in this District, after Maryland has ceded it to this government, whose fundamental, organic law gives it no power to create or continue slavery here? Suppose Maryland had ceded her share of the District to Massachusetts, would not every slave in it have been instantaneously free by the constitution of Massachusetts? They would have been transferred to a free jurisdiction,--just as much as an individual owner of a slave transfers him to a free jurisdiction, when he voluntarily takes him to the north. The legal existence of slavery was annulled in this District when Congress exercised its “exclusive” power over it, just as much as the debtor’s right to be discharged under the Maryland bankrupt law was annulled. But I go further than this; and I say that the constitution not only does not empower Congress to establish or continue slavery in this District, but again and again, by the strongest implications possible, it prohibits the exercise of such a power. In regard to this whole matter of slavery, the constitution touches the subject with an averted face. The abhorred word “_slave_” is nowhere mentioned in it. The constitution is ashamed to utter such a name. The country, coming fresh from that baptism of fire,--the American Revolution,--would not profane its lips with this unhallowed word. Hence, circumlocution is resorted to. It seeks to escape a guilty confession. Like a culprit, in whom some love of character still survives, it speaks of its offence without calling it by name. It uses the reputable and honorable word “persons,” instead of the accursed word “slaves.” As the Tyrian queen, about to perpetrate a deed which would consign her character to infamy, called it by the sacred name of “marriage,” and committed it,-- “_Hoc prætexit nomine culpam_;” so the constitution, about to recognize the most guilty and cruel of all relations between man and man, sought to avert its eyes from the act, and to pacify the remonstrances of conscience against every participation in the crime, by hiding the deed under a reputable word. But let us look to the prohibitions of the constitution; for I maintain that there is not only no power, express or implied, in the constitution authorizing Congress to create or continue slavery in this District, but that it is debarred and prohibited from doing so, again and again.