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Page 32
He says, further:
"I should like, if I had time, to attempt to demonstrate the fallacy
of that opinion. I have examined the view of the Supreme Court of the
United States on the question of the power of the Constitution to carry
slavery into free territory belonging to the United States, and I tell
you that I believe any tolerably respectable lawyer in the United States
can show, beyond all question, to any fair and unprejudiced mind, that
the decision has nothing to stand upon except assumption, and bad logic
from the assumptions made. The main proposition on which that decision
is founded, the corner-stone of it, without which it is nothing, without
which it fails entirely to satisfy the mind of any man, is this: that
the Constitution of the United States recognizes property in slaves,
and protects it as such. I deny it. It neither recognizes slaves as
property, nor does it protect slaves as property."
The Senator here, you see, says that the whole decision is based on
that assumption, which is false. He says that the Constitution does
not recognize slaves as property, nor protect them as property, and his
reasoning, a little further on, is somewhat curious. He says:
"On what do they found the assertion that the Constitution recognizes
slavery as property? On the provision of the Constitution by which
Congress is prohibited from passing a law to prevent the African
slave trade for twenty years; and therefore they say the Constitution
recognizes slaves as property."
I should think that was a pretty fair recognition of it. On this point
the gentleman declares:
"Will not anybody see that this constitutional provision, if it works
one way, must work the other? If, by allowing the slave trade for twenty
years, we recognize slaves as property, when we say that at the end of
twenty years we will cease to allow it, or may cease to do so, is not
that denying them to be property after that period elapses?"
That is the argument. Nothing but my respect for the logical intellect
of the Senator from Maine could make me treat this argument as serious,
and nothing but having heard it myself would make me believe that he
ever uttered it. What, sir! The Constitution of our country says to the
South, "you shall count as the basis of your representation five slaves
as being three white men; you may be protected in the natural increase
of your slaves; nay, more, as a matter of compromise you may increase
their number if you choose, for twenty years, by importation; when these
twenty years are out, you shall stop." The Supreme Court of the United
States says, "well; is not this a recognition of slavery, of property
in slaves?" "Oh, no," says the gentleman, "the rule must work both
ways; there is a converse to the proposition." Now, sir, to an
ordinary, uninstructed intellect, it would seem that the converse of the
proposition was simply that at the end of twenty years you should not
any longer increase your numbers by importation; but the gentleman says
the converse of the proposition is that at the end of the twenty years,
after you have, under the guarantee of the Constitution, been adding by
importation to the previous number of your slaves, then all those that
you had before, and all those that, under that Constitution, you have
imported, cease to be recognized as property by the Constitution, and
on this proposition he assails the Supreme Court of the United States--a
proposition which he says will occur to anybody.
Mr. Fessenden. Will the Senator allow me?
Mr. Benjamin. I should be very glad to enter into this debate now, but I
fear it is so late that I shall not be able to get through to-day.
Mr. Fessenden. I suppose it is of no consequence.
Mr. Benjamin. What says the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Collamer), who
also went into this examination somewhat extensively. I read from his
printed speech:
"I do not say that slaves are never property. I do not say that they
are, or are not. Within the limits of a State which declares them to be
property, they are property, because they are within the jurisdiction of
that government which makes the declaration; but I should wish to speak
of it in the light of a member of the United States Senate, and in the
language of the United States Constitution. If this be property in the
States, what is the nature and extent of it? I insist that the Supreme
Court has often decided, and everybody has understood, that slavery is
a local institution, existing by force of State law; and of course that
law can give it no possible character beyond the limits of that State."
I shall no doubt find the idea better expressed in the opinion of Judge
Nelson, in this same Dred Scott decision. I prefer to read his language.
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