on
would entitle it to admission. It is acquired to become a State, and
not to be held as a colony and governed by Congress with absolute
authority; and as the propriety of admitting a new State is committed
to the sound discretion of Congress, the power to acquire territory
for that purpose, to be held by the United States until it is in a
suitable condition to become a State upon an equal footing with the
other States, must rest upon the same discretion. It is a question for
the political department of the Government, and not the judicial; and
whatever the political department of the Government shall recognise as
within the limits of the United States, the judicial department is
also bound to recognise, and to administer in it the laws of the
United States, so far as they apply, and to maintain in the Territory
the authority and rights of the Government, and also the personal
rights and rights of property of individual citizens, as secured by
the Constitution. All we mean to say on this point is, that, as there
is no express regulation in the Constitution defining the power which
the General Government may exercise over the person or property of a
citizen in a Territory thus acquired, the court must necessarily look
to the provisions and principles of the Constitution, and its
distribution of powers, for the rules and principles by which its
decision must be governed.

Taking this rule to guide us, it may be safely assumed that citizens
of the United States who migrate to a Territory belonging to the
people of the United States, cannot be ruled as mere colonists,
dependent upon the will of the General Government, and to be governed
by any laws it may think proper to impose. The principle upon which
our Governments rest, and upon which alone they continue to exist, is
the union of States, sovereign and independent within their own limits
in their internal and domestic concerns, and bound together as one
people by a General Government, possessing certain enumerated and
restricted powers, delegated to it by the people of the several
States, and exercising supreme authority within the scope of the
powers granted to it, throughout the dominion of the United States. A
power, therefore, in the General Government to obtain and hold
colonies and dependent territories, over which they might legislate
without restriction, would be inconsistent with its own existence in
its present form. Whatever it acquires, it acquires for the