million of free colored persons in the free states. _They_ are
unquestionably free. They possess, as fully as you or I, those
prerogatives of freedom without which life ceases to be a blessing.
Their freedom is guarantied to them by the constitution of the United
States, and by the constitutions and laws of the states respectively
in which they dwell. They certainly are a part of the people. In some
of the states, as in Massachusetts for instance, the law knows no iota
of distinction, in any respect, between a black man and a white man;
between one of European and one of African descent. It is the noble
privilege of a Massachusetts man to say, that, as all men are equal
before the divine law, so are all men equal within our borders, before
the human law.
Now, scattered among this half million, more or less, of free
colored people in the free states, there are a few hundreds, or a
few thousands if you please, of “fugitives from service or labor,”
as the constitution cunningly and evasively phrases it; which, being
interpreted, means, as the whole world knows, fugitives from toil,
and fetters, and stripes, and agony; fugitives from ignorance and the
thick darkness of the intellect; fugitives from moral debasement, and
from that enforced pollution of body and soul that spares neither wife,
nor mother, nor a daughter’s innocence; fugitives from the disruption
of family ties, and from the laceration of all human affections;
fugitives, in fine, from a heathenism of superstition and religious
blindness into the glorious light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now this free class and this fugitive class belong ethnologically
to the same race. They speak the same language, and wear the same
distinctive characteristics of feature and of form. All the unspeakable
privileges, all the sacred titles and immunities of the one class are
enshrined in the same complexion and in the same contour of person
that attend the debasement and privation of the other. The vessels of
honor and of glory are moulded into the same shape with the vessels of
dishonor and of shame.
Now, after this debased class has been created by a wicked system
of human laws, and after it is mingled with the free class, another
law steps in and decrees that the former shall be remanded to their
bondage. An awful decree! second in terribleness only to that
which shall divide between the blessed and the accursed before the
judgment-seat of God. Within the compass of human action, there never
was an occasion that demanded more unerring justice and wisdom, that
invoked more foresight and solicitude, that appealed more touchingly
to every sentiment and instinct congenial to liberty, with which God
has endowed and ennobled the soul of man, so to devise the law, if law
there must be, as not to involve the free in the horrible doom of the
enslaved. If, in the administration of penal laws, a knowledge of human
fallibility has forced the maxim into existence and into practice, that
it is better that ninety-nine guilty persons should escape than that
one innocent man should suffer, ought not the same benign rule to be
adopted in our legislation whenever there is a possibility of exposing
the free to the fearful fate of the enslaved? But instead of this
jealousy and circumspection, what have we? A law whose first utterance
abjures the distinction between freedom and bondage; a law which brings
the whole free colored population of the United States within the
outer circles of the whirlpool of slavery, that they may be ingulfed
in its vortex; a law which empowers every villain in the country, by
fabricating false testimony at his own leisure and convenience, to use
his own freedom in order to rob other people of theirs! I aver, that
before any moral tribunal, where right and wrong are weighed in the
balances of the sanctuary, there is not a felony described in the whole
statute book that is more felonious than such a law.
It has become an axiom in the administration of justice,--an axiom
slowly evolved by the wisdom of ages, but now firmly established and
incorporated into the jurisprudence of every civilized community,--that
the ethical policy of the law will tolerate no rule of action that
opens the door to fraud or crime, but will even vacate solemn contracts
between parties otherwise competent, in its jealousy and apprehension
of wrong. Hence the law applicable to common carriers, which will
not allow a man to exonerate himself from liability even by express
notice, lest opportunity should be given for collusion and fraud.
Hence, too, the principle of law which forbids an insolvent debtor to
pay, or even to contract to pay, a _bona fide_ creditor in anticipation
of bankruptcy. Now, this principle applies with tenfold force to
legislators,--withholding and repelling them from passing any law which
may involve the innocent in the fate of the guilty, or the free in the
bondage of the enslaved.
But the law violates a still deeper principle than these. I do not
recollect the instance of a single northern man or northern press,
utterly false to freedom, and venal as so many of them have been, that
has expressed entire satisfaction with the law. They palliate it, they
strive, by seductive party and pecuniary appeals, to beguile men into
its support. They look outside of it for pretexts to hide its inherent
baseness; but not one of them, so far as I know, has had the effrontery
to justify it on its intrinsic merits. Even those northern men who
voted for it have sought refuge from the storm of righteous indignation
that burst upon them, by alleging that it was an essential ingredient
in a system of measures, and entered, as a necessary element, into a
desirable compromise.
When this language is translated, what does it mean? Simply this, and
no more. California was admitted, and thereby certain political and
commercial advantages were gained. This, in legal language, was the
consideration. The Fugitive Slave law was passed, and thereby the
rights of freemen, the property of men in themselves, all the household
sanctities, all the domestic endearments of half a million of men,
were put in peril. This was the equivalent given! A mere barter of the
holiest interests for worldly advantages! And these interests were
given away by men who did not own them, and therefore had no right to
transfer them. The whites, north and south, played a game, and made
the black people their stakes. Who authorized the law-makers to derive
a benefit to themselves from doing this infinite wrong to others? Who
gave them the terrible prerogative of making others suffer for their
pleasure. I say it with reverence, but I still say it with emphasis,
that we cannot conceive of God himself as having power to inflict
vicarious suffering without the free consent of the sufferer! Yet the
atrocities of this law are defended by those who made it, on the ground
that they and other white men have secured benefits to themselves by
sacrificing the liberty, happiness and peace of half a million of their
fellow-beings of a different color. Cause and counsellor are alike; for
the defence is as profligate as the act it defends.
I say, sir, it is the population of African descent in the free states
which is specially put in peril by this law. Occasionally, indeed,
persons of unmixed white blood are seized and enslaved under it. These
cases, however, are comparatively rare. But suppose the reverse.
Suppose circumstances to be such that the whole body of the white
population should be as much endangered by it as the colored people
now are. Suppose that not only the white voters themselves, but their
wives and their children, were as liable to be “_Ingrahamed_,” as the
blacks; suppose this, I say, and would the existence of the law be
tolerated for an hour? Would there not be an uprising of the people,
simultaneous and universal against it, and such a yell of execration
as never before burst from mortal lips? The name of every man who had
voted for it, or who should defend it, would be entered upon that
apostate list at whose head stands the name of Judas. Christian and
Infidel, Jew and Gentile, would execrate it alike. Why, then, if they
would do this to avert such peril from themselves and their families,
do they not do it when their sable brethren are in jeopardy? Alas!
there is but one answer! From selfish considerations, from the love of
wealth, or the love of power, they have discarded that heaven-descended
maxim, “Whatever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye the same
unto them.”
And it is this very class of men who have thus abjured the precepts of
Jesus Christ, who have trampled upon the divine doctrines of liberty
and love, that now so clamorously summon us to an obedience to law.
In answer to this call, let me say, that true obedience to law is
necessarily accompanied and preceded by a reverence for those great
principles of justice and humanity without which all law is despotism.
How can a man pretend to any honest regard for the principle of
obedience to law when he is willing, as in the case of this fugitive
act, to transcend our constitutional law, and to invade the divine law?
It is but an appeal to the lower rule of action to justify a violation
of the higher. Under the pretext of rendering unto Cæsar the things
that are Cæsar’s it denies to God the things that are God’s.
And again, a true reverence for law is a general principle, and not an
isolated fact. It applies to all laws collectively, and not to any
one law in particular. It bestows its greatest homage upon those laws
that embrace and confer the most of human welfare; for, were all the
laws of a community, or the great majority of them, unrighteous, then
disloyalty to law would be the virtue. Can the class of men who demand
our allegiance to the Fugitive Slave law stand this test? We have usury
laws, which not only carry the legal force of statutes, but the moral
power of the greatest names in legislation and in statesmanship. Are
the men in New York, in Philadelphia, and Boston, who are most vehement
in support of the Fugitive Slave law, signalized for their regard to
the statutes against usury?
Is not money lent in all those cities on the same principle that
wreckers send a rope’s end to a drowning man,--for as much as they can
extort? It is notorious that among the great body of merchants and
capitalists in those cities, interest is regulated by the pressure
upon the money market, and that no more idea of law mingles with their
contracts than in California, where there is no law on the subject.
We have laws restricting the sale of intoxicating liquors, and designed
to promote the glorious object of temperance. For which practice
have our cities been conspicuous,--for their obedience to these laws
or for their violation of them? A few years ago, when a question of
the constitutionality of a law of Massachusetts for the restraint of
intemperance arose, did not its two distinguished senators appear in
the supreme court of the United States, and make the most strenuous
exertions to annul the law of their own state, and to open anew the
flood-gates for overwhelming their own constituents in misery and
ruin,--the selfsame gentlemen who are now so intolerant even of
discussion?
Look at the complaints which come to us every day from the friends
of a protective tariff. They tell us that our revenue laws are
fraudulently and systematically evaded; and they number the violations
of these laws by thousands and tens of thousands. Who are the
violators? Not men living in the country; not the farmers and mechanics
and laborers,--the substratum of our strength and the origin of our
power;--but they are the city merchants, the getters-up of “Union
meetings,” and the members of “safety and vigilance committees,” who
are so earnest in inculcating those lessons of obedience by their
precepts, which they have done so little to recommend by their example.
The Southern States are loud in their calls upon us to execute the
Fugitive Slave law. But what examples have they set us on the subject
of obedience to law? I think I may be pardoned for mentioning a few
cases, to show how their preaching and practice tally.
In 1831, the legislature of Georgia offered a bribe of _five thousand
dollars_ to any one who would arrest, and bring to trial and
conviction, in Georgia, a citizen of Massachusetts, named William Lloyd
Garrison. This law was “approved” by William Lumpkin, governor, on the
26th December, 1831. Mr. Garrison had never stepped foot within the
limits of Georgia, and therefore it was not a reward for his trial and
conviction, but for his abduction and murder.
At a meeting of slaveholders, held at Sterling, in the same state,
September 4, 1835, it was formally recommended to the governor, to
offer, by proclamation, the five thousand dollars appropriated by the
act of 1831, for the apprehension of either of ten persons, citizens,
with one exception, of New York, or Massachusetts, whose names were
given; not one of whom, it was not even pretended, had ever been within
the limits of Georgia.
The Milledgeville, Georgia, “Federal Union,” of February 1, 1836,
contained an offer of $10,000 for kidnapping A. A. Phelps, a clergyman
of the city of New York.
The committee of vigilance, (another “committee of vigilance,”) of
the parish of East Feliciana, offered, in the Louisville Journal, of
October 15, 1835, $50,000 to any person who would deliver into their
hands Arthur Tappan, a merchant of New York.
At a public meeting of the citizens of Mount Meigs, Alabama, August 13,
1836, the _honorable_ Bedford Ginress in the chair, a reward of $50,000
was offered for the apprehension of the same Arthur Tappan, or of Le
Roy Sunderland, a Methodist clergyman of New York.
Repeated instances have occurred in which the governors of slave
states,--Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, &c.,--have made
requisitions upon the governors of free states, under the second
section of the fourth article of the constitution, for the surrender
of free citizens, _as fugitives from justice_, when it was well known
that the citizens so demanded were not within the limits of the slave
states at the time when the alleged offence was committed, and, in
some instances, had never been there in their lives,--high executive
perversions of the constitution of the United States, by chief
magistrates who had sworn to support it!
For nearly twenty years past the post-office laws of the United States
have been systematically violated in slave states, the mail bags
rifled, and their contents seized and publicly burned; and, in some
instances, these violations have been enjoined, under heavy penalties,
by a law of the states. There are several of the slave states on whose
statute books these laws, commanding a violation of the post-office,
stand to-day.
During Mr. Adams’s administration, a man by the name of Tassels, in
Georgia, was adjudged to be hanged, under a law of the state, as
clearly unconstitutional as was ever passed. A writ of error was sued
out from the supreme court of the United States, in order to bring
the case before that tribunal for revision. But the state of Georgia
anticipated the service of the writ, and made sure of its victim by
hanging him extemporaneously.
Within a few weeks past,--the accounts having but just now reached
us,--an aged and most respectable individual of the name of Harris, a
citizen of New Hampshire, has been tried by a mob in South Carolina,
and tarred and feathered, because he happened to have _in his trunk_
a sermon which had been sent to him by one of his acquaintances, a
clergyman at the north; though he had never showed the sermon to a
single individual, nor whispered a word of its contents. Another
man, a Dr. Coles, belonging to Boston, who had been lecturing on the
subject of physiology, was, within a few days, seized and carried
before a magistrate, in the same state, his trunks rifled, the private
letters sent to him by his wife and family publicly read, with the most
indecent comments, and all without any shadow of reasonable suspicion
against him.
The unconstitutional imprisonment of northern seamen in southern ports
is an occurrence so frequent, and so universally known, that I need not
spend time to enumerate or to describe the cases.
The President of the United States has made proclamation, and proffered
the military and naval force of the United States, to aid any southern
slave owner in reducing his fugitive slave to a new bondage; but I have
not heard that he has made any similar proclamation, or manifested
any anxiety for the support of that part of the constitution which
says that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the
privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.”
Now, with a few exceptions, it is these very classes of men who
violate the laws against extortion and usury; who break down the
barriers against the desolations of intemperance; who, almost alone of
all our citizens, are implicated in the breach of the revenue laws; who
annul the post-office laws of the United States; who offer rewards for
free northern citizens, that they may get them in their clutch to lynch
and murder them; who demand free citizens as fugitives from justice,
in states where they have never been, and who imprison free citizens
and sell them into slavery;--it is these classes of men who are now so
suddenly smitten with a new sense of the sacredness of law, and of the
duty of obedience to law,--not of the laws of God, not even of the laws
of man, in general, but of this most abominable of all enactments, the
Fugitive Slave law in particular.
I do not cite the above cases from among a thousand similar ones, as
any justification or apology for forcible and organized resistance
to law by those who even constructively can be said to have given it
their consent. But the words of a preacher do not “come mended from his
tongue,” when his name is a scandal among men for his violation of all
the precepts he enjoins.
And now, sir, when I am called upon to support such a law as this, or
to desist from opposing it in all constitutional ways, while it lasts,
my response is, repeal the law, that I may no longer be called upon to
support it. In the name of my constituents, and by the memory of that
“old man eloquent,” in whose place it is my fortune to stand, I demand
its repeal. I demand it,--
Because it is a law which wars against the fundamental principles of
human liberty.
Because it is a law which conflicts with the constitution of
the country, and with all the judicial interpretations of that
constitution, wherever they have been applied to the white race.
Because it is a law which introduces a fatal principle into the code
of evidence, and into judicial practice,--a principle, before which no
man’s liberties and no man’s rights of any kind can stand.
Because it is a law which is abhorrent to the moral and religious
sentiments of a vast majority of the community that is called upon to
enforce it.
Because the life and character of so many of its apologists and
supporters are themselves potent arguments against whatever they may
advocate.
Because it is a law which, if executed in the free states, divests them
of the character of free states, and makes them voluntary participators
in the guilt of slaveholding.
Because it is a law which disgraces our country in the eyes of the
whole civilized world, and gives plausible occasion to the votaries of
despotic power to decry republican institutions.
Because it is a law which forbids us to do unto others as we would have
them do to us, and which makes it a crime to feed the hungry, to clothe
the naked, and to visit and succor the sick and the imprisoned.
Because it is a law which renders the precepts of the gospel and the
teachings of Jesus Christ seditious; and, were the Savior and his band
of disciples now upon earth, there is but one of them who would escape
its penalties by pretending “to conquer his prejudices.” And, finally,
Because the advocates and defenders of this law have been compelled to
place its defence upon the express ground that the commandments of men
are of higher authority than the ordinances of God.
In Hooker’s sublime description of law, when understood in its generic
sense, he says,--
“Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the
bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven
and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the
greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels, and men, and
creatures, of what condition soever, though each in different sort and
manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of
their peace and joy.”
Now, sir, with these glorious attributes of “law,” I say the Fugitive
Slave law of the last session possesses not one quality in common, nor
in similitude. To say that the seat of such a law is in the “bosom of
God,” is the intensest blasphemy. To say that it is “the harmony of
the world,” is to declare that the world is a sphere of ubiquitous and
omnipotent wrong, uncheckered by any thought of justice, and devoid of
any emotion of love. To say that “all things in heaven do homage” to
such a law, is to affirm of the realms of light what is true only of
the realms of darkness. The “least” do not “feel its care,” but tremble
and wail beneath its cruelty; while the “greatest” and the strongest
_are_ “exempt from its power;” for they made it not for themselves
but for others. To no class of “creatures,” rational or irrational,
human or divine, can it prove to be the “mother of peace and joy;” but
wherever it extends, and as long as it exists, it will continue to be
an overflowing Marah of bitterness and strife.
As the great name of Hooker has been profanely cited in behalf of this
law, I will close by quoting his distinction between those laws of
human governments which ought to be obeyed, and those which ought not:--
----“which laws,” says he, “we must obey, _unless there be reason
showed which may necessarily enforce that_ THE LAW OF REASON OR OF GOD
DOTH ENJOIN THE CONTRARY.”
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Such also is the law in Louisiana. See _Louis_ vs. _Marot_, 9
Louis. Rep. 473; _Smith_ vs. _Smith_, 13 Louis. Rep. 441.
SPEECH
ON THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW, DELIVERED AT LANCASTER, MASSACHUSETTS, MAY
19, 1851, PENDING THE CANVASS FOR A MEMBER OF CONGRESS FOR THE FOURTH
CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT.
FELLOW-CITIZENS;
We are assembled on a great occasion and for a great purpose. The
election of a member of Congress, indeed, is not an extraordinary
event; but it is extraordinary that principles of the most vital
importance to the honor of Massachusetts, and to the cause of human
liberty throughout the world, should be involved in a local election.
Such, however, is now the fact.
Gentlemen, the assertion and the recognition of the rights of man have
made great progress among the nations of Europe within the recollection
of many who are now before me. Notwithstanding the partition of Poland
by allied robbers, and the obliteration of that kingdom from the map of
Europe; notwithstanding Hungarian subjugation to Austrian despotism,
and many other atrocious crimes against humanity, such as nations only
can commit; for they are too vast and monstrous to be perpetrated by
any individual,--I say, notwithstanding these facts, the great fabric
of human liberty has been rising in Europe, while the solid structures
of despotism have been disintegrating and making ready for their fall.