[Footnote 44: Journal do Commercio, (Rio,) May 26, 1856.] But one more fact remains: When the late Confederate Government adopted a constitution, although it was composed exclusively of slaveholding States, it voluntarily did what the United States has never done: it placed an absolute prohibition of the foreign slave trade in its organic law. CHAPTER III. LEGAL STATUS OF SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES. It has been a favourite and persistent assertion of Abolitionists, that slavery in America was an exceptional institution, and contrary to the law of nature and nations. They represent it as owing its existence solely to the _lex loci_ of the States where it was legalized by their own legislation; and hence they draw the conclusion, that the moment a slave passed out of one of these States into a free State, or into the territories of the United States, his bondage terminated of itself. Hence, also, they argue that slaveholders had no right to the protection of that species of property in the territories, which were the common possession of the citizens of all the States; and that the federal government could not properly permit the growth of, or recognize, new slave States. Their party cry was: "Freedom is national; slavery is local." It is plain that this proposition is the premise necessary to all the above assumptions. It will now be shown that this proposition is untrue. Slavery in the United States, instead of being the mere creature of _lex loci_, was founded on a basis as broad as that of the American Union, was in full accordance with the law of nature and nations as then recognized by the States and the federal government, and had universal recognition by the force of general law. The exclusion of slavery from any State was legally the exception, owing its validity purely to the _lex loci_, and to the recognized sovereignty of the States over their own local affairs. Hence, the rights of slaveholders stood valid, of course, in all the common territories of the United States, and everywhere, save where the sovereignty of a non-slaveholding State arrested them within its own borders. This representation is established by the following facts: