Democracy of Illinois hold that a slaveholder has the same right to take his slave property into a territory as any other man has to take his horse or his merchandise.”
What? Slavery is the creature of local law, and yet a slaveholder has a right to take his slave property into a territory before any local law has given him that right? A slave does not become free when voluntarily brought by his owner upon the soil of a Territory where no positive local law establishing slavery exists? How is this possible? How can even the elastic mind of a Democratic candidate for the Presidency unite these contradictory assumptions? And yet there it stands, and nothing that Mr. Douglas ever said can be more unequivocal in its meaning. And here again we may claim the privilege of drawing a few logical deductions from Mr. Douglas's own premises. If, as Mr. Douglas distinctly and emphatically tells us, a slaveholder has a right to take his slave as property into a territory and to hold him there as property, before any legislation on that point is had, from what source does that right arise? Not from the law of nature—for the right to hold a slave is “unfounded in the law of nature and in the unwritten and common law,” and even Mr. Douglas, little as he may care about nature and her laws, will hardly dare to assert that the system of slave labor is the natural and normal condition of society. It must then spring from positive law. But from what kind of positive law? Not from any positive law of a local and municipal character, for there is none such in the territory so far. Where is its source then? There is but one kind of positive law to which the territories are subject, before any local legislation has been had, and that is the Constitution of the United States. If, therefore, Mr. Douglas asserts, as he does, that a slaveholder has a right to take his slave as property into a territory, he must at the same time admit that, in the absence of local legislation positively
