as being a
consequence of the cession. It was by words thus studiously chosen,
sir, that James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson marked their
understanding of a contract now misconstrued as being a bargain and
sale of sovereignty over freemen. With what indignant scorn would
those stanch advocates of the inherent right of self-government have
repudiated the slavish doctrine now deduced from their action!

How were the obligations of this treaty fulfilled? That Louisiana
at that date contained slaves held as property by her people through
the whole length of the Mississippi Valley, that those people had an
unrestricted right of settlement with their slaves under legal
protection throughout the entire ceded province, no man has ever yet
had the hardihood to deny. Here is a treaty promise to protect
their property--their slave property--in that Territory, before
it should become a State. That this promise was openly violated, in
the adjustment forced upon the South at the time of the admission of
Missouri, is a matter of recorded history. The perspicuous and
unanswerable exposition of Mr. Justice Catron, in the opinion
delivered by him in the Dred Scott case, will remain through all
time as an ample vindication of this assertion.

If then, sir, the people of Louisiana had a right, which Congress
could not deny, of the admission into the Union with all the rights
of all the citizens of the United States, it is in vain that the
partisans of the right of the majority to govern the minority with
despotic control, attempt to establish a distinction, to her
prejudice, between her rights and those of any other State. The only
distinction which really exists is this, that she can point to a
breach of treaty stipulations expressly guaranteeing her rights, as
a wrong superadded to those which have impelled a number of her
sister States to the assertion of their independence.

The rights of Louisiana as a sovereign State are those of Virginia;
no more, no less. Let those who deny her right to resume delegated
powers successfully refute the claim of Virginia to the same right,
in spite of her express reservation made and notified to her sister
States when she consented to enter the Union! And, sir, permit me to
say that, of all the causes which justify the action of the Southern
States, I know none of greater gravity and more alarming magnitude
than that now developed of the right of secession. A pretension so
monstrous as th