Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.

The United States are a political state, or organized society, whose end is government, for the security, welfare, and happiness of all who live under its protection.

But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.

There is a higher law than the Constitution.

The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.

The two systems slave and free-labor are incompatible. They have never permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.

The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.