Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

He repeats, and keeps repeating, that his decision, dooming Sims to all the horrors of bondage, and putting him under the control of a man who claims title to his body and his soul, to be carried into a jurisdiction where such titles are acknowledged, is not “FINAL.” It is not final, he says, because if Sims be free, he may extort that freedom from the laws of Georgia which has been denied to him by the laws of Massachusetts; that is, if the judgment which the commissioner is giving against a free man, in a free state, is a false judgment, he may go to a slave state to obtain redress,—which is ten thousand times worse than if a jury, in a capital case, should say, We may find this prisoner guilty; for if he be wrongfully hanged, God will make him amends.

Besides the inhumanity of this position, it contains a fallacy which is twin-brother to the one just considered. The judicial word, “final,” has a legal, technical, and certain meaning. In the courts, and in the law books, it means the last judgment in a judicial proceeding. It means that judgment from which a party cannot appeal, though he may ever so much desire it; or it means that judgment, after which, however dissatisfied the party may be, he cannot have his cause retried or reheard by a court, but is compelled to submit.

“Final judgments,” says Blackstone, “are such as at once put an end to the action.” This is a precise description of the judgment rendered by the commissioner against Sims. That victim resisted by prayers and tears, by the subduing eloquence of his counsel, and by their irresistible logic, which the commissioner has never yet begun to answer. But the self-constituted judge was inexorable. Though he knew that, according to the terms of the Fugitive Law, there was no escape from his decision; though he knew that his certificate was to protect the man-hunter from all “molestation by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever,” yet, like Pilate, he washes his hands and says, “I am innocent of this man’s blood, see ye to it;” for my decision is not “final.” And why? Because, in another jurisdiction, in another suit, where the plaintiff is to be defendant, and the defendant plaintiff, or perhaps against another party; in a place, too, where all the common-law presumptions in favor of freedom are reversed; where the law is different, and the rules of evidence are different; and where the respondent himself is reduced to the condition of a chattel and a brute, a decision, at some indefinite future period, may be had that the man, whom the commissioner now declares to be a slave, is free, and has always been so. Because of this future and contingent event, because of this almost impossible possibility, the commissioner’s decision is not final. I deny this. The decision is final, because, as Blackstone says, it “at once puts an end to the action.” But let us test the question, not only by its legal definition, but by its actual effects. It decides that Sims is a slave. It decides that he owes service to James Potter. It decides that Potter and his heirs and assigns forever are the lawful owners of Sims and the heirs of his bondage forever; and when Sims and his posterity shall be scourged, torn, flayed, mutilated, starved, the only consolation which the commissioner has for him and them is, Shall the clay say to the Potter that fashioneth it, What makest thou? It not only decides that Sims is a slave, and that he shall be sent to Georgia, but it sends familiars, like those which once disgraced even the purlieus of the Inquisition, to see that the devilish deed is done.

The whole argument of the commissioner, that this act of his is not final, is founded on a quibble,—on the use of the legal word “final,” as though it were synonymous with the popular word eternal or perpetual. The slavery of Sims may not be eternal or perpetual; because, by some miracle of God, or otherwise, he may escape. But in a technical and juridical sense the decision of the commissioner is final; and he might as well doom a man to be hurled from the Tarpeian rock, and say that the act is not final, because he only commits the victim to the laws of gravitation, as he has committed Sims to the laws of Georgia.

If by any possibility this doctrine, that the decision is not final, could be for a moment sustained, then I will submit a case with which to compare it.

The constitution says, “No state shall pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts.” Here we have a constitutional basis,—the same as for the reclamation of fugitive slaves. Some states have passed laws impairing the obligation of contracts, as the stop-laws of Kentucky, and so forth. Suppose a Massachusetts creditor to claim to have a Kentucky debtor, whose contract has been so impaired. Could Congress, in order to give efficacy to this constitutional provision, authorize this pretended creditor to go to Kentucky, seize enough of the alleged debtor’s property to satisfy the alleged debt, and carry it home, or have it ordered home by a magistrate, under some “summary” process, which, on its face, excludes the trial by jury; and thereby debar the supposed defendant of all right under that provision of the constitution which gives a jury trial when the value in controversy exceeds twenty dollars? And could the Kentucky magistrate, in the supposed case, deny the jury trial on the ground that the proceeding before him was not “final,” because the defendant might follow the plaintiff to Massachusetts, and there institute an action of replevin, trespass, or trover, to try, before a jury of the country, the right of the former plaintiff to the property he had seized?

The commissioner says much in different places, with the apparent hope of showing that the proceeding before him was only for what he calls a “limited and special purpose,” namely, “removal.”

I confess myself unable to understand why the certificate of the commissioner is any more restricted to a limited and special purpose than any judicial act, sentence, or execution, of any court whatever. The commissioner declares a prima facie freeman to be a slave. He declares that James Potter owns Thomas Sims, and the posterity in his loins forever; or that Thomas Sims and his posterity forever, owe service to James Potter and his heirs and assigns forever. Does this “forever” limit the meaning of the certificate, as to time? If so, then a general or unlimited award or execution, against Sims, as contradistinguished from this limited and special one, must extend and run into the next world. When our courts decide that one man owes another man money, they award execution against his property, with certain humane exemptions as to clothes, furniture, provisions, school books, Bible, &c. But when this commissioner decided that Sims owed Potter service, he awarded a certificate against the adjudged debtor, which made no exemption whatever; but included property, clothes, books, skin, flesh, heart, brain, soul, and all that was in him, or of him, with all appurtenances and appendages, present emblements, and future increase. Yet, according to the commissioner, the first judgment is a common or general one; the last “special and limited.” Under our old laws, (and under the laws of some states yet,) courts could sentence offenders to the barbarous punishment of flogging. But they were and are bound to specify the number of lashes. This is general. The commissioner delivers over a slave to be flogged by his master, ad libitum, and in perpetuum, to be flogged in his own person, and to be flogged in the persons of his children, and their posterity, in secula seculorum. The defined flogging of thirty-nine, or such other number of lashes as can be computed, the commissioner calls general or indefinite. But the incomputable number of lashes; the vast, unknown, algebraic quantity; the infinite series; that which Newton with all his mathematics could not compass, nor Rosse with his telescope see the end of,—that is “special and limited.” The taking of a limited amount of a man’s property, carefully set down in dollars and cents, both in the text and in the margin of the execution, the commissioner calls a general purpose. But the robbing of a man, not only of all he has earned, but of all his capabilities of earning as long as he breathes, with full authority to do the same thing to his posterity to the latest generation, this is “special and limited.” To sentence a man to be hanged by the neck till he be dead, though with privilege of priest, prayer book, and Bible,—this, too, is general and proper; though in Massachusetts it can be done only by a majority of the judges of the supreme court. But to send a man to be worked to death in five years on a sugar plantation, where his being taught to read the gospel of Jesus Christ is a felony,—this is “special and limited,” and so may be done by any hireling commissioner who will do what Judas did for one third part of his silver pieces.

Fellow-citizens, I submit to any man, clerical, legal, or lay, who is capable of appreciating moral distinctions, whether this whole doctrine, about delivering a man up as a slave, and putting him bodily into the hands of the claimant, and thrusting him into slave jurisdiction, under the pretext that it is done only for the special and limited purpose of removal, be not atrocious. It is more like a forgery than an argument. Assumed learning and logic never practised a greater imposition upon themselves, nor attempted a greater one upon others, than when they fabricated this notion, that adjudging a man to be a slave, stripping him of his liberam legem, that is, of all his rights and immunities as a citizen, and delivering him into actual bondage, is “for a special and limited purpose of removal,”—only to give him a voyage, or a pleasure excursion of a few hundred miles,—out,—but not back. When the successor of St. Peter, claiming to hold the keys of heaven, and to have death and hell for his ministers, excommunicated whole sects and peoples, and delivered them over to the great soul-hunter, and sent his familiars with them to see that the “claimant” suffered no “molestation” while conveying them to the bottomless pit, he might as well have said that he did it only for a “special and limited purpose.” It was not damnation, it was only “removal.” And do you suppose the devil, could he have got possession of those outcast souls, would have cared any more under what pretence the great pontiff commissioner made the delivery, than does the southern slaveholder, when he gets possession of a man of whom he can make a slave?

This fallacy about the “special and limited purpose of removal” did not originate with Mr. Commissioner Curtis. I exculpate him from that guilt. He only adopted it and gave it a “bad eminence” by making it, in part, the basis of his decision. But henceforth let the people brand it. Let them classify it and denounce it, and detest it, as belonging to that impious and blasphemous kind of arguments by which our first parents were beguiled, when Satan told them that, though they sinned against God, they should not die; or by which Mr. Webster cajoled and cozened so many honest men, when he assured them, that though they should violate the moral law, by opening all the territories to slavery, yet some physical law of geography or the weather would avert the penalties.