od, show the universal conviction of legislative bodies, that
when great public interest were at stake, nothing should be left to be
"implied."

Further: suppose Maryland and Virginia had expressed their "implied
faith" in _words_, and embodied it in their acts of cession as a
proviso, declaring that Congress should not "exercise exclusive
legislation in _all_ cases whatsoever over the District," but that the
"case" of _slavery_ should be an exception: who does not know that
Congress, if it had accepted the cession on those terms, would have
violated the Constitution; and who that has ever studied the free mood
of those times in its bearings on slavery--proofs of which are given in
scores on the preceding pages--can for an instant believe that the
people of the United States would have altered their Constitution for
the purpose of providing for slavery an inviolable sanctuary; that when
driven in from its outposts, and everywhere retreating discomfited
before the march of freedom, it might be received into everlasting
habitations on the common homestead and hearth-stone of this free
republic? Besides, who can believe that Virginia made such a condition,
or cherished such a purpose, when at that very moment, Washington,
Jefferson, Wythe, Patrick Henry, St. George Tucker, and almost all her
illustrious men, were advocating the abolition of slavery by law. When
Washington had said, two years before, Maryland and Virginia "must have
laws for the gradual abolition of slavery and at a period _not remote_;"
and when Jefferson in his letter to Price, three years before the
cession, had said, speaking of Virginia, "This is the next state to
which we may turn our eyes for the interesting spectacle of justice in
conflict with avarice and oppression--a conflict in which THE SACRED
SIDE IS GAINING DAILY RECRUITS;" when voluntary emancipations on the
soil were then progressing at the rate of between one and two thousand
annually, (See Judge Tucker's "Dissertation on Slavery," p. 73;) when
the public sentiment of Virginia had undergone, and was undergoing so
mighty a revolution that the idea of the continuance of slavery as a
permanent system could not be _tolerated_, though she then contained
about half the slaves in the Union. Was this the time to stipulated for
the _perpetuity_ of slavery under the exclusive legislation of Congress?
and that too at the _same_ session of Congress when _every one_ of her
delegation voted for the abol