Despite these considerations, Rhode Island alone repealed the
obnoxious statutes, and great leaders of the Republican Party frankly
confessed that the constitution and the law would not be respected in
certain of the Northern States. Salmon P. Chase, speaking in the Peace
Conference at Washington, in February, 1861, alluding to the provision
of the constitution for the return of fugitive slaves, said: "The
people of the free states, however, who believe that slave-holding is
wrong cannot and will not aid in the reclamation, and the stipulation
becomes therefore a dead letter."[301]
Of the Personal Liberty Laws Mr. George Lunt of Boston in his work,
_Origin of the Late War_, says: "They constitute an extreme
exemplification of the broadest claim to state sovereignty, and put
the states which authorized them in direct hostility to the United
States. They were not one whit more defensible than the Rebellion
itself to which they had such a principal part in preparing the minds
of the seceding states."[302]