Where is there any express power given to Congress by the constitution to establish slavery?

Thousands of human beings are not to be robbed of all their dearest rights, and they and their children, forever, by strained constitutions, or apocryphal authority, doomed to bondage.

Will those who say that Congress cannot establish a banking institution by construction, nor aid internal improvements, nor enact a tariff,--will they say that Congress can make a man a slave, and all his posterity slaves, by construction?

Nor can any power to establish slavery be deduced from the 18th clause of the 8th section of the 1st article of the constitution, which gives Congress power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution”…

What power is granted to Congress, for the exercise of which the establishment of slavery in this District is a necessary means or a preliminary?

But to what one of all these powers is the power to establish slavery in the District of Columbia a necessary incident?

If slavery in the District of Columbia were to cease to-day, could not the government continue to exercise every function which it has heretofore exercised?

If so, then the existence of slavery in this District is not “necessary” to the exercise of any of the expressly granted powers.

I call upon any gentleman to name any one power of this government which cannot be exercised, which must necessarily cease, if slavery should cease to be, in this District of Columbia?

Well, then, if a power to establish slavery in this District is not among the granted powers, and if it is not necessary for the exercise of any one of the granted powers, then it is--no where;--it does not exist at all.

No power of Congress, then, exists, either for the creation or for the continuance of slavery in this District; and all the legislation of Congress upon this subject is beyond or against the constitution.

The idea is abhorrent to the whole spirit of the constitution.

But Congress had as much power to establish a national religion here, in the absence of all express or implied authority to do so, as to establish slavery here.

Congress, then, does not and cannot legalize slavery in this District.

It found slavery in existence in the states; and it does not abolish it, or interfere with it, because it has no power of “exclusive legislation” in them.

But Congress has as much right to go into any state and abolish slavery there, as any state, even Virginia or Maryland, has to come into this District with its laws and establish slavery here.

I suppose that no jurist will contend that Congress could have passed the act of 1793, for the recapture of fugitive slaves, had it not been for the third clause in the second section of the fourth article of the constitution, which…

By this article in the constitution, the case of fugitive slaves only is provided for.

If a master voluntarily carries his slave into a free state, and the slave departs from his possession, he cannot reclaim him.

And if Congress cannot so much as restore a slave to a master, who has voluntarily carried him into a free state, how can it continue slavery in this District, after Maryland has ceded it to this government, whose fundamental, organic law…

Suppose Maryland had ceded her share of the District to Massachusetts, would not every slave in it have been instantaneously free by the constitution of Massachusetts?

They would have been transferred to a free jurisdiction,--just as much as an individual owner of a slave transfers him to a free jurisdiction, when he voluntarily takes him to the north.

The legal existence of slavery was annulled in this District when Congress exercised its “exclusive” power over it, just as much as the debtor’s right to be discharged under the Maryland bankrupt law was annulled.

But I go further than this; and I say that the constitution not only does not empower Congress to establish or continue slavery in this District, but again and again, by the strongest implications possible, it prohibits the exercise of…

So far from facilitating the increase of individual or national wealth, slavery retards both.