Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

[504] should attempt to bring it into this District with intent to remove it to sell it at some other time and at some other place. Congress acted then upon the subject —acted beyond the limit of its authority, as I believed, confidently believed; and, if ever that act comes before the Supreme Court, I feel satisfied they will declare it null and void. Are we to understand that those men, thus acting at the very moment, intended by non-intervention to deny and repudiate the laws they were then creating? The man who stood most prominently the advocate of the measures of that year, who, great in many periods of our history, perhaps shone then with the brightest light his genius ever emitted—I refer to Henry Clay—has given his own view on this subject; and I suppose he may be considered as the highest authority. On June 18, 1850, I had introduced an amendment to the compromise bill, providing:

“And that all laws, or parts of laws, usages, or customs, preexisting in the Territories acquired by the United States from Mexico, and which in said Territories restrict, abridge, or obstruct, the full enjoyment of any right of person or property of a citizen of the United States, as recognized or guaranteed by the Constitution or laws of the United States, are hereby declared and shall be held as repealed.”

Upon that, Mr. Clay said:

“Mr. President: I thought that upon this subject there had been a clear understanding in the Senate that the Senate would not decide itself upon the lex loci as it respects slavery; that the Senate would not allow the Territorial Legislature to pass any law upon that question. In other words, that it would leave the operation of the local law, or of the Constitution of the United States upon that local law, to be decided by the proper and competent tribunal—the Supreme Court of the United States.”¹

That was the position taken by Mr. Clay, the leader. A mere sentence will show with what view I regarded the dogma of non-intervention when that amendment was offered. I said:

“But what is non-intervention seems to vary as often as the light and shade of every fleeting cloud. It has different meanings in every State, in every county, in every town. If non-intervention means that we shall not have protection for our property in slaves, then I always was, and always shall be, opposed to it. If it means that we shall not have the protection of the law because it would favor slaveholders, that Congress shall not legislate so as to secure to us the benefits of the Constitution, then I am opposed to non-intervention, and shall always be opposed to it.”²

Mr. Downs, one of the Committee of Thirteen, and an advocate of the measures, said:

“What I understand by non-intervention is, an interposition of Congress prohibiting, or establishing, or interfering with slavery.”³

By what species of legerdemain this doctrine of non-intervention has come to extend to a paralysis of the Government on the whole subject, to exclude the Congress from any kind of legislation whatever, I am at a loss to conceive. Certain it is, it was not the theory of that period, and it was not contended for in all