Especially, in view of its odious character, was it necessary in the case of fugitives from service.  Abstaining from any such grant, and then grouping the bare compact with other similar compacts, separate from every grant of power, they testified their purpose most significantly.  Not only do they decline all addition to the compact of any such power, but, to render misapprehension impossible, to make assurance doubly sure, to exclude any contrary conclusion, they punctiliously arrange the clauses, on the principle of noscitur a sociis, so as to distinguish all the grants of power, but especially to make the new grant of power, in the case of public records, stand forth in the front by itself, severed from the naked compacts with which it was originally associated.

Thus the proceedings of the Convention show that the founders understood the necessity of powers in certain cases, and, on consideration, jealously granted them.  A closing example will strengthen the argument.  Congress is expressly empowered “to establish an uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies, throughout the United States.”  Without this provision these two subjects would have fallen within the control of the States, leaving the nation powerless to establish a uniform rule thereupon.  Now, instead of the existing compact on fugitives from service, it would have been easy, had any such desire prevailed, to add this case to the clause on naturalization and bankruptcies, and to empower Congress To ESTABLISH A UNIFORM RULE FOR THE SURRENDER OF FUGITIVES FROM SERVICE THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES.  Then, of course, whenever Congress undertook to exercise the power, all State control of the subject would be superseded.  The National Government would have been constistuted, like Nimrod, the mighty Hunter, with power to gather the huntsmen, to halloo the pack, and to direct the chase of men, ranging at will, without regard to boundaries or jurisdictions, throughout all the States.  But no person in the Convention, not one of the reckless partisans of slavery, was so audacious as to make this proposition.  Had it been distinctly made, it would have been as distinctly denied.

The fact that the provision on this subject was adopted unanimously, while showing the little importance attached to it in the shape it finally assumed, testifies also that it could not have been regarded as a source of national power for Slavery.  It will be remembered that among the members of the Convention were Gouverneur Morris, who had said that he “NEVER would concur in upholding domestic Slavery,”—­Elbridge Gerry, who thought we “ought to be careful NOT to give any sanction to it,”—­Roger Sherman, who “was OPPOSED to a tax on slaves imported, because it implied they were property,”—­James Madison, who “thought it WRONG to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men,”—­and Benjamin Franklin, who likened American slaveholders to Algerine corsairs.  In the face of these unequivocal judgments, it is absurd to suppose that these eminent citizens consented unanimously to any provision by which the National Government, the creature of their hands, dedicated to freedom, could become the most offensive agent of Slavery.