But this Act is not only an unwarrantable assumption of power by the Nation, it is also an infraction of rights reserved to the States. Everywhere within their borders the States are the peculiar guardians of _personal liberty_. By Jury and Habeas Corpus to save the citizen harmless against all assault is among their duties and rights. To his State the citizen, when oppressed, may appeal; nor should he find that appeal denied. But this Act despoils him of rights, and despoils his State of all power to protect him. It subjects him to the wretched chance of false oaths, forged papers, and facile commissioners, and takes from him every safeguard. Now, if the slaveholder has a right to be secure _at home_ in the enjoyment of _Slavery_, so also has the freeman of the North--and every person there is presumed to be a freeman--an equal right to be secure _at home_ in the enjoyment of _Freedom_. The same principle of State Eights by which Slavery is protected in the Slave States throws an impenetrable shield over Freedom in the Free States. And here, let me say, is the only security for Slavery in the Slave States, as for Freedom in the Free States. In the present fatal overthrow of State Rights you teach a lesson which may return to plague the teacher. Compelling the National Government to stretch its Briarean arms into the Free States for the sake of Slavery, you show openly how it may stretch these same hundred giant arms into the Slave States for the sake of Freedom. This lesson was not taught by our fathers. Here I end this branch of the question. The true principles of our Political System, the history of the National Convention, the natural interpretation of the Constitution, all teach that this Act is a usurpation by Congress of powers that do not belong to it, and an infraction of rights secured to the States. It is a sword, whose handle is at the National Capital, and whose point is everywhere in the States. A weapon so terrible to Personal Liberty the Nation has no power to grasp. * * * * * (2.) _And now of the denial of Trial by Jury._ Admitting, for the moment, that Congress is intrusted with power over this subject, which truth disowns, still the Act is again radically unconstitutional from its denial of Trial by Jury in a question of Personal Liberty and a suit at Common Law. Since on the one side there is a claim of property, and on the other of liberty, both property and liberty are involved in the issue. To this claim on either side is attached Trial by Jury.