AUTHORS OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT.
Such are some of the consequences of this ill-fated measure. But the duty of the Committee cannot be performed without glancing at its authors also. By an easy transition we pass from one to the other, for the two are in natural harmony. Each may be read in the light of the other.
And who were the authors of this Fugitive Slave Act? The answer may be general or special.
If general, it may be said that its authors were the representatives of Slavery, constituting that same Oligarchy, or Slave Power, which has madly plunged this country into civil war. Some of them, even at the time of its enactment, were already engaged in treasonable conspiracy against the Union. They thought little of any pretended interests in property; but they were occupied with two controlling ideas: first, how to unite their own people at home; and, secondly, how to insult and subjugate the Free States. The Fugitive Slave Act furnished a convenient agency for this double purpose, and was naturally adopted by men who had lost the power of blushing as well as the power of feeling.
Unquestionable facts show how little real occasion there was for this barbarous statute. It is now established by the report of the census in 1860, that the loss of slaves by escape was trivial. According to this document, “the whole annual loss to the Southern States from this cause bears less proportion to the amount of capital involved than the daily variations which, in ordinary times, occur in the fluctuations of State or Government securities in the city of New York alone.”[374] Such a statement is most suggestive. Official tables furnish confirmatory details. From these it appears that during the year ending June 1, 1860, out of 3,949,557 slaves, only 803 were able to escape, being one to about five thousand, or at the rate of one fiftieth of one per cent. Then again, out of more than one million of slaves in the Border States in 1860, fewer than five hundred escaped. Such are authentic facts. Nor is this all. The slave who succeeded in escaping, even when reënslaved, was never afterwards regarded as good property. All the work he could do would not compensate for his bad example. Jefferson Davis, in the frankness of an address to his constituents at home in Mississippi, on the 11th July, 1851, said openly that he did not want any fugitive slaves sent into his State; that “such stock would be a curse to the land,—for, with the knowledge they had gained, they would ruin the rest of the slaves, and very probably give rise to the most dreadful consequences”; and he concluded by announcing, that “he would not have in his quarters a negro brought from the North on any account whatever.”[375] And yet, in face of such authentic facts, showing how few escaped, and in face of an instinctive repugnance to any commingling with other slaves by those who had once tasted Liberty, this atrocious statute was enacted, and its enforcement was maintained at the point of the bayonet, while Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War.
There have been wars of pretext; but here was an act of legislation, which, whenever enforced, was a Petty War, and its origin was a pretext. It was nothing but a pretext, through which the representatives of Slavery sought to enforce a flagitious power. The pretext was worthy of the legislation, and both pretext and legislation were in harmony with the authors, who drew their motives of conduct from Slavery and nothing else. The same spirit which triumphed in this Fugitive Slave Act, on a pretext, has at last broken forth in rebellion, on a pretext also. Each was under pretext of maintaining Slavery, and each proceeded from the same influence.
Speaking, then, in general terms, the authors of the Fugitive Slave Act were the authors of the Rebellion. The one and the other have the same paternity, as unquestionably they have a family likeness.
If, however, we go still further, and seek the individual authors of this odious measure, the forerunner of the Rebellion, it is easy to point them out.
The bill was reported to the Senate by Mr. Butler, of South Carolina, so that in origin it may be traced directly to the hot-house of nullification, treason, and rebellion. But Mr. Mason, of Virginia, subsequently moved a substitute, which, being adopted, became the existing statute, and this enormity stalked into life under the patronage of a Senator from Virginia. Public report, which is entitled to belief, attributes this substitute to the cunning hand of Mr. Faulkner, also of Virginia; but, on moving it in the Senate, Mr. Mason made it his own, and pressed it with untiring pertinacity, as the “Globe” amply attests, until it became the law of the land, so far as such a measure can in any just sense be “law.”
But whether its authors be found in States or individuals, there is in it the same pernicious virus, which, breaking out first in South Carolina, inoculated Virginia, like the Rebellion itself. A Senator from Virginia took from South Carolina the final responsibility, as an aged madman from Virginia asked and obtained permission to point the first gun at Fort Sumter. Nor are the two events unlike in character. The Fugitive Slave Act was levelled at the Union hardly less than the batteries at Charleston, when they opened upon Fort Sumter.
Such are the authors, general and special, of this wickedness. The Senator from South Carolina is dead; but the representatives of Slavery still live, and so also do the two madmen from Virginia. Thus the representatives of Slavery, though now in open rebellion, continue, through unrepealed statute, to insult the loyal States, to degrade the Republic, and to rule the country which they tried to ruin. And thus two audacious Rebels, one the pretended Minister of the Rebellion at London, and the other an officer in the Rebel forces, still exert among us a malignant power, while, with a long arm not yet amputated, they reach even into the streets of Washington, and fasten the chains of the slave.