3 a labor State ? Should that State confess him to be a chattel and restore him as such, or might it regard him as a person, and harbor and protect him as a man ? They compromised again, and decided that no person held to labor or service in one State by the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall by any law or regulation of that State, be discharged from such labor or service, but shall be delivered up on claim to the person to whom such labor or service shall be due. Free laborers would immigrate, and slaves might be imported into the States. The fathers agreed that Congress may establish uniform laws of naturalization, and it might prohibit the importation of persons after 1808. Communities in the Southwest, detached from the Southern States, were growing up in the practice of slavery, to be capital States. New States would soon grow up in the Northwest, while as yet capital stood aloof, and labor had not lifted the axe to begin there its endless but benificent task. The fathers authorized Congress to make all needful rules and regulations concerning the arrangements and disposition of the public lands, and to admit new States. So the Constitution, while it does not disturb or affect the system of capital in slaves, existing in any State under its own laws, does, at the same time, recognize every human being when within any exclusive sphere of Federal jurisdiction, not as capital but as a person. What was the action of the fathers in Congress? They admitted the new States of the Southwest as capital States, because it was practically impossible to do otherwise, and by the ordinance of 1787, confirmed in 1789, they provided for the organization and admission of only labor States in the Northwest. They directed fugitives from service to be restored not as chattels, but as persons. They awarded naturalization to immigrant free laborers, and they prohibited the trade in African labor. This disposition of the whole subject was in harmony with the condition of society, and, in the main, with the spirit of the age. The seven Northern States contentedly became labor States by their own acts. The six Southern States, with equal tranquillity and by their own determination, remained capital States. The circumstances which the fathers did not clearly foresee were two, namely: the reinvigoration of slavery, consequent on the increased consumption of cotton, and the extension of the national domain across the Mississippi, and these occurred before 1820. The State of Louisana, formed on a slaveholding French settlement, within the newly- acquired Louisianian Territory, had then already been admitted into the Union. There yet remained, however, a vast region, which included Arkansas and Missouri, together with the then unoccupied, and even unnamed Kansas and Nebraska. Arkansas, a slaveholding community, was nearly ready to apply, and Missouri, another such Territory, was actually applying for admission into the Federal Union. The existing capital States seconded these applications, and claimed that the whole Louisianian Territory was rightfully open to slavery, and to the organization of future slave States. The labor States maintained that Congress had supreme legislative power$ within the domain, and could and ought to' exclude slavery there. The question thus opened was one which related not at all to slavery in the existing capital States. It was purely and simply a national question whether the Common interest of the whole Ee- public required that Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, should become capital States, with all the evils and dangers of slavery, or be labor States, with all the security, benefits, and blessings of freedom. On the decision was suspended the question, as was thought, whether ultimately the interior of this new continent should be an asylum for the oppressed and the exile, coming year after year, and age after age, voluntarily from every other civilized land, as well as for the children of misfortune in our own, or whether, through the renewal of the African slave trade, those magnificent and luxuriant regions should be surrendered to the control of capital, wringing out the fruit of the earrn through the impoverishing toil of negro slaves. That question of 1820 was identically the question of 1860, so far as principle, and even the field of its application was concerned. Every element of the controversy now present entered it then; the rightfulness or the wrongfulness of slavery; its effects, present and future; the constitutional authority of Congress; the claims of the States and of their citizens; the nature of the Federal Union, whether it is a compact between ,the States, or an independent Government; the
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