We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert.  But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen,—­Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—­and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding—­or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in—­in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.

It should not be overlooked that, by the Nebraska bill, the people of a State as well as Territory were to be left “perfectly free,” “subject only to the Constitution.”  Why mention a State?  They were legislating for Territories, and not for or about States.  Certainly the people of a State are and ought to be subject to the Constitution of the United States; but why is mention of this lugged into this merely Territorial law?  Why are the people of a Territory and the people of a State therein lumped together, and their relation to the Constitution therein treated as being precisely the same?  While the opinion of the court, by Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case, and the separate opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a Territorial Legislature to exclude slavery from any United States Territory, they all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a State, or the people of a State, to exclude it.  Possibly, this is a mere omission; but who can be quite sure, if McLean or Curtis had sought to get into the opinion a declaration of unlimited power in the people of a State to exclude slavery from their limits, just as Chase and Mace sought to get such declaration, in behalf of the people of a Territory, into the Nebraska bill—­I ask, who can be quite sure that it would not have been voted down in the one case as it had been in the other?  The nearest approach to the point of declaring the power of a State over slavery is made by Judge Nelson.  He approaches it more than once, using the precise idea, and almost the language too, of the Nebraska act.  On one occasion his exact language is:  “except in cases where the power is restrained by the Constitution of the United States, the law of the State is supreme over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction.”  In what cases the power of the States is so restrained by the United States Constitution is left an open question, precisely