Chapter XXI: Letter II: To the Editors of the Boston Atlas; (9)

The strength, or rather, the weakness, of the commissioner’s argument, on this point, consists in the obtrusive, projecting, self-shouting fallacy of using the exact, technical, constitutional phrase, “judicial power,” as synonymous with the popular expression, “_a judicious act_,” or “_the exercise of judgment_.” Officers of all kinds exercise “judicial power,” in this broad and popular sense of the phrase; that is, they perform acts requiring good judgment. Umpires, arbitrators, and referees perform acts precisely like those of judges, but they cannot put the whole physical strength of the government in motion to enforce them. So sheriffs decide upon the identity of the party named in their precepts; postmasters, to whom they shall deliver letters, and what postage they shall demand; custom-house officers, upon the nature and value of dutiable goods; assessors, in levying taxes; parents and teachers, on matters of discipline, &c., &c. In a popular sense, they may all be said to exercise judicial power; but no particle of that power which, by the fundamental law of our government, is vested in the “courts.” Their acts are all examinable by the courts. They cannot set the arm of the government in motion to execute their judgments. Indeed, the whole argument of the commissioner on this point is but a play upon words. It is only a trick of verbal legerdemain. The premises he starts with are unknown to the constitution, and the conclusion he comes to is abhorrent to humanity.

Does not every body see that, in order to make the cases parallel, in order to obtain any legitimate ground of comparison between them, Sims should have had the same power of appealing from the commissioner’s decision, to a court, which power of appeal belongs _of right_ to a party who feels aggrieved by the act of sheriff, auditor, or commissioner; and that the certificate should bind him only by his voluntary assent?

But there is another point in the commissioner’s opinion which is worthy to be companion to this. I proceed to consider it.

He repeats, and keeps repeating, that his decision, dooming Sims to all the horrors of bondage, and putting him under the control of a man who claims title to his body and his soul, to be carried into a jurisdiction where such titles are acknowledged, is not “FINAL.” It is not _final_, he says, because if Sims be free, he may extort that freedom from the laws of Georgia which has been denied to him by the laws of Massachusetts; that is, if the judgment which the commissioner is giving against a free man, in a free state, is a false judgment, he may go to a slave state to obtain redress,--which is ten thousand times worse than if a jury, in a capital case, should say, We may find this prisoner guilty; for if he be wrongfully hanged, God will make him amends.

Besides the inhumanity of this position, it contains a fallacy which is twin-brother to the one just considered. The judicial word, “_final_,” has a legal, technical, and certain meaning. In the courts, and in the law books, it means the last judgment in a judicial proceeding. It means that judgment from which a party cannot appeal, though he may ever so much desire it; or it means that judgment, after which, however dissatisfied the party may be, he cannot have his cause retried or reheard by a court, _but is compelled to submit_.

“Final judgments,” says Blackstone, “are such as at once put an end to the action.” This is a precise description of the judgment rendered by the commissioner against Sims. That victim resisted by prayers and tears, by the subduing eloquence of his counsel, and by their irresistible logic, which the commissioner has never yet begun to answer. But the self-constituted judge was inexorable. Though he knew that, according to the terms of the Fugitive Law, there was no escape from his decision; though he knew that his certificate was to protect the man-hunter from all “molestation by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever,” yet, like Pilate, he washes his hands and says, “I am innocent of this man’s blood, see ye to it;” for my decision is not “final.” And why? Because, in another jurisdiction, in another suit, where the plaintiff is to be defendant, and the defendant plaintiff, or perhaps against another party; in a place, too, where all the common-law presumptions in favor of freedom are reversed; where the law is different, and the rules of evidence are different; and where the respondent himself is reduced to the condition of a chattel and a brute, a decision, at some indefinite future period, may be had that the man, whom the commissioner now declares to be a slave, is free, and has always been so. Because of this future and contingent event, because of this almost impossible possibility, the commissioner’s decision is not _final_. I deny this. The decision is _final_, because, as Blackstone says, it “at once puts an end to the action.” But let us test the question, not only by its legal definition, but by its actual effects. It decides that Sims is a slave. It decides that he owes service to James Potter. It decides that Potter and his heirs and assigns forever are the lawful owners of Sims and the heirs of his bondage forever; and when Sims and his posterity shall be scourged, torn, flayed, mutilated, starved, the only consolation which the commissioner has for him and them is, Shall the clay say to the _Potter_ that fashioneth it, What makest thou? It not only decides that Sims is a slave, and that he shall be sent to Georgia, but it sends _familiars_, like those which once disgraced even the purlieus of the Inquisition, to see that the devilish deed is done.

The whole argument of the commissioner, that this act of his is not _final_, is founded on a quibble,--on the use of the legal word “final,” as though it were synonymous with the popular word _eternal_ or _perpetual_. The slavery of Sims may not be _eternal_ or _perpetual_; because, by some miracle of God, or otherwise, he may escape. But in a technical and juridical sense the decision of the commissioner is _final_; and he might as well doom a man to be hurled from the Tarpeian rock, and say that the act is not final, because he only commits the victim to the laws of gravitation, as he has committed Sims to the laws of Georgia.

If by any possibility this doctrine, that the decision is not _final_, could be for a moment sustained, then I will submit a case with which to compare it.

The constitution says, “No state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.” Here we have a constitutional basis,--the same as for the reclamation of fugitive slaves. Some states have passed laws impairing the obligation of contracts, as the stop-laws of Kentucky, and so forth. Suppose a Massachusetts creditor to claim to have a Kentucky debtor, whose contract has been so impaired. Could Congress, in order to give efficacy to this constitutional provision, authorize this pretended creditor to go to Kentucky, seize enough of the alleged debtor’s property to satisfy the alleged debt, and carry it home, or have it ordered home by a magistrate, under some “summary” process, which, on its face, excludes the trial by jury; and thereby debar the supposed defendant of all right under that provision of the constitution which gives a jury trial when the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars? And could the Kentucky magistrate, in the supposed case, deny the jury trial on the ground that the proceeding before him was not “final,” because the defendant might follow the plaintiff to Massachusetts, and there institute an action of replevin, trespass, or trover, to try, before a jury of the country, the right of the former plaintiff to the property he had seized?

The commissioner says much in different places, with the apparent hope of showing that the proceeding before him was only for what he calls a “limited and special purpose,” namely, “_removal_.”

I confess myself unable to understand why the certificate of the commissioner is any more restricted to a limited and special purpose than any judicial act, sentence, or execution, of any court whatever. The commissioner declares a _prima facie_ freeman to be a slave. He declares that James Potter owns Thomas Sims, and the posterity in his loins forever; or that Thomas Sims and his posterity forever, owe service to James Potter and his heirs and assigns forever. Does this “_forever_” limit the meaning of the certificate, as to time? If so, then a _general_ or _unlimited_ award or execution, against Sims, as contradistinguished from this _limited_ and _special_ one, must extend and run into the next world. When our courts decide that one man owes another man money, they award execution against his property, with certain humane exemptions as to clothes, furniture, provisions, school books, Bible, &c. But when this commissioner decided that Sims owed Potter service, he awarded a certificate against the adjudged debtor, which made no exemption whatever; but included property, clothes, books, skin, flesh, heart, brain, soul, and all that was in him, or of him, with all appurtenances and appendages, present emblements, and future increase. Yet, according to the commissioner, the first judgment is a common or general one; the last “special and limited.” Under our old laws, (and under the laws of some states yet,) courts could sentence offenders to the barbarous punishment of flogging. But they were and are bound to specify the number of lashes. This is general. The commissioner delivers over a slave to be flogged by his master, _ad libitum_, and _in perpetuum_, to be flogged in his own person, and to be flogged in the persons of his children, and their posterity, _in secula seculorum_. The defined flogging of thirty-nine, or such other number of lashes as can be computed, the commissioner calls general or indefinite. But the incomputable number of lashes; the vast, unknown, algebraic quantity; the infinite series; that which Newton with all his mathematics could not compass, nor Rosse with his telescope see the end of,--that is “special and limited.” The taking of a limited amount of a man’s property, carefully set down in dollars and cents, both in the text and in the margin of the execution, the commissioner calls a general purpose. But the robbing of a man, not only of all he has earned, but of all his capabilities of earning as long as he breathes, with full authority to do the same thing to his posterity to the latest generation, this is “special and limited.” To sentence a man to be hanged by the neck till he be dead, though with privilege of priest, prayer book, and Bible,--this, too, is general and proper; though in Massachusetts it can be done only by a majority of the judges of the supreme court. But to send a man to be worked to death in five years on a sugar plantation, where his being taught to read the gospel of Jesus Christ is a felony,--this is “special and limited,” and so may be done by any hireling commissioner who will do what Judas did for one third part of his silver pieces.

Fellow-citizens, I submit to any man, clerical, legal, or lay, who is capable of appreciating moral distinctions, whether this whole doctrine, about delivering a man up as a slave, and putting him bodily into the hands of the claimant, and thrusting him into slave jurisdiction, under the pretext that it is done only for _the special and limited purpose of removal_, be not atrocious. It is more like a forgery than an argument. Assumed learning and logic never practised a greater imposition upon themselves, nor attempted a greater one upon others, than when they fabricated this notion, that adjudging a man to be a slave, stripping him of his _liberam legem_, that is, of all his rights and immunities as a citizen, and delivering him into actual bondage, is “for a special and limited purpose of removal,”--only to give him a voyage, or a pleasure excursion of a few hundred miles,--_out,--but not back_. When the successor of St. Peter, claiming to hold the keys of heaven, and to have death and hell for his ministers, excommunicated whole sects and peoples, and delivered them over to the great soul-hunter, and sent his _familiars_ with them to see that the “claimant” suffered no “molestation” while conveying them to the bottomless pit, _he_ might as well have said that he did it only for a “special and limited purpose.” It was not damnation, it was only “removal.” And do you suppose the devil, could he have got possession of those outcast souls, would have cared any more under what pretence the great pontiff commissioner made the delivery, than does the southern slaveholder, when he gets possession of a man of whom he can make a slave?

This fallacy about the “special and limited purpose of removal” did not originate with Mr. Commissioner Curtis. I exculpate him from that guilt. He only adopted it and gave it a “bad eminence” by making it, in part, the basis of his decision. But henceforth let the people brand it. Let them classify it and denounce it, and detest it, as belonging to that impious and blasphemous kind of arguments by which our first parents were beguiled, when Satan told them that, though they sinned against God, they should not die; or by which Mr. Webster cajoled and cozened so many honest men, when he assured them, that though they should violate the moral law, by opening all the territories to slavery, yet some physical law of geography or the weather would avert the penalties.

In the absence of all decent materials for an argument, the commissioner resorts to that ten times exploded position, that there is an analogy between fugitives from justice and fugitives from service. Where could he find a bandage of prejudice thick enough to blind him to the distinction, that the condition of delivering up the former is that he be _charged_ with crime, while the condition of delivering up the latter is that he be _held_ to labor, and that he _owes_ service? How can it be said that a man _owes_ service, until the _fact_ of the _indebtedness_ be proved? Such reasonable suspicion of guilt as justifies a grand jury in finding a bill of indictment is sufficient in the one case, but such positive proof as would require the court to enter up judgment and award execution is absolutely necessary in the other. The government demanding a fugitive from justice seeks possession of him for a trial, _before a court and jury_, of the question of _criminality_; but the claimant of an alleged fugitive from service seeks possession of him to avoid a trial, _before a court and jury_, of the question of _freedom_. The constitution requires that every person accused of crime shall be tried in the state and district where the crime shall be charged to have been committed; but it makes no such provision in regard to the alleged fugitive from service; and this injunction in the one case, and omission in the other, create the irresistible inference, that there is a difference between them, and that the alleged fugitive from service, according to all the analogies of the common law, is to be tried where he is found.

But there is one distinction which is broad enough and luminous enough to make a blind man see it. An alleged fugitive from justice is not adjudged to be a criminal previous to delivery, nor is he made a criminal, in the eye of the law, by the act of delivery. But the alleged fugitive from service is adjudged a slave, and made a slave by the certificate of the commissioner. The state receiving a fugitive from justice does not proceed forthwith to punish him. But the receiver of an alleged fugitive from service _owns_ him, and may proceed to control him, and beat him, and rob him, and starve him, on the very instant that the commissioner puts the certificate into his hands. If any one cannot see this distinction, no act of the moral oculist can give him sight.

The papers inform us that when Sims was landed in Savannah, he was taken to jail and received the “_usual reprimand_,” which, as every body knows, is a flayed and blood-streaming back. By whose certificate was the nine-thonged cat laid on? Had he been a murderer or a pirate, would excoriation have been the first act of welcome on his arrival? No! Murderers and pirates would have had a jury. The law is beneficent to them; it saves its terrors for the slave. A man who will not _see_ such a distinction as this, would excite no pity should he be made to _feel_ it.

In treating this topic, the commissioner makes one assertion that seems insane. He says that, to authorize the delivery of a fugitive from justice, in order to his removal, “_it must be proved that he has committed a crime_.” Such a declaration was never made before, and I do not believe it will be ever made again. You could not find a lawyer south of Mason and Dixon’s who would venture to say this. Every body knows that the supposed criminal needs only _to be charged_ with crime. It is the alleged slave who must be proved to _be held_ to service before he can be constitutionally surrendered. But as though this was not absurd enough, the commissioner goes on to say, that though the alleged fugitive from justice must be proved, in the place where he is taken, “to have committed a crime,” yet, after his removal, he must be proved again to have committed it. How can a man be proved, in any legal way, to have committed a crime, without being confronted with the witnesses against him? Why, after having been so proved, is he put upon trial again?

As to all the commissioner says in denial of the right of trial by jury, I shall make but one or two remarks. I have argued that question elsewhere; and, until I see some answer to that argument, I have no occasion for repetition or corroboration of it. After using the word “_person_” some twenty times, to signify the President of the United States, electors, senators, representatives, United States officers, Indians, Africans, &c., the constitution declares that “no _person_ shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;”--this “due process of law” meaning trial by jury. This is one fact. Adam Gibson, Henry Long, Thomas Sims, and many others, some of them now acknowledged on all hands to have been free, have been sent into slavery without this trial. This is another fact. Now put these two facts together. No man shall be deprived of liberty or property, except by the jury trial. These men have been deprived of liberty and property without the jury trial. These are the two ends. Now fill up the space between them with what you please, and call it argument, law, gospel, or what you will, every body must see that it is nothing, and can be nothing but Mephistophiles’ jugglery. I dismiss this point with a single proposition: In Massachusetts, we know no legal distinction founded on color. Through all the gradations, from the person who has the preternatural whiteness of an Albino to one whom you can see in the darkest midnight, because he is so solid black,--all, _all_, under our constitution and laws, are alike freemen, or alike slaves. Notwithstanding the commissioner’s decision makes us all slaves, yet I maintain that, in the eye of the law, we are all free. How then can any one of us freemen be robbed of liberty and property, and turned into a slave, but by freeman’s proof,--that is, trial by jury? I acknowledge that after we have been proved to be slaves by freeman’s proof, then all the unutterable consequences of slavery follow, of course; just as when a man has been proved to be a murderer, the consequences of murder follow. But UNTIL, mark this, =UNTIL= a man has been proved to be a slave by freeman’s proof, he remains legally free. And a magistrate who takes jurisdiction of a proceeding by which a man may be deprived of liberty or property, without freeman’s proof, prejudges his victim, when he allows the first witness to be called, or the first paper to be read; and he might just as well do it, in a case of “life,” as in a case of “liberty and property.”

The next position of the commissioner which I shall notice relates to the right of Congress to make use of state courts to execute United States laws.

Now we have the express authority of the supreme court of the United States for saying that “Congress cannot vest any portion of the judicial power of the United States, except in courts ordained and established by itself.”--_Martin_ vs. _Hunter’s Lessee_, 1 Wheaton, 330. “The whole judicial power of the United States should be, at all times, vested in some courts created under its authority.”--_Ib._ 331. “The jurisdiction over such cases, [cases arising under the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States,] could not exist in the state courts previous to the adoption of the constitution, and it could not afterwards be directly conferred on them; for the constitution expressly requires the judicial power to be vested in courts ordained and established by the United States.”--_Ib._ 335. But the commissioner refers to a passage in Prigg’s case, in which it is said that “while a difference of opinion exists ... whether state magistrates are bound to act under it, [a law of Congress,] none is entertained by the court, that state magistrates may, if they choose, exercise the authority, unless prohibited by state legislation.”

Waiving all exceptions to this doctrine, the utmost that can be made of it is this: that state magistrates may execute a law of Congress, unless forbidden by a law of their state; but when so forbidden, they cannot; and Congress can neither compel them to do so, nor annul a prohibitory law of the state, by giving validity to the act of the magistrate, performed in violation of the state law. Now mark the _non sequitur_ of the commissioner’s logic. See how his premises belong to one subject, and his conclusion to another. Because a _Massachusetts_ magistrate may execute a law of Congress, unless the Massachusetts legislature forbid him, but if so forbidden he can no longer do it, therefore, when the Massachusetts legislature has so forbidden him, Congress may send the magistrates of Georgia, or of any other state, into Massachusetts, to do what our own state had forbidden our own magistrates to do. I say “_send the magistrates of Georgia here_;” because Congress may just as well, and even better for us, authorize the magistrates of any state in the Union to come here, set up courts, and pass sentences which shall convey our citizens into bondage, as to stay at home and make records, which, when brought here, shall have the same effect. This, then, is the law-logic of the commissioner: Because a Massachusetts magistrate may aid in reclaiming an alleged fugitive on Massachusetts ground, unless forbidden by his state, yet, if so forbidden, then the legislatures of fifteen slave states may send their magistrates, or the acts of their magistrates here, to do the same thing. The state might prevent its own magistrates from aiding in this nefarious work, but this would be of no avail, for any one, or all, of fifteen sets of slave state magistrates may come and do the forbidden act.

Pierpont Edwards once said of a clergyman, that if his text had a contagious disease, the sermon would not catch it; and a blind man, being asked to describe his conception of color, compared it to a clap of thunder. But all their ideas were coherent and homogeneous compared with those premises and conclusions of the commissioner, by which the State Rights’ doctrine is expounded to mean, the right of one _state_ to send its magistrates into another state, to do what the latter has _lawfully_ prohibited its own magistrates from doing. South Carolina never claimed so much as this.

Under the first head, where it had been urged by counsel, that a freeman might have no opportunity to prove his freedom in the state from which he was alleged to have fled, because the claimant was under no obligation to carry him to that state, but might send him to the Cuban or Brazilian market, the commissioner shuts his eyes to these very probable consequences, and refuses to consider them; but under the fifth head, where an argument in favor of the slaveholder could be derived from consequences, he not only argues elaborately from them, but bases his judgment upon them.

There are two remarks thrown out in the course of the commissioner’s opinion so shocking to every feeling of humanity, that any one, in commenting upon them, may well be excused for passing from the language of argument to that of emotion.

If there be any one right known to the common law more important and sacred than all others, it is the right of confronting and cross-examining the witnesses who are brought to testify against us. Without this right, there is no fraud that cannot be practised upon the most honest man, and no guilt that cannot be proved against the most innocent one. Doubtless this right of cross-examination is sometimes abused; but there are few spectacles more exciting or more gratifying than to see the demons of falsehood driven out, one after another, from a perjured villain, until the truth, at last, is wrenched from his heart, notwithstanding the double boltings and barrings with which he had locked it there. The fear of this cross-examination “casting its shadows before,” has prevented thousands and tens of thousands from swearing falsely. Next to honesty, this fear is the greatest protection to property, liberty, and life.

Now the testimony which doomed Sims to slavery, and which may doom any of us with our wives and children to slavery, when men grow, not more wicked, but only a little more bold in their wickedness than they are now, was wholly _ex parte_ testimony; taken, not merely behind the victim’s back, but a thousand miles behind his back; of which he had no knowledge, and, unless he were omniscient, like God, could have no knowledge. And when the counsel of Sims urged upon the commissioner the enormity of this outrage against all principle, what was his reply? It was this, and it makes a man’s blood run cold to read it: Sims’s absence from Georgia, “so that he could not be served with notice, if he was entitled to it, was in his own wrong, and he cannot now complain that he had no opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses.”

I appeal to all history to prove, that no judge who ever sat upon a bench where the common law was recognized and administered, however corrupt he may have been, ever advanced a more atrocious doctrine. Why, gentlemen, if a debtor absconds for the very purpose of defrauding his creditors, he must have notice before he can be proceeded against for the recovery of a debt. If he flees from the state, lurks and hides himself, he must have the best notice the court can contrive to give him. If the plaintiff recovers and takes out execution, he must file a bond conditioned to make restoration; and years afterwards, if the defendant shall come back and show cause; he shall be entitled to a review to annul the whole proceedings against him. Ay, when a criminal, a robber, a murderer, an incendiary, is brought to trial, even he must be “confronted with the witnesses against him, have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and the assistance of counsel in his defence.” And yet the commissioner _makes proof out of nothing_, that Sims escaped from slavery, and then, because of this nothing-made proof, he inculpates him with being absent “in his own wrong.”

The other point referred to arose from certain testimony, (if it can be called testimony,) that the mother of Sims begged the witness, “whether her son was in a free state or in a slave state, for God’s sake, to bring him back again.” “This,” says the commissioner, “certainly disarms the case of any unpleasant features”! Why, even the kine of the barn-yard, when the butcher cuts the throat of her young, will weep and low, and bellow, for days and days, and say, as well as in her inarticulate moanings she can say, “For God’s sake, let it be brought back again;” though the only consequence of its return would be to have its throat cut by the butcher again. And are we to expect that the brutalized, chattelized “cattle” of the south will have less of that natural yearning and longing of the soul, at the loss of their offspring, than the animals of the farmer’s yard? Can we suppose that God has not planted the instinct of a mother’s love too deep to be destroyed but by the destruction of the being herself in whom it was planted? No! debase the mother as you will, by ignorance, vice, superstition, lust, concubinage, incest, and this wealth of affection will still glow at the bottom of her heart, “rich as the oozy bottom of the deep in sunken wrack and sumless treasures.” And because this mother’s love had not been all extinguished, the commissioner says that his sending a human being into the abyss of bondage, on evidence that an intelligent barbarian would reject, “certainly disarms the case of any unpleasant features.” But I shall not expostulate with the commissioner. A man must have a heart before he can feel, as he must have eyes before he can see.

“O, who can paint a sunbeam to the blind,
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?”

Fellow-citizens, I might occupy your attention much longer upon this unprecedented opinion of the commissioner; but there are two or three other topics to which I wish to call your attention, and I therefore forbear. In saying what I have said, I disclaim all personal ill will or discourtesy towards that magistrate. Even should I appear not to have succeeded in suppressing my own feelings, I certainly cannot wound his more than he has wounded mine, and those I believe of nine tenths of all who have ever read his opinion;--not by a thousand fold as much as he has wounded the law, whose servant he is, or the fair fame of Massachusetts, of which he is a citizen; not so much as his decision will wound the hearts of an intelligent posterity, who shall look back upon it as a partisan and an ignoble act, not to be remembered without a sigh.

* * * * *

If the legal relations of slavery did not sustain the moral ones, as the root sustains the branches and nourishes the fruit, those moral relations would seem to demand all our attention. I know but comparatively little, and no man living at the north can know but comparatively little, of the various and ever-repeated wickednesses of this institution. It has been my lot, however, to live for about half the time, during the last four years, in the midst of a milder form of slavery. And besides this, I was once engaged for about six weeks in the trial of causes growing directly out of slavery; and that experience gave me some insight into its dreadful mysteries. For a moment, the wind blew the smoke and flame aside, and I looked into its hell. I saw, then, as I had never seen before, what a vital and inextinguishable interest every human being has in this subject;--not the slaves alone, but the free men; not voters only, but all who can be affected by votes; not men only, but especially women.

For this reason, I am glad to see so many ladies in this audience. It becomes them to be here. If any mortal should cultivate an abhorrence of slavery, the female sex should do it. Whatever any one may hold to be the social relation between free women and slave women, yet before God and Christ, and all the holy angels, they belong to the same sisterhood of the human race. They are your sisters. And what is the condition of these your sisters, in regard to everything that a virtuous and noble woman holds most sacred and dear?

Ladies, there are now in this land of pretended freedom and pretended gospel a million and a half of women who have no practical knowledge of what a woman’s higher life should be, or what a woman’s most precious rights are. Since the Declaration of Independence, the number of slaves in this country has increased from less than five hundred thousand to more than three millions; and before the close of this century, their descendants will increase to more than thrice three millions. And yet, neither as to the living nor as to the dead, has there ever been a lawful marriage among them all. There has never been a man slave who could say, “This is my wife, heart of my heart, and life of my life, and no mortal power shall pluck her from my side.” There has never been a woman slave who could say, “This is my lawful, wedded husband, whom I promise to love and cherish, and to whom I vow inviolable constancy.” “For this cause,” says Christ, “shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.” But the “twain” of slaves are never one. And even when any sham ceremony is observed, to distinguish this holy relation of husband and wife from the cohabitations of beasts, and he who officiates comes to those other words of Christ, “What, therefore, God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he stops; for he knows, and they all know, that a few dollars, at any time, will bring bereavement upon both,--a double bereavement, he a widower and she a widow, both still surviving. Their life, at best, is but a life of concubinage;--not even that concubinage, which, though not founded upon a lawful contract, has still something like conjugal fidelity in it, and therefore a semblance of virtue; but a various and vagrant concubinage, traversing the circle of overseer, master, master’s guests, and master’s sons. The fate of the children born to the slave mother you all know. Those objects upon which all maternal affections meet and glow as in a focus, are torn from her bosom, like lambs from the flock when the shambles are empty.

And as to those females who are young, sprightly, and handsome:--

Charge me not with indelicacy in touching upon this theme. _Honi soit qui mal y pense._ I speak not to fastidious ears, but to the pure in heart, to whom all things are pure. I speak of eternal verities, before whose massive force the heart trembles and bows itself, as reeds before the tempest. It is the grossest and most shameless of all indelicacies to patronize and multiply vice, through pusillanimity in exposing it,--

As to those females, I say, who are young, sprightly, and handsome, whom God has damned with beauty of form and beauty of face, because they only attract the gloating eye of passion, who can describe the loathsomeness of their life? They are ripened for the New Orleans, or for some other market, whence southern harems are supplied; as, under the Mahometan religion, white Caucasian beauties are sent to the slave marts of the darker-skinned Turk.

In that company of seventy-six persons who attempted, in 1848, to escape from the District of Columbia in the schooner Pearl, and whose officers I assisted in defending, there were several young and healthy girls who had those peculiar attractions of form, of feature, and of complexion, which southern connoisseurs in sensualism so highly prize. Elizabeth Russell was one of them. She fell immediately into the slave-traders’ fangs, and was doomed for the New Orleans market. The hearts of those who saw her and foresaw her fate were touched with pity. They offered eighteen hundred dollars to redeem her, and some there were who offered to give, who would not have had much left after the gift. But the fiend of a slave trader was inexorable. He knew how he could transmute her charms into gold through the fires of sin. He demanded twenty-one hundred dollars, (though for menial services she would not have been worth more than four or five,) and would take nothing less. She was despatched to New Orleans, but when about half way there, God had mercy upon her and smote her with death. Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide. There were two girls named Edmundson in the same company. When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims. He bantered her, telling her what fine dresses and fine furniture they would have. “Yes,” said she, “that may do well in this life, but what will become of them in the next?” They, too, were sent to New Orleans, but they were afterwards redeemed at an enormous ransom, and brought back. There was one girl, who, after her recapture in the Pearl, was sold six times in seven weeks, in Maryland and Virginia, for her beauty’s sake. But she proved heroically and sublimely intractable. Like Rebecca, the Jewess, she would have flung herself from the loftiest battlement, rather than yield her person to a villain. Notwithstanding her masters’ pretence that they had bought her with their money, and owned her soul, yet she had wealth, which, though all the earth were “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” it could not buy. It was not difficult, therefore, to purchase her, and she was redeemed and came to New York; and I have been informed in the most authentic manner from the lady of the very respectable family of which she became an inmate, that, on an examination of her person, after the healing-time of the journey had passed, her body was found scarred and waled with whip marks, which the villains inflicted upon her because she would not come to their bed.

Now, suppose a sister or daughter of yours, of this heroic soul and spotless purity, should find herself on the way to New Orleans;--suppose, by almost superhuman power and adroitness, she should escape, and should thread her solitary and darksome path, for hundreds of miles, towards the north star; should lie down in caverns, with poisonous reptiles by day, and pursue her lonely journey by night, finding the beasts of the forests to be less terrible than man; should swim rivers, and keep off famine by roots and insects, until at last, thanks be to God, she sets her mangled and bleeding feet upon the soil of freedom. Perhaps some echo of the fame of the Pilgrim mothers has reached her ears. She has heard of Boston and its noble women of old, and she hies hither as to a city of refuge,--as to a sanctuary where virtue has an altar, and where she can lay down her hunted and weary body, and be at rest. Fallacious hope! The lecher pursues his prey, and he is here. He goes to some Glossin lawyer who sues out a warrant; and to some Jack Ketch who serves it. The victim is seized at midnight, under some lying charge, and she is carried before a commissioner, whose conduct, were he a _quasi_ judge, as he pretends to be, would be enough to make every hair of the judicial ermine forever detestable. Here a process is gone through which she does not understand, and some papers are read of which she never heard, and then a judgment is pronounced that her “labor” is “due” to her pursuer, (and such labor!) that she “owes service” to him, (and such service!) and then the commissioner delivers her into his arms, and pockets a fee which common pimps would be ashamed to work for.

And, my friends, the keenest pang in the grief of all this is, that there is no fiction or romance about it. A commissioner who could bring himself down to send a _man_ to a Georgia cotton-field under this law, the first time trying, could send a virtuous and spotless woman into enforced harlotry the second time; and the prince of darkness only knows what he could not set him to do afterwards. The clergymen who could defend the enslavers of Sims because he “owed” the “service” of one sex, could defend the enslavers of a woman because she “owed” the “service” of the other sex;--the clergymen of the rich parishes I mean;--for it happens, with the constancy of a law of nature, that it is only the clergymen of the rich parishes who do this. Do they not know how to serve and reverence their Lord and Master,--that is, their Landlord and Paymaster!

But, fellow-citizens, as our feelings are stimulated to the keenest sensibility, in looking at the infinite of wrong which slavery commits; as we see the millions and millions of human beings dimly emerging into view, and crowding down the vista of futurity to blast our eyes with the vision of their woe, a potent voice rings in our ears, exclaiming, “_Conquer your prejudices_,” “CONQUER YOUR PREJUDICES.” And this execrable counsel is uttered in reference to the infinite crime and disgrace of sending into slavery, without a trial, those who are free under our laws,--the men to stripes and death, and the women to the body’s shame and the soul’s perdition. Fouler, baser, more ungodly counsel was never uttered, since it was said to our first parents in the garden of Eden, “On the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die.”

And what is it that this long-honored eulogist of liberty, but now its great apostate, blasphemes with the name of “_prejudice_”? If there be one sentiment more deeply rooted in the public heart of Massachusetts than any other, more intertwined and grown together with all the fibres of its being, it is the sentiment of liberty. We have drunk it in with our mothers’ milk; we have imbibed it from all the lessons of the school-room and the teachings of the sanctuary; we have inspired it with the atmosphere we breathe, and our organs have been attuned to it from our birth, by the anthems of the mountain’s wind and the ocean’s roar. It was from the love of liberty that our earlier fathers plucked themselves up by the roots from that natal soil into which they had been fastening for centuries. For this they wandered abroad upon the ocean, deeming its ingulfing surges to be more tolerable than a tyrant’s power. For this they transplanted themselves to this land, at that time more distant and more formidable to them than any part of the habitable globe could now be to us. For this they performed the double task of enduring all privations and dangers, and at the same time of laying the foundations of all our free and glorious institutions; and as the sires were stricken down by toil and death, the sons took up the work and bore it on, generation after generation.

For this noble sentiment of liberty our later fathers encountered the perils and deaths of a seven years’ war, and amid poverty and destitution, amid hunger and cold and nakedness, without any of the protections and defences of battle which the wealth of their foe could command, they bared their noble breasts to the shock of the mailed legions of the British crown. And when the struggle was ended and the triumph won, they achieved labors of peace not less magnanimous and wonderful than their labors of war.

They were the pattern men of the world;--not aggressive, not submissive; not hostile, not servile; doing right, demanding right; they were the men who would never wield the oppressor’s rod, and would go mad at the touch of his heel.

Now, there is not one of all those glorious deeds, from the embarkation at Delfthaven to the signing of the peace of 1783, or the inauguration of the federal government in 1789, which was not begotten by the love of liberty, or would have been performed without its creative energy. And yet, the arch-apostate, standing in the city of Boston, the home of old Samuel Adams and John Hancock, within a stone’s throw of the spot where Benjamin Franklin was born, in sight of Bunker Hill, and with Lexington and Concord, as it were, just hiding themselves behind the hills for shame, calls all this a “prejudice,” and commands us to cast it from us as an unclean thing. Was it not enough to make the stones in the streets, and every block in that eternal shaft which marks the spot where Warren fell, cry out “with most miraculous organ” to rebuke him?

We have another, and it is a kindred “prejudice.” We have a “prejudice” of sixty years’ standing in favor of the principle of the ordinance of 1787. That ordinance has been cherished in our memories, it has been taught to our children, and we have displayed it before the world both as the pledge and the promise of our devotion to liberty. Five states, now numbering five millions of men, were the battalions whom that ordinance wheeled from the ranks of Belial to the Lord’s side. Hundreds of times have the Whig party and the Democratic party resolved that the principle of that ordinance should be maintained inviolate. Mr. Webster claimed the application of it to the new territories, as his thunder, and swaggered as he rattled it. Now he calls the great achievement of Thomas Jefferson and Nathan Dane a “_prejudice_,” and dishonors their graves by his scoffs. He abandons the vast regions of Utah and New Mexico to the slaveholder; he gives more than fifty thousand square miles of free territory to Texas; he gives ten millions of dollars in money, (more than, with all our devotion and self-sacrifice, we have been able to appropriate to public education in Massachusetts for the last ten years;) and worse than this, he gives permission that she may carve out of her territory a slave state _additional_ to what had been unconstitutionally contracted for when she came into the Union.

And for what does he flout us, by stigmatizing all these sacred convictions and sentiments and instincts as “_prejudices_”? Only to feed the famine of his ambition. He began to see, what every body else has so long seen, that his vices were bringing upon him the retribution of premature old age and decrepitude; and that, unless he could enter the White House the next term, he must wait, at least until the great Julian period should bring the world round again. He parleyed with southern tempters, and fell.

Nor did he outrage our feelings only. He sacrificed our pecuniary interests, our very means of subsistence. Massachusetts would be prospering under an improved system of protection for our domestic industry to-day, but for Mr. Webster’s apostasy, which stripped us of all our power and of all our unity, and inflamed the spirit of southern aggrandizement to demand every thing and yield nothing. Could the issue be now formed, and the case tried, whether Daniel Webster’s course in 1850 did not deprive the working-men of the country of a tariff for the protection of their labor, not an intelligent and impartial jury could be found that would not bring him in guilty. This result every unbiased man at Washington saw, last summer; while he was cajoling the men of the north with the delusion that, if they would surrender liberty, they should have their reward in a tariff. I speak of this with confidence, because there are hundreds of my constituents and acquaintances who will bear me witness that, in personal interviews, and by correspondence, they were warned, that if they followed Mr. Webster in his recreancy to principles, he would leave them without relief in the matter of property.

Fellow-citizens, I will trespass upon your attention but for a moment longer. I wish to advance one idea for the consideration of all sober, moral, and religious men; and when this idea is duly considered, I trust to its working a revolution in public sentiment. In selecting men to be our political leaders, we have sometimes committed the gravest moral error. We have assumed the falsity of a distinction between a man’s public and his private life. We have supposed that the same individual might be a bad man and a good citizen; might be a patriot and an inebriate, a faithful officer and a debauchee, at the same time; might serve his country during “office hours,” and the powers of darkness the rest of the twenty-four. But I say, as of old, no man can serve God and mammon.

We have been too prone to judge of men by their professions and by their connections. We seem to have forgotten that the tree is to be known by its fruit, and a man by his life. If we are to take the Pharisee’s rule, and determine a man’s piety by his creed, and by the number and length of his prayers, then piety will be the cheapest thing in the market, and as worthless as it is cheap.

In choosing teachers to be the guides and exemplars of our children, we demand high moral worth; and we would as soon thrust our youth into the centre of pestilence, as amid the contagion of vicious and profligate men.

In selecting our religious guides, we feel almost justified in being captiously and morbidly critical; we hardly admit that we can be strict to a fault; and the man who fails to carry personal purity and exemplariness into the pastoral life, is driven from it with indignation and contempt.

I admit too, rejoicingly, that, in Massachusetts, this preventive and praiseworthy discipline has been more extensively applied to political men than in any other state in the Union. Our highest state offices have been filled for years, saving very rare exceptions, with men of distinguished probity and a spotless life. And why, in this department, should we _ever_ grant dispensations and absolutions; or, like the old popes, sell indulgences to sin?

Now, let this doctrine be applied; for I hold it to be no unwarrantable invasion of private character to apply these principles to public men. When public men openly and notoriously practise vice, they make the vice public, and bring it within public jurisdiction. If it is public for example, it is public for criticism; and, under such circumstances, the moral and religious guides of the community are as solemnly bound “truly to find, and due presentment make,” of these offences, as the grand jury is in the case of crimes against the laws of the land. I say, therefore, let us apply this doctrine.

How long have all good citizens in Massachusetts labored in the glorious cause of temperance! They have devoted time, expended talent, lavished money, incurred obloquy; but, as their reward, they have plucked the guilty from perdition; rescued the young, just losing their balance over the precipice of ruin; saved the widow and the fatherless from unutterable woe, and driven demons of discord from domestic Edens. Now why, after all our toils and sacrifices to uphold and carry forward the cause of temperance, and to make its name as honorable as it is blessed; why should we demolish all our work by elevating a man to a high political station, or by upholding him when in it, who, in the face of the nation and of the world, will become so drunken that he cannot articulate his mother tongue? Is this an example you desire to set before the ingenuous and aspiring youth of the land; ay, before your own children?

We have had men in the presidential chair not without faults and blemishes of character; but hitherto we may proudly say, that we never have had one there who drowned his reason in his cups. God grant that we never may. Think of this magnificent ship of state freighted with twenty-three millions of souls, and laden to the scuppers with the wealth of the world’s hopes, with a pilot at the helm--_drunk_!

We are an industrious and a frugal people. The aptitude is born with us. A true Massachusetts boy seems to take to ingenious labor and to labor-saving contrivances from his birth,--like a duck almost impatient to be hatched, that it may get into the water. We prize and honor the home-bred virtues of diligence and thrift; for they bestow upon us all our comforts, the means of educating our children, and leave us a magnificent surplus for godlike charities to be scattered over the world.