Note 212 — Chapter V

In asserting that freedom is national, Mr. Sumner may perhaps mean that it is the duty of the National Government to exclude slavery from all its territories, and to admit no new State in which there are slaves. If this be his meaning, we should reply, that it is as foreign from the merits of the Fugitive Slave Law, which he proposed to discuss, as it is from the truth. The National Government has, indeed, no more power to exclude, than it has to ordain, slavery; for slavery or no slavery is a question which belongs wholly and exclusively to the sovereign people of each and every State or territory. With our whole hearts we respond to the inspiring words of the President's Message: "If the friends of the Constitution are to have another struggle, its enemies could not present a more acceptable issue than that of a State, whose Constitution clearly embraces a republican form of government, being excluded from the Union because its domestic institutions may not, in all respects, comport with the ideas of what is wise and expedient entertained in some other State."