n.

This decision rendered jubilant all friends of slavery, as also the
ultra Abolitionists, but correspondingly disheartened the sober friends
of human liberty. How, it was asked, is the cause of freedom to be
advanced when the supreme law of the land, as interpreted by the highest
tribunal existing for that purpose, virtually establishes slavery in New
England itself, provided any slave-master wishes to come there with his
troop? But anti-slavery men did not despair. Patriots had of course to
obey the court till its opinion should be reversed, yet its opinion was
at once repudiated as bad law. Men like Sumner, Wilson, Chase, Giddings,
Seward, and Lincoln, appealing to both the history and the letter of the
Constitution, and to the course of legislation and of judicial decisions
on slavery even in the slave States, had been elaborating and
demonstrating the counter theory, under which our fundamental law
appeared as anything but a "covenant with hell."

The pith of this counter theory was that slaves were property not by
moral, natural, or common law, but only by state law, that hence
freedom, not slavery, was the heart and universal presupposition of our
government, and that slavery, not freedom, was bound to show reasons for
its existence anywhere. This being so, while Calhoun and Taney were
right as against Douglas in ascribing to Congress all power over the
Territories, it was as impossible to find slaves in any United States
Territory as to find a king there. Slaves taken into Territories
therefore became free. Slaves taken into any free State became free.
Slaves carried from a slave State on to the high seas became free. Even
the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution must be applied in the way
least favorable to slavery.

On the other hand Douglas was right in his view that citizens and not
States were the partners in the Territories. As to the assertion of
incompatibility between citizenship and African blood, it would not
stand historical examination a moment. If it was true that the framers
of the Constitution did not consciously include colored persons in the
"ourselves and our posterity" for whom they purposed the "Blessings of
Liberty," neither did they consciously exclude, as is clear from the
fact that nearly everyone of them expected blacks some time to be free.

CHAPTER VI.

SLAVERY AND THE OLD PARTIES

[1841]

The Democratic Party was predominantly southern, the Whig northern. Both
sou