Their only consolation under circumstances of
such deprivation is that of the devoted exterior guards of a camp--that
their sufferings secure tranquillity and safety within. Are there any of
their countrymen, who would subject them to greater sacrifices, to any
other humiliations than those essentially necessary to the security of
the object for which they were thus separated from their
fellow-citizens? Are their rights alone not to be guaranteed by the
application of those great principles upon which all our constitutions
are founded? We are told by the greatest of British orators and
statesmen that at the commencement of the War of the Revolution the most
stupid men in England spoke of "their American subjects." Are there,
indeed, citizens of any of our States who have dreamed of their subjects
in the District of Columbia? Such dreams can never be realized by any
agency of mine. The people of the District of Columbia are not the
subjects of the people of the States, but free American citizens. Being
in the latter condition when the Constitution was formed, no words used
in that instrument could have been intended to deprive them of that
character. If there is anything in the great principle of unalienable
rights so emphatically insisted upon in our Declaration of Independence,
they could neither make nor the United States accept a surrender of
their liberties and become the subjects--in other words, the slaves--of
their former fellow-citizens.
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