preted as to interfere with slavery, or to make it
unlawful for one portion of the people to enslave another, _without an
express alteration in that instrument, in the manner therein set
forth._ While, therefore, the Constitution remains as it was
originally adopted, they who swear to support it are bound to comply
with all its provisions, as a matter of allegiance. For it avails
nothing to say, that some of those provisions are at war with the law
of God and the rights of man, and therefore are not obligatory.
Whatever may be their character, they are _constitutionally_
obligatory; and whoever feels that he cannot execute them, or swear to
execute them, without committing sin, has no other choice left than to
withdraw from the government, or to violate his conscience by taking
on his lips an impious promise. The object of the Constitution is not
to define _what is the law of God_, but WHAT IS THE WILL OF THE
PEOPLE--which will is not to be frustrated by an ingenious moral
interpretation, by those whom they have elected to serve them.

ARTICLE 1, Sect. 2, provides--"Representatives and direct taxes shall
be apportioned among the several States, which may be included within
this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be
determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including
those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not
taxed, _three-fifths of all other persons_."

Here, as in the clause we have already examined, veiled beneath a form
of words as deceitful as it is unmeaning in a truly democratic
government, is a provision for the safety, perpetuity and augmentation
of the slaveholding power--a provision scarcely less atrocious than
that which related to the African slave trade, and almost as
afflictive in its operation--a provision still in force, with no
possibility of its alteration, so long as a majority of the slave
States choose to maintain their slave system--a provision which, at
the present time, enables the South to have twenty-five additional
representatives in Congress on the score of property, while the North
is not allowed to have one--a provision which concedes to the
oppressed three-fifths of the political power which is granted to all
others, and then puts this power into the hands of their oppressors,
to be wielded by them for the more perfect security of their tyrannous
authority, and the complete subjugation of the non-slaveholding
States.

Re