in the faces of the SOVEREIGN PEOPLE while calmly remonstrating with their SERVANTS for violence committed on the nation’s charter and their own dearest rights!  Added to this “the right of peaceably assembling” violently wrested—­the rights of minorities, rights no longer—­free speech struck dumb—­free men outlawed and murdered—­free presses cast into the streets and their fragments strewed with shoutings, or flourished in triumph before the gaze of approving crowds as proud mementos of prostrate law!  The spirit and power of our fathers, where are they?  Their deep homage always and every where rendered to FREE THOUGHT, with its inseparable signs—­free speech and a free press—­their reverence for justice, liberty, rights and all-pervading law, where are they?

But we turn from these considerations—­though the times on which we have fallen, and those toward which we are borne with headlong haste, call for their discussion as with the voices of departing life—­and proceed to topics relevant to the argument before us.

The seventh article of the amendments to the constitution is alleged to withhold from Congress the power to abolish slavery in the District.  “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”  All the slaves in the District have been “deprived of liberty” by legislative acts.  Now, these legislative acts “depriving” them “of liberty,” were either “due process of law,” or they were not.  If they were, then a legislative act, taking from the master that “property” which is the identical “liberty” previously taken from the slave, would be “due process of law” also, and of course a constitutional act; but if the legislative acts “depriving” them of “liberty” were not “due process of law,” then the slaves were deprived of liberty unconstitutionally, and these acts are void.  In that case the constitution emancipates them.

If the objector reply, by saying that the import of the phrase “due process of law,” is judicial process solely, it is granted, and that fact is our rejoinder; for no slave in the District has been deprived of his liberty by “a judicial process,” or, in other words, by “due process of law;” consequently, upon the objector’s own admission, every slave in the District has been deprived of liberty unconstitutionally, and is therefore free by the constitution.  This is asserted only of the slaves under the “exclusive legislation” of Congress.