And it is this very class of men who have thus abjured the precepts of Jesus Christ, who have trampled upon the divine doctrines of liberty and love, that now so clamorously summon us to an obedience to law.
In answer to this call, let me say, that true obedience to law is necessarily accompanied and preceded by a reverence for those great principles of justice and humanity without which all law is despotism. How can a man pretend to any honest regard for the principle of obedience to law when he is willing, as in the case of this fugitive act, to transcend our constitutional law, and to invade the divine law? It is but an appeal to the lower rule of action to justify a violation of the higher. Under the pretext of rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s it denies to God the things that are God’s.
And again, a true reverence for law is a general principle, and not an isolated fact. It applies to all laws collectively, and not to any one law in particular. It bestows its greatest homage upon those laws that embrace and confer the most of human welfare; for, were all the laws of a community, or the great majority of them, unrighteous, then disloyalty to law would be the virtue. Can the class of men who demand our allegiance to the Fugitive Slave law stand this test? We have usury laws, which not only carry the legal force of statutes, but the moral power of the greatest names in legislation and in statesmanship. Are the men in New York, in Philadelphia, and Boston, who are most vehement in support of the Fugitive Slave law, signalized for their regard to the statutes against usury?
Is not money lent in all those cities on the same principle that wreckers send a rope’s end to a drowning man,—for as much as they can extort? It is notorious that among the great body of merchants and capitalists in those cities, interest is regulated by the pressure upon the money market, and that no more idea of law mingles with their contracts than in California, where there is no law on the subject.
We have laws restricting the sale of intoxicating liquors, and designed to promote the glorious object of temperance. For which practice have our cities been conspicuous,—for their obedience to these laws or for their violation of them? A few years ago, when a question of the constitutionality of a law of Massachusetts for the restraint of intemperance arose, did not its two distinguished senators appear in the supreme court of the United States, and make the most strenuous exertions to annul the law of their own state, and to open anew the flood-gates for overwhelming their own constituents in misery and ruin,—the selfsame gentlemen who are now so intolerant even of discussion?
Look at the complaints which come to us every day from the friends of a protective tariff. They tell us that our revenue laws are fraudulently and systematically evaded; and they number the violations of these laws by thousands and tens of thousands. Who are the violators? Not men living in the country; not the farmers and mechanics and laborers,—the substratum of our strength and the origin of our power;—but they are the city merchants, the getters-up of “Union meetings,” and the members of “safety and vigilance committees,” who are so earnest in inculcating those lessons of obedience by their precepts, which they have done so little to recommend by their example.
The Southern States are loud in their calls upon us to execute the Fugitive Slave law. But what examples have they set us on the subject of obedience to law? I think I may be pardoned for mentioning a few cases, to show how their preaching and practice tally.
In 1831, the legislature of Georgia offered a bribe of five thousand dollars to any one who would arrest, and bring to trial and conviction, in Georgia, a citizen of Massachusetts, named William Lloyd Garrison. This law was “approved” by William Lumpkin, governor, on the 26th December, 1831. Mr. Garrison had never stepped foot within the limits of Georgia, and therefore it was not a reward for his trial and conviction, but for his abduction and murder.
At a meeting of slaveholders, held at Sterling, in the same state, September 4, 1835, it was formally recommended to the governor, to offer, by proclamation, the five thousand dollars appropriated by the act of 1831, for the apprehension of either of ten persons, citizens, with one exception, of New York, or Massachusetts, whose names were given; not one of whom, it was not even pretended, had ever been within the limits of Georgia.
The Milledgeville, Georgia, “Federal Union,” of February 1, 1836, contained an offer of $10,000 for kidnapping A. A. Phelps, a clergyman of the city of New York.