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Now, sir, because the Supreme Court of the United States says—­what is patent to every man who reads the Constitution of the United States—­that it does guaranty property in slaves,it has been attacked with vituperation here, on this floor, by Senators on all sides.  Some have abstained from any indecent, insulting remarks in relation to the Court.  Some have confined themselves to calm and legitimate argument.  To them I am about to reply.  To the others, I shall have something to say a little later.  What says the Senator from Maine (Mr. Fessenden)?  He says: 

“Had the result of that election been otherwise, and had not the (Democratic) party triumphed on the dogma which they had thus introduced, we should never have heard of a doctrine so utterly at variance with all truth; so utterly destitute of all legal logic; so founded on error, and unsupported by anything like argument, as is the opinion of the Supreme Court.”

He says, further: 

“I should like, if I had time, to attempt to demonstrate the fallacy of that opinion.  I have examined the view of the Supreme Court of the United States on the question of the power of the Constitution to carry slavery into free territory belonging to the United States, and I tell you that I believe any tolerably respectable lawyer in the United States can show, beyond all question, to any fair and unprejudiced mind, that the decision has nothing to stand upon except assumption, and bad logic from the assumptions made.  The main proposition on which that decision is founded, the corner-stone of it, without which it is nothing, without which it fails entirely to satisfy the mind of any man, is this:  that the Constitution of the United States recognizes property in slaves, and protects it as such.  I deny it.  It neither recognizes slaves as property, nor does it protect slaves as property.”

The Senator here, you see, says that the whole decision is based on that assumption, which is false.  He says that the Constitution does not recognize slaves as property, nor protect them as property, and his reasoning, a little further on, is somewhat curious.  He says: 

“On what do they found the assertion that the Constitution recognizes slavery as property?  On the provision of the Constitution by which Congress is prohibited from passing a law to prevent the African slave trade for twenty years; and therefore they say the Constitution recognizes slaves as property.”

I should think that was a pretty fair recognition of it.  On this point the gentleman declares: 

“Will not anybody see that this constitutional provision, if it works one way, must work the other?  If, by allowing the slave trade for twenty years, we recognize slaves as property, when we say that at the end of twenty years we will cease to allow it, or may cease to do so, is not that denying them to be property after that period elapses?”