May they not think that these call for the abolition of Slavery? May
they not pronounce all Slaves Free? and will they not be warranted by
that power? * * * They have the power, in clear, unequivocal terms,
and will clearly and certainly exercise it."

So, too, in his great speech of May 25, 1836, in the House of
Representatives, John Quincy Adams had declared that in "the last great
conflict which must be fought between Slavery and Emancipation,"
Congress "must and will interfere" with Slavery, "and they will not only
possess the Constitutional power so to interfere, but they will be bound
in duty to do it, by the express provisions of the Constitution itself."
And he followed this declaration with the equally emphatic words: "From
the instant that your Slave-holding States become the theatre of War
--civil, servile, or foreign--from that instant, the War powers of
Congress extend to interference with the Institution of Slavery in every
Way by which it can be interfered with."

The position thus announced by these expounders of the Constitution--the
one from Virginia, the other from Massachusetts--was not to be shaken
even by the unanimous adoption, February 11, 1861, by the House of
Representatives on roll call, of the resolution of Mr. Sherman, of Ohio,
in these words:

"Resolved, That neither the Congress of the United States nor the people
or governments of the non-Slaveholding States have the Constitutional
right to legislate upon or interfere with Slavery in any of the
Slaveholding States in the Union."

Ex-President J. Q. Adams's cogent exposition of the Constitution,
twenty-five years before, in that same House, demonstrating not only