it is established; but I say it is, after all, local law.  It is nothing more.  And wherever that local law does not extend, property in persons does not exist.  Well, Sir, what is now the demand on the part of our Southern friends?  They say, “We will carry our local laws with us wherever we go.  We insist that Congress does us injustice unless it establishes in the territory in which we wish to go our own local law.”  This demand I for one resist, and shall resist.  It goes upon the idea that there is an inequality, unless persons under this local law, and holding property by authority of that law, can go into new territory and there establish that local law, to the exclusion of the general law.  Mr. President, it was a maxim of the civil law, that, between slavery and freedom, freedom should always be presumed, and slavery must always be proved.  If any question arose as to the status of an individual in Rome, he was presumed to be free until he was proved to be a slave, because slavery is an exception to the general rule.  Such, I suppose, is the general law of mankind.  An individual is to be presumed to be free, until a law can be produced which creates ownership in his person.  I do not dispute the force and validity of the local law, as I have already said; but I say, it is a matter to be proved; and therefore, if individuals go into any part of the earth, it is to be proved that they are not freemen, or else the presumption is that they are.

Now our friends seem to think that an inequality arises from restraining them from going into the territories, unless there be a law provided which shall protect their ownership in persons.  The assertion is, that we create an inequality.  Is there nothing to be said on the other side in relation to inequality?  Sir, from the date of this Constitution, and in the counsels that formed and established this Constitution, and I suppose in all men’s judgment since, it is received as a settled truth, that slave labor and free labor do not exist well together.  I have before me a declaration of Mr. Mason, in the Convention that formed the Constitution, to that effect.  Mr. Mason, as is well known, was a distinguished member from Virginia.  He says that the objection to slave labor is, that it puts free white labor in disrepute; that it causes labor to be regarded as derogatory to the character of the free white man, and that the free white man despises to work, to use his expression, where slaves are employed.  This is a matter of great interest to the free States, if it be true, as to a great extent it certainly is, that wherever slave labor prevails free white labor is excluded or discouraged.  I agree that slave labor does not necessarily exclude free labor totally.  There is free white labor in Virginia, Tennessee, and other States, where most of the labor is done by slaves.  But it necessarily loses something of its respectability, by the side of, and when associated with, slave labor.  Wherever labor is mainly performed by slaves, it is regarded as degrading to freemen.  The freemen of the North, therefore, have a deep interest in keeping labor free, exclusively free, in the new territories.