Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

Then the cruel haste in executing judgment! The murderer is allowed a season of respite between the hour of sentence and the hour of death; the debtor may turn out goods to satisfy a creditor’s demands; but the alleged fugitive has no reprieve. He has no opportunity to solicit money to redeem himself, or to negotiate for the ransom of body and soul. Swift and sure as an arrow to its mark, he is speeded on his way to the abodes of toil and despair. The witnesses who swore away his liberty may have been perjured, but he cannot stop to convict them. The court may have been corrupt, but he cannot remain to impeach it. However honestly rendered, the judgment may be reversible for error in law, but he cannot stay to set it aside.

Now, every one must see that where there is so little caution before trial, there should be a liberal opportunity for revision after it. But here is infinite exposure to error with no chance for rectification. Overstepping the acts of the common tyrant, there is an infliction of the most heinous wrong, with a premeditated purpose that it shall not be repaired. The great and free republic of North America has transferred the unwritten law of Judge Lynch to its statute book.

However clear the constitutional obligation of Congress to enact a law for the reclamation of fugitive slaves may be supposed by any one to be, there certainly are limitations to this obligation, which all the principles of our government forbid the law-maker to transcend.

In the first place, this constitutional obligation must be strictly construed. The main and primary object of the constitution was to protect natural rights; but the object of the Fugitive Slave clause was to protect a legal right in conflict with natural right. All judges of an honorable name, all courts in all civilized communities, have recognized a broad distinction in the principles of interpreting law. They have held that provisions against life and liberty should be strictly construed, while those in favor of life and liberty should be liberally construed,—the one so construed as to inflict as little of pain and privation as possible; the other, to give as much of freedom and immunity as possible. These have become maxims, or axioms, of legal interpretation; and in their long and unbroken recognition, it is not too strong an expression to say, they impetrate and command a strict construction of that clause in the constitution under which fugitives may be claimed. And the same legal maxims, in regard to all subjects touching life and liberty, bind Congress in legislating under the constitution, as bind the judicial tribunals in administering the law.

Yet the Fugitive Slave law contains provisions which there can be no pretence nor shadow of a pretence that the constitution requires. By the constitution, “No person held to service or labor in one state, escaping into another, shall be discharged.” Into another what? Indisputably, into another state. It must mean state, and can mean nothing else; for the laws of language admit no other construction. The expression, “No person held in one state, escaping into another TERRITORY,” would be not merely ungrammatical and un-English, but nonsensical. No man of common intelligence ever so construed a sentence. Yet the sixth section of the act provides not only for the case of slaves escaping from one state into another state, but for their escape from a state into a territory, and for an escape from a territory into a state, and for an escape from one territory into another territory. Four classes of cases are provided for by the law, while but one of them finds any warrant in the constitution.

Now let any one take a map of the United States, and see over what a vast area the law extends, over which the provision in the constitution does not extend. The region is continental over which the law unconstitutionally extends, and this corresponds with the vast inhumanity of the principle which so extends it.

Mark another particular in which the provisions of the law go beyond the requirements of the constitution. The constitution says the fugitive shall be “delivered up.” The law makes provision for transporting him to the claimant’s home. Is there any similar provision respecting any other species of property? If a northern merchant recovers a debt from his southern customer, does the government assume the responsibility of seeing that it is paid to the creditor at his own home? If a northern man is robbed, and the stolen goods are found in another state, does the government transport them back and pay freight? Then, why should government interpose in this case to bear costs and risks, unless slavery is so meritorious an institution as to deserve the benefactions as well as the benedictions of freemen?

Then observe how artfully the law is worded, to make the assistance rendered to the claimant go beyond any supposed necessity in the case. “If,” it says, “upon affidavit made by the claimant, ... his agent or attorney, ... that he has reason to apprehend that such fugitive will be rescued by force, ... before he can take him beyond the limits of the state in which the arrest is made, it shall be the duty of the officer ... to remove him to the state whence he fled.” Thus, if danger is apprehended, within the first ten miles, the government shall see the slave safely home, at its own expense, though it be a thousand miles.

But besides the unheard-of principle of saddling the government with the expense of prosecuting the private claims of its citizens within its own jurisdiction, I should like to know what provision the constitution contains, which, though interpreted by the most latitudinarian constructionist, confers any right upon Congress thus to take the money of one citizen to pay the private expenses of another. There is no clause, or phrase, or word in that instrument which favors the idea that the Northern States should bear the expense, as well as the disgrace, of thus remanding our fellow-men into bondage.

Besides, if the limits of the constitution were to be transcended in order to deliver an alleged fugitive to his master, would not the slightest element of equity, or decency, even, require that when a freeman is condemned to bondage under the law, his expenses, incurred in returning to the place where he was plundered of himself, should be reimbursed to him by the government which had failed in its duty to protect him? If the claimant of James Hamlet could be supplied with a force, at the government’s expense, to carry him into slavery, why should not the expense of coming back into a land of freedom be reimbursed by the government to Adam Gibson, after one of its venal and villanous instruments had wrested that freedom from him?