But Liberty is always priceless. There are other instances, less known, where kindred wrong has been done. Every case is a tragedy, under the forms of law. Worse than poisoned bowl or dagger was the certificate of a commissioner, allowed, without interruption, to continue his dreadful trade. Even since the Rebellion has raged in blood, the pretension of returning slaves to their masters is not abandoned. The piety of Abraham, who offered up Isaac as a sacrifice to Jehovah, is imitated, and the country continues to offer up fugitive bondmen as a sacrifice to Slavery. It is reported on good authority, that among slaves thus sacrificed was one who by communications to the Government had been the means of saving upwards of one hundred thousand dollars. Here in Washington, since the beneficent Act of Emancipation, even in sight of the flag floating from the National Capitol, the Fugitive Slave Act has been made a scourge and a terror to innocent men and women.
If all these pains and sorrows had redounded in any respect to the honor of the country, or had contributed in any way to the strength of the Union, then we might confess, perhaps, that something at least had been gained. But, alas! there has been nothing but unmixed evil. The country has suffered in good name, while foreign nations have pointed with scorn to a republic which could legalize such indecencies. Not a case occurred which was not greedily chronicled in Europe, and circulated there by the enemies of liberal institutions. Even since the Rebellion began in the name of Slavery, the existence of this odious enactment unrepealed on our statute-book has been quoted abroad to show that the supporters of the Union are as little deserving of sympathy as Rebel Slavemongers. By the enforcement of this odious Act the Union has suffered from the beginning; for not a slave is thrust back into bondage without weakening those patriotic sympathies, North and South, which are its best support. The natural irritation of the North, as it beheld all safeguards of Freedom overthrown and Slavery triumphant in its very streets, was answered by savage exultation in the South, which seemed to dance about its victims. Each instance was the occasion of new exasperations on both sides, which were skilfully employed by wicked conspirators “to fire the Southern heart.”
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.