The Supreme Court rests this claim upon
this clause of the Constitution: 'No person held to service or labor in
one State, under the laws thereof, shall, in consequence of any law or
regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall
be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may
be due.' Now the question is, does that guaranty it? Does that make
it the same as other property? The very fact that this clause makes
provision on the subject of persons bound to service, shows that the
framers of the Constitution did not regard it as other property. It
was a thing that needed some provision; other property did not. The
insertion of such a provision shows that it was not regarded as other
property. If a man's horse stray from Delaware into Pennsylvania, he can
go and get it. Is there any provision in the Constitution for it? No.
How came this to be there, if a slave is property? If it is the same as
other property, why have any provision about it?'"
It will undoubtedly have struck any person, in hearing this passage read
from the speech of the Senator from Vermont, whom I regret not to see
in his seat to-day, that the whole argument, ingeniously as it is put,
rests upon this fallacy--if I may say so with due respect to him--that
a man cannot have title in property wherever the law does not give him
a remedy or process for the assertion of his title; or, in other words,
his whole argument rests upon the old confusion of ideas which considers
a man's right and his remedy to be one and the same thing.
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