he other
evidence does, _signed with their own hands_. And is this to be set
aside, and the constitution itself to be impeached and destroyed, and
free government overturned, on the authority of a few meagre snatches of
argument, intent or opinion, uttered by a few only of the members;
jotted down by one of them, (Mr. Madison,) merely for his own
convenience, or from the suggestions of his own mind; and only reported
to us fifty years afterwards by a posthumous publication of his papers?
If any thing could excite the utter contempt of the people of this
nation for the miserable subterfuges, to which the advocates of slavery
resort, it would seem that their offering such evidence as this in
support of their cause, must do it. And yet these, and such as these
mere fragments of evidence, all utterly inadmissible and worthless in
their kind, for any legal purpose, constitute the warp and the woof, the
very _sine qua non_ of the whole argument for slavery.

Did Mr. Madison, when he took his oath of office, as president of the
United States, swear to support these scraps of debate, which he had
filed away among his private papers?--Or did he swear to support that
written instrument, which the people of the country had agreed to, and
which was known to them, and to all the world, as the constitution of
the United States.[29]

But even if the unexpressed intentions, which these notes of debate
ascribe to certain members, had been participated in by the whole
convention, we should have had no right to hold the people of the
country at large responsible for them. _This convention sat with closed
doors_, and it was not until near fifty years after the people had
adopted the constitution itself, that these private intentions of the
framers authentically transpired. And even now all the evidence
disclosed implicates, _directly and absolutely_, but few of the
members--not even all from the slaveholding states. The intentions of
all the rest, we have a right to presume, concurred with their votes and
the words of the instrument; and they had therefore no occasion to
express contrary ones in debate.

But suppose that _all_ the members of the convention had participated in
these intentions--what then? Any forty or fifty men, like those who
framed the constitution, may now secretly concoct another, that is
honest in its terms, and yet in secret conclave confess to each other
the criminal objects they intend to accomplish by it, if its