At the same time
they admitted and asserted the right of the people of a Territory, on
emerging from their territorial condition to that of a State, to
determine what should then be their domestic institutions, as well as
all other questions of personal or proprietary right, without
interference by Congress, and subject only to the limitations and
restrictions prescribed by the Constitution of the United States.
4. The so-called "Republicans," presenting the names of Lincoln and
Hamlin, who held, in the language of one of their leaders,[18] that
"slavery can exist only by virtue of municipal law"; that there was "no
law for it in the Territories, and no power to enact one"; and that
Congress was "bound to prohibit it in or exclude it from any and every
Federal Territory." In other words, they asserted the right and duty of
Congress to exclude the citizens of half the States of the Union from
the territory belonging in common to all, unless on condition of the
sacrifice or abandonment of their property recognized by the
Constitution--indeed, of the _only_ species of their property distinctly
and specifically recognized as such by that instrument.
On the vital question underlying the whole controversy--that is, whether
the Federal Government should be a Government of the whole for the
benefit of all its equal members, or (if it should continue to exist at
all) a sectional Government for the benefit of a part--the first three
of the parties above described were in substantial accord as against the
fourth.
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