and despoils his State of all power to protect him.  It subjects him to the wretched chance of false oaths, forged papers, and facile commissioners, and takes from him every safeguard.  Now, if the slaveholder has a right to be secure at home in the enjoyment of Slavery, so also has the freeman of the North—­and every person there is presumed to be a free man—­an equal right to be secure at home in the enjoyment of freedom.  The same principle of State rights by which Slavery is protected in the slave States throws an impenetrable shield over Freedom in the free States.  And here, let me say, is the only security for Slavery in the slave States, as for Freedom in the free States.  In the present fatal overthrow of State rights you teach a lesson which may return to plague the teacher.  Compelling the National Government to stretch its Briarean arms into the free States for the sake of Slavery, you show openly how it may stretch these same hundred giant arms into the slave States for the sake of Freedom.  This lesson was not taught by our fathers.

Here I end this branch of the question.  The true principles of our political system, the history of the National Convention, the natural interpretation of the Constitution, all teach that this Act is a usurpation by Congress of powers that do not belong to it, and an infraction of rights secured to the States.  It is a sword, whose handle is at the National Capital, and whose point is everywhere in the States.  A weapon so terrible to personal liberty the nation has no power to grasp.

(2).  And now of the denial of Trial by Jury.

Admitting, for the moment, that Congress is intrusted with power over this subject, which truth disowns, still the Act is again radically unconstitutional from its denial of Trial by Jury in a question of personal liberty and a suit of common law.  Since on the one side there is a claim of property, and on the other of liberty, both property and liberty are involved in the issue.  To this claim on either side is attached Trial by Jury.

To me, Sir, regarding this matter in the light of the Common Law and in the blaze of free institutions, it has always seemed impossible to arrive at any other conclusion.  If the language of the Constitution were open to doubt, which it is not, still all the presumptions of law, all the leanings to Freedom, all the suggestions of justice, plead angel-tongued for this right.  Nobody doubts that Congress, if it legislates on this matter, may allow a Trial by Jury.  But if it may, so overwhelming is the claim of justice, it MUST. Beyond this, however, the question is determined by the precise letter of the Constitution.