By act of Congress of April 2, 1816, it was declared that no cause should be removed from the circuit court of the District of Columbia to the supreme court by appeal or writ of error, “unless the matter in dispute shall be of the value of one thousand dollars or upwards.” The plaintiffs in error were claimed as slaves. Their petition for freedom in the court below had been decided against them; and from this decision they appealed. The defendant in error took the objection that they,—their bodies and souls,—were not worth one thousand dollars, and therefore that they had no right to appeal. But the court said,—
“The matter in dispute, in this case, is the freedom of the petitioners. The judgment of the court below is against their claims to freedom; the matter in dispute is, therefore, to the plaintiffs in error, the value of their freedom, and this is not susceptible of a pecuniary valuation. Had the judgment been in favor of the petitioners, and the writ of error brought by the party claiming to be the owner, the value of the slaves as property would have been the matter in dispute, and affidavits might be admitted to ascertain such value. But affidavits estimating the value of freedom are entirely inadmissible; and no doubt is entertained of the jurisdiction of the court.”
Now, if the supreme court of the United States, in construing a law, felt constrained by their oaths to hold the freedom of a man,—of any man, though he might be a drivelling idiot, or stretched upon his death bed, with only another hour to breathe,—to be worth more than a thousand dollars, how can a senator of the United States say, that in passing a law, under which human liberty may be retained or lost, he is not bound at least by the “spirit” of the constitution, if not by its letter, to hold that human liberty to be of greater value than twenty dollars, and therefore to provide the trial by jury for its protection? What can prove more strikingly that Mr. Webster violates the whole “spirit” of the constitution, when the framers and ratifiers of this amendment covenanted for and decreed the trial by jury, for such a paltry sum of money; and when the judges of the supreme court held human liberty to be worth more than any nameable sum of money, while he regards it as a thing to be disposed of by any corrupt postmaster, which any corrupt administration may corruptly appoint. Yet he says, “Nothing can be more false than that a jury trial is demanded in cases of this kind by the constitution, either in its letter, or in its spirit.”
I wish I could find, or felt at liberty to coin some milder word; but for want of a better, I must say that Mr. Webster seems to me, throughout this whole matter, to dogmatize. He makes strong assertions without offering even weak reasons. Of this character was his annunciation of the discovery of a new law,—“the law of physical geography,”—which was to suspend moral agency, and take from man his power to commit crime against his brother; as though in ascending hill-sides, freedom and slavery lie in different atmospherical strata, and are bounded by each other impassably; as though there were any mountain so “exceeding high,” to whose top even Jesus Christ could go, that Satan could not go there to tempt him. This does not strike the common mind like a true discovery;—like the law of gravitation, for instance, discovered by Newton, or the existence of the planet Neptune, by Leverrier. It is rather like that earliest pretended discovery on record, which was designed to seduce, and did seduce, the first parents of us all. Ye may eat of the forbidden tree, for ye shall NOT surely die. So Mr. Webster says, Let slaves be driven in coffles, or carried in ships’ holds to the new territories; they cannot live there. Will not the results of the two experiments bear a lively analogy to each other, and be likely to reflect similar credit upon their authors?
So, too, when he tore some of the brightest pages from the New Testament, by proclaiming that “there is to be found no injunction against that relation [of slavery] between man and man, in the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ, or of any of his apostles”! Upon how many Christian hearts did this sentiment fall like an anathema against all truth. He does not say any express injunction, but “no injunction;”—none of any kind. No positive injunction against slavery in the New Testament!—a book designed to regulate our life and condition for two worlds; yet, altogether, not so large as many a congressional report; less voluminous than the ordinances of many of our city governments;—a book, therefore, which, from the necessity of the case, must deal with great and immortal principles, and could not descend into specification and detail;—and because such a book as this contains no express injunction against slavery, therefore slavery is not forbidden by it, but has the implied approval of its silence! Surely, never was there a more sinister, unsound, unchristian argument uttered by infidel or pagan. Is there any express injunction “in the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ, or of any of his apostles,” commanding us to declare the African slave trade piracy? Is there any express injunction “in the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ, or of any of his apostles,” against cannibalism? Do they any where say, “Ye shall not eat one another?” Yet what enormity and flagitiousness would it be to infer, that, therefore, men and women may turn ogres and ogresses, and eat human flesh as they do mutton and sirloin. The inference in the latter case is every whit as warrantable and as sound, as in the former. Yet I consider that this theological argument does not violate the “spirit” of the gospel, any more than his constitutional argument violates the “spirit” of the constitution. John Wesley, who had lived amid slavery, denominates it the “sum of all villanies,” and if Christ came into this world and left it, without permeating and saturating all his teachings with injunctions against the injustice, cruelty, pride, avarice, lust, love of domination, and love of adulation, which are the inseparable accompaniments of slavery, then I think the Christian world will cry out, that so far as this life is concerned, his mission was substantially fruitless.
“O, star-eyed Science! hast thou wandered there,
To bring us back these tidings of despair?”
So, if the constitution of the United States contains not even any implied security for the liberty of all the colored population in the free states and territories, and for the trial by jury as the only adequate means of securing that liberty, then would it not be more creditable to its framers never to have put their signatures to it?
Let me here compare the relative value of life or property on the one side, with liberty on the other, and see what inference must be drawn in favor of affording as great a protection to the latter as to the former.
The fifth article of amendment declares that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The commentators say that these words, “due process of law,” are the equivalent of the phrase “the law of the land,” in the 29th chapter of Magna Charta; and hence that “this clause in effect affirms the right of trial according to the process and proceedings of the common law;” that is, by jury. (See Story’s Comm. 661; 2 Inst. 50, 51; 2 Kent’s Comm. 10; 1 Tucker’s Black. App. 304.)