The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus

by American Anti-Slavery Society

The navy, even that part that is cruising off the coast of Africa, to suppress the foreign slave trade, is in the hands of slavery.

Freemen of the North, who have even dared to lift up their voice against slavery, cannot travel through the slave States, but at the peril of their lives.

The representatives of freemen are forbidden, on the floor on Congress, to remonstrate against the encroachments of slavery, or to pray that she would let her poor victims go.

I renounce my allegiance to a Constitution that enthrones such a power, wielded for the purpose of depriving me of my rights, of robbing my countrymen of their liberties, and of securing its own protection, support and perpetuation.

Passing by that clause of the Constitution, which restricted Congress for twenty years, from passing any law against the African slave trade, and which gave authority to raise a revenue on the stolen sons of Africa, I come to that part of the fourth article, which guarantees protection against "domestic violence," and which pledges to the South the military force of the country, to protect the masters against their insurgent slaves: binds us, and our children, to shoot down our fellow-countrymen, who may rise, in emulation of our revolutionary fathers, to vindicate their inalienable "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,"—this clause of the Constitution, I say distinctly, I never will support.

That part of the Constitution which provides for the surrender of fugitive slaves, I never have supported and never will. I will join in no slave-hunt. My door shall stand open, as it has long stood, for the panting and trembling victim of the slave-hunter. When I shut it against him, may God shut the door of her mercy against me! Under this clause of the Constitution, and designed to carry it into effect, slavery has demanded that laws should be passed, and of such a character, as have left the free citizen of the North without protection for his own liberty. The question, whether a man seized in a free State as a slave, is a slave or not, the law of Congress does not allow a jury to determine: but refers it to the decision of a Judge of a United State' Court, or even of the humblest State magistrate, it may be, upon the testimony or affidavit of the party most deeply interested to support the claim. By virtue of this law, freemen have been seized and dragged into perpetual slavery—and should I be seized by a slave-hunter in any part of the country where I am not personally known, neither the Constitution nor laws of the United States would shield me from the same destiny.

These, sir, are the specific parts of the Constitution of the united States, which in my opinion are essentially vicious, hostile at once to the liberty and to the morals of the nation. And these are the principal reasons of my refusal any longer to acknowledge my allegiance to it, and of my determination to revoke my oath to support it. I cannot, in order to keep the law of man, break the law of God, or solemnly call him to witness my promise that I will break it.

It is true that the Constitution provides for its own amendment, and that by this process, all the guarantees of Slavery may be expunged. But it will be time enough to swear to support it when this is done. It cannot be right to do so, until these amendments are made.

It is also true that the framers of the Constitution did studiously keep the words "Slave" and "Slavery" from its face. But to do our constitutional fathers justice, while they forebore—from very shame—to give the word "Slavery" a place in the Constitution, they did not forbear—again to do them justice—to give place in it to the thing. They were careful to wrap up the idea, and the substance of Slavery, in the clause for the surrender of the fugitive, though they sacrificed justice in doing so.

There is abundant evidence that this clause touching "persons held to service or labor," not only operates practically, under the judicial construction, for the protection of the slave interest; but that it was intended so to operate by the framers of the Constitution. The highest judicial authorities—Chief Justice Shaw, of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the Latimer case, and Mr. Justice Story, in the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Prigg vs. The State of Pennsylvania,—tell us, I know not on what evidence, that without this "compromise," this security for Southern slaveholders, "the Union could not have been formed." And there is still higher evidence, not only that the framers of the Constitution meant by this clause to protect slavery, but that they did this, knowing that slavery was wrong. Mr. Madison[[12]] informs us that the clause in question, as it came out of the hands of Dr. Johnson, the chairman of the "committee on style," read thus: "No person legally held to service, or labor, in one State, escaping into another, shall," &c., and the word "legally" was struck out, and the words "under the laws thereof" inserted after the word "State," in compliance with the wish of some, who thought the term legal equivocal, and favoring the idea that slavery was legal "in a moral view." A conclusive proof that, although future generations might apply that clause to other kinds of "service or labor," when slavery should have died out, or been killed off by the young spirit of liberty, which was then awake and at work in the land; still, slavery was what they were wrapping up in "equivocal" words: and wrapping it up for its protection and safe keeping: a conclusive proof that the framers of the Constitution were more careful to protect themselves in the judgement of coming generations, from the charge of ignorance, than of sin; a conclusive proof that they knew that slavery was not "legal in a moral view," that it was a violation of the moral law of God; and yet knowing and confessing its immorality, they dared to make this stipulation for its support and defence.