The celebrated Roger Sherman, one of the committee of five appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence, and a member of the convention that formed the United States’ constitution, said, in the first Congress after its adoption:  “The constitution does not consider these persons, (slaves,) as a species of property.”—­[Lloyd’s Cong.  Reg. v. 1, p. 313.] That the United States’ Constitution does not make slaves “property,” is shown in the fact, that no person, either as a citizen of the United States, or by having his domicile within the United States’ government, can hold slaves.  He can hold them only by deriving his power from state laws, or from the laws of Congress, if he hold slaves within the District.  But no person resident within the United States’ jurisdiction, and not within the District, nor within a state whose laws support slavery, nor “held to service” under the laws of such a state or district, having escaped therefrom, can be held as a slave.

Men can hold property under the United States’ government though residing beyond the bounds of any state, district, or territory.  An inhabitant of the Iowa Territory can hold property there under the laws of the United States, but he cannot hold slaves there under the United States’ laws, nor by virtue of the United States’ Constitution, nor upon the ground of his United States’ citizenship, nor by having his domicile within the United States’ jurisdiction.  The constitution no where recognizes the right to “slave property,” but merely the fact that the states have jurisdiction each in its own limits, and that there are certain “persons” within their jurisdictions “held to service” by their own laws.

Finally, in the clause under consideration “private property” is not to be taken “without just compensation.”  “JUST!” If justice is to be appealed to in determining the amount of compensation, let her determine the grounds also.  If it be her province to say how much compensation is “just,” it is hers to say whether any is “just,”—­whether the slave is “just” property at all, rather than a “person”.  Then, if justice adjudges the slave to be “private property,” it adjudges him to be his own property, since the right to one’s self is the first right—­the source of all others—­the original stock by which they are accumulated—­the principal, of which they are the interest.  And since the slave’s “private property” has been “taken,” and since “compensation” is impossible—­there being no equivalent for one’s self—­the least that can be done is to restore to him his original private property.

Having shown that in abolishing slavery, “property” would not be “taken for public use,” it may be added that, in those states where slavery has been abolished by law, no claim for compensation has been allowed.  Indeed the manifest absurdity of demanding it seems to have quite forestalled the setting up of such a claim.