honest
character should enable them to secure for it the adoption of the
people.--But if the people should adopt such constitution, would they
thereby adopt any of the criminal and secret purposes of its authors? Or
if the guilty confessions of these conspirators should be revealed fifty
years afterwards, would judicial tribunals look to them as giving the
government any authority for violating the legal meaning of the words of
such constitution, and for so construing them as to subserve the
criminal and shameless purposes of its originators?

The members of the convention, as such, were the mere scriveners of the
constitution; and their individual purposes, opinions or expressions,
then uttered in secret cabal, though now revealed, can no more be
evidence of the intentions of the people who adopted the constitution,
than the secret opinions or expressions of the scriveners of any other
contract can be offered to prove the intentions of the true parties to
such contract. As framers of the constitution, the members of the
convention gave to it no validity, meaning, or legal force. They simply
drafted it, and offered it, such as it legally might be, to the people
for their adoption or rejection. The people, therefore, in adopting it,
had no reference whatever to the opinions of the convention. They had no
authentic evidence of what those opinions were. They looked simply at
the instrument. And they adopted even its legal meaning by a bare
majority. If the instrument had contained any tangible sanction of
slavery, the people would sooner have had it burned by the hands of the
common hangman, than they would have adopted it, and thus sold
themselves as pimps to slavery, covered as they were with the scars they
had received in fighting the battles of freedom. And the members of the
convention knew that such was the feeling of a large portion of the
people; and for that reason, if for no other, they dared insert in the
instrument no legal sanction of slavery. They chose rather to trust to
their craft and influence to corrupt the government, (of which they
themselves expected to be important members,) after the constitution
should have been adopted, rather than ask the necessary authority
directly from the people. And the success they have had in corrupting
the government, proves that they judged rightly in presuming that the
government would be more flexible than the people.

For other reasons, too, the people should not be