other kind of property; secondly, that all American citizens may settle
everywhere with their property.

What a menace for the free-soilers! How easy to see to what lengths the
South would shortly go! Since slavery constituted property like any
other, it was necessary to prohibit the majority from proscribing it in
States as well as in Territories. Who knew whether we should not some
day see slaves and even slave-markets (the right of property carries
with it that of sale) in the streets even of Philadelphia or Boston!

Let no one cry out against this: those who demanded and those who framed
the Dred Scott decision knew probably what they wished to do. With the
right of property understood in this wise, no State has the power either
to vote the real abolition of slavery, or to forbid the introduction of
slaves, or to refuse their extradition. And, effectively, horrible laws,
ordering fugitive slaves to be given up, were accorded to the violent
demands of the South. Liberty by contact with the soil, that great maxim
of our Europe, was interdicted America; the very States that most
detested slavery were condemned to assist, indignant and shuddering, in
the federal invasion of a sheriff entering their homes to lay hands on a
poor negro, who had believed in their hospitality, and who was about to
be delivered up to the whip of the planter.

It was asking much of the patience of the North; yet, notwithstanding,
this patience was not yet at an end. The Administration was given up a
prey to the will of the Southerners. On their prohibition, the mails
ceased to carry books, journals, letters, which excited their suspicion.
They had seized upon the policy of the Union, and they ruled it
according to their liking. No one has forgotten those enterprises,
favored underhand, then disavowed after failure, those filibustering