Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

The committee of vigilance, (another “committee of vigilance,”) of the parish of East Feliciana, offered, in the Louisville Journal, of October 15, 1835, $50,000 to any person who would deliver into their hands Arthur Tappan, a merchant of New York.

At a public meeting of the citizens of Mount Meigs, Alabama, August 13, 1836, the honorable Bedford Ginress in the chair, a reward of $50,000 was offered for the apprehension of the same Arthur Tappan, or of Le Roy Sunderland, a Methodist clergyman of New York.

Repeated instances have occurred in which the governors of slave states,—Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, Alabama, &c.,—have made requisitions upon the governors of free states, under the second section of the fourth article of the constitution, for the surrender of free citizens, as fugitives from justice, when it was well known that the citizens so demanded were not within the limits of the slave states at the time when the alleged offence was committed, and, in some instances, had never been there in their lives,—high executive perversions of the constitution of the United States, by chief magistrates who had sworn to support it!

For nearly twenty years past the post-office laws of the United States have been systematically violated in slave states, the mail bags rifled, and their contents seized and publicly burned; and, in some instances, these violations have been enjoined, under heavy penalties, by a law of the states. There are several of the slave states on whose statute books these laws, commanding a violation of the post-office, stand to-day.

During Mr. Adams’s administration, a man by the name of Tassels, in Georgia, was adjudged to be hanged, under a law of the state, as clearly unconstitutional as was ever passed. A writ of error was sued out from the supreme court of the United States, in order to bring the case before that tribunal for revision. But the state of Georgia anticipated the service of the writ, and made sure of its victim by hanging him extemporaneously.

Within a few weeks past,—the accounts having but just now reached us,—an aged and most respectable individual of the name of Harris, a citizen of New Hampshire, has been tried by a mob in South Carolina, and tarred and feathered, because he happened to have in his trunk a sermon which had been sent to him by one of his acquaintances, a clergyman at the north; though he had never showed the sermon to a single individual, nor whispered a word of its contents. Another man, a Dr. Coles, belonging to Boston, who had been lecturing on the subject of physiology, was, within a few days, seized and carried before a magistrate, in the same state, his trunks rifled, the private letters sent to him by his wife and family publicly read, with the most indecent comments, and all without any shadow of reasonable suspicion against him.

The unconstitutional imprisonment of northern seamen in southern ports is an occurrence so frequent, and so universally known, that I need not spend time to enumerate or to describe the cases.

The President of the United States has made proclamation, and proffered the military and naval force of the United States, to aid any southern slave owner in reducing his fugitive slave to a new bondage; but I have not heard that he has made any similar proclamation, or manifested any anxiety for the support of that part of the constitution which says that “the citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.”

Now, with a few exceptions, it is these very classes of men who violate the laws against extortion and usury; who break down the barriers against the desolations of intemperance; who, almost alone of all our citizens, are implicated in the breach of the revenue laws; who annul the post-office laws of the United States; who offer rewards for free northern citizens, that they may get them in their clutch to lynch and murder them; who demand free citizens as fugitives from justice, in states where they have never been, and who imprison free citizens and sell them into slavery;—it is these classes of men who are now so suddenly smitten with a new sense of the sacredness of law, and of the duty of obedience to law,—not of the laws of God, not even of the laws of man, in general, but of this most abominable of all enactments, the Fugitive Slave law in particular.

I do not cite the above cases from among a thousand similar ones, as any justification or apology for forcible and organized resistance to law by those who even constructively can be said to have given it their consent. But the words of a preacher do not “come mended from his tongue,” when his name is a scandal among men for his violation of all the precepts he enjoins.