t. Congress has no power but what it
derives from the Constitution. If it can acquire territory and govern
it, it can do so only by virtue of and in accordance with the
Constitution. We cannot suppose that the framers of the Constitution, or
the people of the States who spake through it, looking as many of them
did, to the fair lands of the west, as their own future homes and the
homes of brothers and children, where fortunes broken in the
revolutionary struggle might be retrieved, would impose on themselves or
those brothers and children a colonial bondage to the Federal
government, worse than that from which they had just escaped. Jealousy
of the power of the Federal government, as already shown, had been the
great drawback to the confederacy and to the formation of the
Constitution, and had carefully guarded in the Constitution the rights
of the States as to all matters of internal sovereignty, and it must be
so construed as equally to guard the rights of the people of the
territories or inchoate States, or the Constitution becomes incongruous
and inconsistent. Power of exclusive legislation was conferred on
Congress, as to certain defined localities acquired for specific
purposes, such as a seat of government, arsenals, &c., all other powers
of legislation were Federal, not municipal--powers to govern the States
or their people for national or Federal purposes, not powers to govern
the people in the States for internal or domestic purposes. This
reasonable view of the Constitution forces the conclusion that we must
regard the power to make rules and regulations as to the territory and
other property of the United States, as relating solely to the
protection and disposal of the public territory as land or property, and
we must therefore find the power to govern the territories involved or
implied, as it doubtless is in the power to admit new States. The end of
acquiring territory is the formation of States, and the powers of
territorial government, so far as power was conferred upon Congress,
must have had reference to that end. Therefore it is, that the duty and
the function of Congress are alike filled in the civil government of a
territory, when the Congress shall have defined a mode or an
organization by which the citizens in a territory shall be able to
exercise their inherent right of self-government in accordance with the
principles of the Constitution. No man pretends that Congress has any
power of legislation