The most glaring instance, in which, in our own country, Government fails to afford protection to its subjects, is slavery. It not only suffers one person to enslave another with impunity, but, in all its departments—legislative, executive, judicial, actually encourages, helps, and defends the outrage. One of its excuses for arraying itself on the side of the slaveholder is that they intended it should, who framed the Federal Constitution. No such intentions, however, are expressed in that anti-slavery instrument: and it is the expressions of an instrument—not the intentions of its framers—which should govern the interpretation of it. The intentions of the framers of the Constitution are entitled to no more weight in the ascertainment of its meaning than are the intentions of the scrivener in determining the sense of the Deed, or Contract, which he had been employed to write. We do not deny that a few—it was only a very few—of the framers of the Constitution undertook to get slavery into it. But the understanding, unanimous from the first, that if slavery were brought into it, it must be so brought in, as neither to be seen to be brought in, nor, even afterwards to be seen to be in, had laid an insurmountable obstacle upon the very threshold of their undertaking. Slavery cannot be an invisible monarch. It can exist nowhere, without being seen, as well as felt. To suppose that the monster could, unseen, enter the Constitution, and unseen, lie coiled up in it, is as absurd as the supposition that Satan could also come among the sons of God without being detected by the All-seeing eye. To speak less figuratively—the instrument, which is drawn up with the intelligent and steadfast purpose of having it serve, and be forever fully and gloriously identified with, the cause of liberty, republicanism, and equal rights, must, of necessity, be shut against the claims and pretensions of slavery.

The Federal Government has power, under its Constitution, to abolish every part of American slavery; and is supremely guilty for refusing to exercise it. But why speak of the Constitution, or of any other paper, when the question raised is, whether the Government shall protect, or suppress, slaveholding? Suppose that the two hundred and fifty thousand pirates, whom this corrupt and bloody nation cherishes in her bosom, were to substitute for their claim to the black skins an equal claim to the blue eyes; or for their claim to enslave men, the more moderate one to kill them; would Government deign so much as a single glance at the laws, statutory, organic, or what not, which these pirates might hunt up, in support of their new claims? Certainly not. It would, in that case, feel as it always should feel, that the sole end of Civil Government is to protect rights; and that it might, as well, be openly repudiating its functions, and destroying its very existence, as to be giving countenance to searches after authorities for destroying rights. Laws, which interpret, define, secure rights, Government is to respect: and laws, which mistakingly [mistakenly] yet honestly, sin at this end, it is not to despise. But laws which are enacted to destroy rights, it should trample under foot.

Source: Proceedings of the National Liberty Convention (Utica: S. W. Green, 1848), 15–16.