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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow XVIII. - Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States

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School of Thought: Abolition of Slavery
Subject Area: Political Theory

XVIII. - Lysander Spooner, Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States [1860]

Edition used:

Address of the Free Constitutionalists to the People of the United States (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860).

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XVIII.

Neither has congress any authority to determine the question whether new States shall be admitted into the Union as slaveholding or as non-slaveholding States. All new States admitted into the Union must come into it subject to the constitution of the United States as “the supreme law.” If this “supreme law” declares one man to be the property of another, then, constitutionally speaking, he is and must be such property as much in the new States as in the old; and congress has no power to prevent it. If, on the other hand, that supreme law declares that there is no property in man, then congress has no power to set aside this supreme law in favor of any new State, any more than in favor of any of the old ones.