hts of Georgia and her citizens during
the Territorial condition of the country. She relied on the
indisputable truths, that the States were by the Constitution made
equals in political rights, and equals in the right to participate in
the common property of all the States united, and held in trust for
them. The Constitution having provided that "The citizens of each
State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens
of the several States," the right to enjoy the territory as equals was
reserved to the States, and to the citizens of the States,
respectively. The cited clause is not that citizens of the United
States shall have equal privileges in the Territories, but the citizen
of each State shall come there in right of his State, and enjoy the
common property. He secures his equality through the equality of his
State, by virtue of that great fundamental condition of the Union--the
equality of the States.

Congress cannot do indirectly what the Constitution prohibits
directly. If the slaveholder is prohibited from going to the Territory
with his slaves, who are parts of his family in name and in fact, it
will follow that men owning lawful property in their own States,
carrying with them the equality of their State to enjoy the common
property, may be told, you cannot come here with your slaves, and he
will be held out at the border. By this subterfuge, owners of slave
property, to the amount of thousand of millions, might be almost as
effectually excluded from removing into the Territory of Louisiana
north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, as if the law declared
that owners of slaves, as a class, should be excluded, even if their
slaves were left behind.

Just as well might Congress have said to those of the North, you shall
not introduce into the territory south of said line your cattle or
horses, as the country is already overstocked; nor can you introduce
your tools of trade, or machines, as the policy of Congress is to
encourage the culture of sugar and cotton south of the line, and so to
provide that the Northern people shall manufacture for those of the
South, and barter for the staple articles slave labor produces. And
thus the Northern farmer and mechanic would be held out, as the
slaveholder was for thirty years, by the Missouri restriction.

If Congress could prohibit one species of property, lawful throughout
Louisiana when it was acquired, and lawful in the State from whence it
was