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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