" 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. If this be true--and it will scarcely be denied by
anyone who has a correct idea of his own rights as an American
citizen--the grant to Congress of exclusive jurisdiction in the District
of Columbia can be interpreted, so far as respects the aggregate people
of the United States, as meaning nothing more than to allow to Congress
the controlling power necessary to afford a free and safe exercise of
the functions assigned to the General Government by the Constitution.
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