quered, and the clarion voice which had commanded in the storm of battle, were powerless and hushed, those who had assaled his motives-who had resisted his purposes of justice and fair dealing with the young Pacific States—those sec-· tional agitators and aggressors took fresh courage, whispering, like gibbering ghosts, above his perished dust, "after lifè's fitful fever he sleeps well." The agitation, the aggression, the conspiracy against free principles, free labor, and equal rights, went on. California was admitted; but New Mexico was rejected, and remanded to the condition of a territorial organization, with the concession to the slave interest that Congress should not then exercise its admitted power of legislation for the protection of liberty and right, either in that Territory or in Utah.

Yes, sir; the free North, with her twenty million of freemen, for the sake of peace, submitted to the humiliation of the demand of this sectional party, that in those vast Territories the law of God should not be re-enacted, as Mr. Webster called the law of liberty. That great man, now sleeping in his tomb by the great sea, at the demand of this power, yielded up his own convictions, and not only consented to this, but joined with others in yielding a reluctant assent to the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 - a law which, in direct violation of the constitution, transfers the judicial power from judges duly appointed by the President, with the consent of the Senate, to irresponsible commissioners appointed by the circuit courts, tendering them a bribe of five dollars, if, upon ex parte evidence the affidavit of some unknown man, taken in the rice swamps of Florida, it may be, before some justice of the peace- he shall adjudge a man brought before him on his warrant, a fugitive slave, guilty of the crime of preferring liberty to bondage.

That flagitious law insults the conscience of the people, by declaring it a crime to exercise that highest duty enjoined by God upon man-charity. That law also discriminates most offensively in favor of slave property over all other movable property, by providing that the slave-owner or claimant may, on his affidavit, have his property restored to him at the national expense; while, if the cattle of a Northern farmer escape into another State, he must reclaim them at his own expense.

I should like to be informed of the constitutional provision for this discrimination. Can it be accounted for upon any other hypothesis than that this government is made exclusively to expand, maintain, and protect, the slave institution, and to legislate exclusively for the pecuniary and political benefit of three hundred and fifty thousand slaveholders? The people are told that they shall not repeal this act of 1850, or the Union will fall. How comes it that the Union lasted for sixty years without this enactment? Having thus saved the Union by enacting the fugitive law of 1850, and by refusing, in the territorial acts for Utah and New Mexico, to re-enact the law of God, these sectional disturbers and aggressors, in Democratic convention at Baltimore, in 1852, resolved to suppress all agitation of this question, either in or out of Congress.

Thus, to maintain as a finality this legislation for slavery, this sectional party attempted to muzzle the press, and stifle the lowest whisper of the national conscience, even in humble protest against this infamous enactment. These gentlemen did not themselves obey their own officious and insulting order of silence. The whole country knows who opened anew this angry controversy in 1854, and filled the whole land with the agitation of this question, by the repeal of the eighth sec

tion of the act of 1820, known as the Missouri Compromise, under the false pretence of giving to the people of the great Territories north of that line the right of self-government, under the title of popular sovereignty. The demagogue cry was: the people of a Territory, like the people of a State, are perfectly free to establish slavery, black or white. True, the federal government appoints for all the Territories their governors, judges, and marshals; prescribes the qualifications of their electors; limits, as well as confers, their legislative powers; and approves or annuls, at pleasure, all their legislative enactments; but the people have the right to enslave and sell one another. "This," said the President, "is a right as old as the right of self-government"-the right to do wrong, and to be supported in that wrong by the nation. This right of popular sovereignty not only includes the right to convert a man into property, but, for reasons of State necessity, to roast and eat him, if they see fit.

The President, as the chief of this sectional party, in one year after his inauguration, announced, as another principle of this sectional party, that slavery exists in all the Territories, not by virtue of this ancient right of self-government, but by virtue of the constitution of the United States. To make good this proposition, this party, aided by the President, attempted to fasten the Lecompton slave constitution upon the people of Kansas, against their protest that constitution which declared that it should never be so altered or amended as to affect the ownership of property in slaves, and that this property was higher than all constitutions. This sectional party, foiled in this attempt to legalize this atrocity only by the united action of the Republican party on this floor, next enacted that other statute, the English bill, for the double purpose of restricting the exercise of the right of petition, and

of fettering the progress of free labor by the formation of a free State. The population, all-sufficient for a slave State, Iwas held not sufficient for a free State. The demon spirit

of this enactment can be seen in the declaration of the President, that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the constitution of the United States, and therefore Kansas is as much a slave State as Georgia or South Carolina.

This dogma is the burden of the message now before us. The President has not more than concluded his invocation "to allay the demon spirit," than he informs us that the supreme court has finally determined the question of slavery in the Territories, and established the right of every citizen to take his slave property into the Territories and "have it protected there under the constitution;" and that "neither Congress, nor a territorial legislature, nor any human power, has any authority to annul or impair this vested right." Yes, sir, we are gravely told that a mere stump speech, made in the supreme court in the Dred Scott case, on this territorial question, whereof the court had confessedly no jurisdiction, is a final judicial decision which has "irrevocably fixed the status of a Territory as a slave Territory. "Had it been decided," says the President, "that either Congress or the territorial legislature possess the power to impair the right of property in slaves, the evil would be intolerable." It is settled that the judiciary must relieve against such territorial legislation as impairs this right, and that Congress "must strengthen their hands by further legislation." I submit that it was bad enough for this party to declare, as it did, from 1854 to 1856, that the scattered settlers of a Territory were perfectly free to enslave their fellow men in the Territories; but who can fathom that lower deep of infamy to which it descends when it avers that property in slaves within the

Territories is a vested right, to be protected by a congressional slave code?

The President seems to think, and so to instruct us, that we are to be bound by the decisions of the supreme court in the discharge of our duties here. The time was, sir, when the President thought and spoke differently. In the Senate, in 1841, when the fiscal bank bill was under consideration, this same person, now President, then a senator, on being told that the constitutionality of the question had been settled by the supreme court, said:

"If the judiciary had settled the question I should never hold myself bound by their decision. . . . If they failed to convince me that the law was constitutional, I should be guilty of perjury before high heaven if I voted in its favor."-Congressional Globe, vol. 10, page 163.

If the supreme court is to decide all constitutional questions for us, why not refer every question of constitutional power to that body, not already decided, before acting upon it. I recognize the decisions of that tribunal as of binding force only as to the parties and privies to the suit, and the rights particularly involved and passed upon. The court has no power, in deciding the right of Dred Scott and of his children to their liberty, to decide, so as to bind this body, that neither Congress, nor a territorial legislature, nor any human power, has authority to prohibit slavery in the Territories; neither has that tribunal the power to decide that five million persons, born and domiciled in this land, "have no rights which we are bound to respect." The judiciary are entitled to respect; but if they arrogate powers not conferred upon them, and attempt by such arrogation of power to take away the legislative power of the whole people, and to deprive large numbers of them of their natural rights, I claim, as a