There are two remarks thrown out in the course of the commissioner’s opinion so shocking to every feeling of humanity, that any one, in commenting upon them, may well be excused for passing from the language of argument to that of emotion.
If there be any one right known to the common law more important and sacred than all others, it is the right of confronting and cross-examining the witnesses who are brought to testify against us. Without this right, there is no fraud that cannot be practised upon the most honest man, and no guilt that cannot be proved against the most innocent one. Doubtless this right of cross-examination is sometimes abused; but there are few spectacles more exciting or more gratifying than to see the demons of falsehood driven out, one after another, from a perjured villain, until the truth, at last, is wrenched from his heart, notwithstanding the double boltings and barrings with which he had locked it there. The fear of this cross-examination “casting its shadows before,” has prevented thousands and tens of thousands from swearing falsely. Next to honesty, this fear is the greatest protection to property, liberty, and life.
Now the testimony which doomed Sims to slavery, and which may doom any of us with our wives and children to slavery, when men grow, not more wicked, but only a little more bold in their wickedness than they are now, was wholly ex parte testimony; taken, not merely behind the victim’s back, but a thousand miles behind his back; of which he had no knowledge, and, unless he were omniscient, like God, could have no knowledge. And when the counsel of Sims urged upon the commissioner the enormity of this outrage against all principle, what was his reply? It was this, and it makes a man’s blood run cold to read it: Sims’s absence from Georgia, “so that he could not be served with notice, if he was entitled to it, was in his own wrong, and he cannot now complain that he had no opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses.”
I appeal to all history to prove, that no judge who ever sat upon a bench where the common law was recognized and administered, however corrupt he may have been, ever advanced a more atrocious doctrine. Why, gentlemen, if a debtor absconds for the very purpose of defrauding his creditors, he must have notice before he can be proceeded against for the recovery of a debt. If he flees from the state, lurks and hides himself, he must have the best notice the court can contrive to give him. If the plaintiff recovers and takes out execution, he must file a bond conditioned to make restoration; and years afterwards, if the defendant shall come back and show cause; he shall be entitled to a review to annul the whole proceedings against him. Ay, when a criminal, a robber, a murderer, an incendiary, is brought to trial, even he must be “confronted with the witnesses against him, have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and the assistance of counsel in his defence.” And yet the commissioner makes proof out of nothing, that Sims escaped from slavery, and then, because of this nothing-made proof, he inculpates him with being absent “in his own wrong.”
The other point referred to arose from certain testimony, (if it can be called testimony,) that the mother of Sims begged the witness, “whether her son was in a free state or in a slave state, for God’s sake, to bring him back again.” “This,” says the commissioner, “certainly disarms the case of any unpleasant features”! Why, even the kine of the barn-yard, when the butcher cuts the throat of her young, will weep and low, and bellow, for days and days, and say, as well as in her inarticulate moanings she can say, “For God’s sake, let it be brought back again;” though the only consequence of its return would be to have its throat cut by the butcher again. And are we to expect that the brutalized, chattelized “cattle” of the south will have less of that natural yearning and longing of the soul, at the loss of their offspring, than the animals of the farmer’s yard? Can we suppose that God has not planted the instinct of a mother’s love too deep to be destroyed but by the destruction of the being herself in whom it was planted? No! debase the mother as you will, by ignorance, vice, superstition, lust, concubinage, incest, and this wealth of affection will still glow at the bottom of her heart, “rich as the oozy bottom of the deep in sunken wrack and sumless treasures.” And because this mother’s love had not been all extinguished, the commissioner says that his sending a human being into the abyss of bondage, on evidence that an intelligent barbarian would reject, “certainly disarms the case of any unpleasant features.” But I shall not expostulate with the commissioner. A man must have a heart before he can feel, as he must have eyes before he can see.
“O, who can paint a sunbeam to the blind,
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?”
Fellow-citizens, I might occupy your attention much longer upon this unprecedented opinion of the commissioner; but there are two or three other topics to which I wish to call your attention, and I therefore forbear. In saying what I have said, I disclaim all personal ill will or discourtesy towards that magistrate. Even should I appear not to have succeeded in suppressing my own feelings, I certainly cannot wound his more than he has wounded mine, and those I believe of nine tenths of all who have ever read his opinion;—not by a thousand fold as much as he has wounded the law, whose servant he is, or the fair fame of Massachusetts, of which he is a citizen; not so much as his decision will wound the hearts of an intelligent posterity, who shall look back upon it as a partisan and an ignoble act, not to be remembered without a sigh.
If the legal relations of slavery did not sustain the moral ones, as the root sustains the branches and nourishes the fruit, those moral relations would seem to demand all our attention. I know but comparatively little, and no man living at the north can know but comparatively little, of the various and ever-repeated wickednesses of this institution. It has been my lot, however, to live for about half the time, during the last four years, in the midst of a milder form of slavery. And besides this, I was once engaged for about six weeks in the trial of causes growing directly out of slavery; and that experience gave me some insight into its dreadful mysteries. For a moment, the wind blew the smoke and flame aside, and I looked into its hell. I saw, then, as I had never seen before, what a vital and inextinguishable interest every human being has in this subject;—not the slaves alone, but the free men; not voters only, but all who can be affected by votes; not men only, but especially women.