A slight examination will show prevailing perversions with regard to the origin and history of this clause. Not content with imparting to it a meaning which it cannot bear, the partisans of Slavery have given to this clause an origin and history having no foundation in truth. It is common to assert that the clause was intended to remove or counteract some difficulty which had occurred anterior to the Convention. But there is no evidence of any such difficulty. There was no complaint. Not a single voice was raised in advance to ask any such security. It is also asserted, with peculiar confidence, that this clause, interpreted to require the rendition of fugitive slaves, constituted one of the original compromises of the Constitution, without which the Union could not have been formed. This pretension makes an asserted stipulation for the rendition of fugitive slaves one of the corner-stones of the Union. To this discreditable imputation upon the fathers of the Republic the Supreme Court seems to have lent sanction, when it declared, in the famous Prigg case, not only that “the object of this clause was to secure to the citizens of the slaveholding States the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves _as property_ in every State in the Union into which they might escape,” but that “the full recognition of this right and title … was so vital to the preservation of their domestic interests and institutions, that it cannot be doubted _that it constituted a fundamental article, without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed_.”[332] Mark the way in which this extraordinary statement is ushered in,--“It cannot be doubted”! But it is doubted, and more too. Chief Justice Taney, at a later day, put forth the statement, that, during the Revolution, it was an accepted truth that colored men “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,”[333]--and this statement was said to stand on authentic history; but it is now exploded, and the other statement must share the same fate. A careful inquiry shows that it is utterly without support in the records of the Convention, where the real compromises are revealed; nor is there a single contemporary pamphlet, speech, article, or published letter, out of which any such thing can be inferred. Surely, had this provision been of such controlling importance, it could not have escaped notice, at least, in the “Federalist,” when its writers undertook to describe and group the powers of Congress “which provide for the harmony and proper intercourse among the States”;[334] but the “Federalist” is entirely silent with regard to it. And yet we are gravely told “it cannot be doubted” that this provision “constituted a fundamental article, without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed.” Frequent repetition has caused the common belief that this was history, instead of fable.