To tamper with the witnesses of the adverse party, or endeavor to suborn his counsel to violate their duty to their client, is not only an act of the grossest baseness, but would subject the offender to penal retribution. Yet what need would there ever be of corrupting witnesses or suborning counsel, if a party could get bodily possession and absolute control of his antagonist himself?
Does not every one see that, in ninety-nine cases in a hundred, a control over the defendant’s person and will would be a control over his case? His rights would be lost in his enforced disability to defend them. You might as well put out a man’s eyes, and then talk of his right in the common sunlight. In Baltimore, or Louisville, a kidnapped freeman might find an opportunity of self-redemption; but such a captive will never be carried to Baltimore or Louisville. He will be sent to some interior region, perhaps fifty miles from any court, or the residence of any counsel, where he may never have an opportunity to speak to a white man unless it be to a taskmaster, who is paid to guard and to silence him.
The authors of the Federalist deemed the principle of excluding an interested party from all power of deciding his own cause to be so important, that they laid down the following doctrine: “No man ought certainly to be a judge in his own cause, or in any cause, in respect to which he has the least interest or bias.” (No. 80.) Yet the only chance which the Fugitive Slave law allows to a freeman, when carried into bondage, is that which he may exercise while under the absolute control of his robber master.
But more than this: the law imposes no obligation upon the claimant to carry his victim to the state he is charged to have escaped from. A man charged to have escaped from Texas may be carried to Florida. Nay, he may not be carried to any state in this Union; but may be sent to Cuba or Brazil; beyond hope, and into the outer darkness of despair.
All the arguments which I have ever heard, or seen, on this point, gratuitously assume, that the persons reclaimed and transported will have an honest master, be surrounded by kind friends, and have a lawyer at hand whom they can consult with every day, and money in their pockets to fee him. Would such be the case of a kidnapped freeman? Would a wretch, vile enough to rob a man of his liberty, carry him five hundred or a thousand miles, and then go to a shire town during a session of the court, and give his pretended slave a purse of money with which to fee a lawyer for investigating his right to freedom? No! the man who knows, or suspects, that he has seized a freeman, or that his victim even believes himself to be a freeman, and will put the claimant to the trouble and expense of a trial, will plunge that freeman into the abyss of bondage, where no ray of hope may ever reach him, and where his voice will be hushed as in the silence of death.
Another objection to the Fugitive Slave law is, that it confers judicial power upon persons who are not judges. Here we are not left to inference or construction, but can stand on the plain words of the constitution. The third article declares,—
“The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges both of the supreme and inferior courts shall hold their offices during good behavior, and shall at stated times receive for their services a compensation which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.”—Art. III. § 1.
Here I hold it to be clear beyond dispute, that the “judges” mentioned in the second sentence of the above section are the members of the “supreme court” and “inferior courts” mentioned in the first section, and no other. If so, then there can be no doubt about the tenure of their office, and the mode of their appointment, compensation, and removal.
By sec. 2, of Art. II., the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint,” “judges of the supreme court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law.”
The appointment of no judge of any court is “otherwise provided for in the constitution;” and therefore the appointment of all the judges in whom “the judicial power of the United States is vested,” belongs by the constitution to the President and Senate; and this “judicial power” cannot be delegated to, nor exercised by, any persons not so appointed.