Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[147] because the South saw that such a doctrine would, as I have shown above, be a practical ending of the slavery question, so far as the future admission of new States into the Union was concerned. They viewed it as I did.

Originally there were two sets of resolutions presented in the Committee on Resolutions. The first embodied substantially the Douglas doctrine. The other was a series of propositions which provided for a slave code for the Territories, and upon the high seas, and declared that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the Territories; that the legislatures of the Territories had not the power to prohibit therein either slavery or the introduction of slaves, nor any power to destroy or impair the right of property in slaves by any legislation whatever; and that, furthermore, it was the duty of the federal government to protect the rights of persons and property on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever its Constitutional authority might extend.

The committee was divided upon these propositions, sixteen free States advocating the Douglas doctrine, and fifteen slave States, together with Oregon and California, dissenting. While the consultation was going on, three gentlemen entered the committee-room and announced themselves a committee from a caucus of the friends of Judge Douglas, with a resolution which his friends desired to be reported to the convention, in order, the chairman said, to aid the Southern friends of Judge Douglas. The resolution was as follows:--

Resolved, That all questions in regard to the rights of property in the States and Territories arising under the Constitution of the States are judicial in their character, and the Democratic party is pledged to abide by and faithfully carry out such determination of this question as has been or may be made by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Now, the decision of the Supreme Court had been in substance that “a negro had no rights that a white man was bound to respect;” and this was the platform proposed by the friends of Judge Douglas as a concession to the South. It were better that a slave code, if we were to have one, should be made by Congress than by a decision of the Supreme Court, especially if we assented that the questions were not legislative, but judicial. If the Supreme Court made a slave