Blake unfolded the paper he had seized, and read as follows: “You will probably find Peek, either at Bunker’s in Broadway, or at his rooms in Greenwich Street, the side nearest the river, third or fourth house from the corner of Dey Street.”
Blake thrust the paper back into his pocket, and, wholly regardless of Charlton’s presence, began pacing the floor.
CHAPTER IX.
THE UPPER AND THE LOWER LAW.
“There is a law above all the enactments of human codes,—the same throughout the world, the same in all times: it is the law written by the finger of God on the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal, while men despise fraud and loathe rapine and abhor bloodshed, they will reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy than man can hold property in man.”—Lord Brougham.
The policeman, Blake, was a Vermonter whose grandsire had been one of the eighty men under Ethan Allen at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. The traditions of the Revolution were therefore something more than barren legends in Blake’s mind. They had inspired him with an enthusiastic admiration of the republic and its institutions. His patriotism was a sentiment which all the political and moral corruption, with which a New York policeman is inevitably brought in contact, could not corrode or enfeeble.
Even slavery, being tolerated by the Constitution of the United States, was, in his view, not to be spoken of lightly. He shut his eyes and his ears to all that could be said in its condemnation; he opened them to all its palliating features and facts. Did not statistics prove that the blacks, in a state of slavery, increase in double the proportion they do in a state of freedom, surrounded by whites? This comforting argument was eagerly seized by Blake as a moral sedative.
The Fugitive-Slave Law he was satisfied was strictly in accordance with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United States. Therefore it must be honestly enforced. The Abolitionists, who were striving to defeat the execution of the law, were almost as bad as Mississippi repudiators who were swindling their foreign creditors. So long as we were enjoying the benefits of the Constitution, was it not mean and dastardly to undertake to jockey the South out of the obvious protection of that clause in it which has reference to the “person held to service or labor,” which we all knew to mean the slave?
Considerations like these had made Blake one of the most earnest advocates of the enforcement of the law among his brethren of the police; and when at last he was called on to carry it out in the case of Peek, he felt that obedience was a duty which it would be poltroonery to evade. He went forth, therefore, with alacrity that morning, resolved to allow no mawkish sensibility to interfere with his obligations as an officer and a citizen.
Accompanied by Iverson, he waited on Colonel Delancy Hyde at the New York Hotel. They found that worthy in the smoking-room, seated at a small marble table, with a cigar in his mouth and an emptied tumbler, which smelt strongly of undiluted whiskey, before him. The Colonel graciously asked the officers to “liquor.” Iverson assented, but Blake declined.
A refusal to “liquor,” the Colonel had been bred to regard as a personal indignity; and so, turning to Blake, he said: “Look here, stranger! I’m Colonel Delancy Hyde. Virginia-born, be Gawd! From one of the oldest families in the State! None of yer interloping Yankee scum! No Puritan blood in me! My ahncestor was one of the cavalyers. My father was one of the largest slave-owners in the State. Now if yer want to put an affront on me, I’d jest have yer understand fust who yer’ve got to deal with.”