ely an exception, all the
members of both Houses of Congress from the slaveholding States; and
so are, in immensely disproportionate numbers, the commanding
officers of the army and navy; the officers of the customs; the
registers and receivers of the land offices, and the post-masters
throughout the slaveholding States.--The Biennial Register indicates
the birth-place of all the officers employed in the government of
the Union. If it were required to designate the owners of this
species of property among them, it would be little more than a
catalogue of slaveholders.'"

It is confessed by Mr. Adams, alluding to the national convention
that framed the Constitution, that "the delegation from the free
States, in their extreme anxiety to conciliate the ascendency of the
Southern slaveholder, did listen to a _compromise between right and
wrong_--_between freedom and slavery_; of the ultimate fruits of which
they had no conception, but which already even now is urging the
Union to its inevitable ruin and dissolution, by a civil, servile,
foreign, and Indian war, all combined in one; a war, the essential
issue of which will be between freedom and slavery, and in which the
unhallowed standard of slavery will be the desecrated banner of the
North American Union--that banner, first unfurled to the breeze,
inscribed with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of
Independence."

Hence, to swear to support the Constitution of the United States, _as
it is_, is to make "a compromise between right and wrong," and to
wage war against human liberty. It is to recognize and honor as
republican legislators, _incorrigible men-stealers_, MERCILESS
TYRANTS, BLOOD THIRSTY ASSASSINS, who legislate with deadly weapons
about their persons, such as pistols, daggers, and bowie-knives,
with which they threaten to murder any Northern senator or
representative who shall dare to stain their _honor_, or interfere
with their _rights_! They constitute a banditti more fierce and cruel
than any whose atrocities are recorded on the pages of history or
romance. To mix with them on terms of social or religious fellowship,
is to indicate a low state of virtue; but to think of administering
a free government by their co-operation, is nothing short of insanity.

Article IV., Section 2, declares,--"No person held to service or
labor in one State, _under the laws thereof_, escaping into another,
shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be
d