Fourth, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and
especially the right of each State, to order and control its own
domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is
essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and
endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless
invasion, by armed force, of any State or Territory, no matter under
what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.
Fifth, That the present Democratic Administration has far exceeded our
worst apprehensions, in its measureless subserviency to the exactions of
a Sectional interest, as especially evinced in its desperate exertions
to force the infamous Lecompton Constitution upon the protesting people
of Kansas; in construing the personal relation between master and
servant to involve an unqualified property in persons; in its attempted
enforcement, everywhere, on land and sea, through the intervention of
Congress and of the Federal Courts, of the extreme pretensions of a
purely local interest; and in its general and unvarying abuse of the
power intrusted to it by a confiding People.
* * * * * * *
Seventh, That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force,
carries Slavery into any or all of the Territories of the United States,
is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit
provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition,
and with legislation and judicial precedent; is revolutionary in its
tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the Country.
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