But slavery being a local institution, sustained neither by the
law of nature nor the law of nations, no citizen migrating from
a slave State could carry his slaves with him, and hold them as
slaves in the Territory. Rights enacted by local law are rights
only in that locality, and slaves carried by their masters into
a slave State even, are free, unless the State into which they
are carried enacts to the contrary. The only persons that could
be held as slaves in a Territory would be those who were slaves
or the children of those who were slaves in the Territory when
it passed to the United States. The whole controversy on,
slavery in the Territories, and which culminated in the civil
war, was wholly unnecessary, and never could have occurred had
the constitution been properly understood and adhered to by both
sides. True, Congress could not exclude slavery from the
Territory, but neither could citizens migrating to them hold
slaves in them; and so really slavery was virtually excluded,
for the inhabitants in nearly all of them, not emigrants from
the States after the cession to the United States, were too few
to be counted.
The General government has power to establish a uniform rule of
naturalization, to which all the States must conform, and it was
very proper that it should have this power, so as to prevent one
State from gaining by its naturalization laws an undue advantage
over another; but the General government has itself no power to
naturalize a single foreigner, or in any case to say who shall
or who shall not be citizens, either of a State or of the United
States, or to declare who may or may not be electors even of its
own officers.
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