CHAPTER XVIII.
THE EXECUTION OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW, AND THE ELECTION OF 1852
[Change of Attitude of the Slaveholders by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850]—[The First Cases Under the New Law]—[The Opposition to the Execution of the Law]—[Establishment of the "Underground"]—[The Support of the Law by the Political Leaders]—[The President's Support of the Law]—[Joshua R. Giddings]—[Petitions for the Repeal of the Law]—[The Shadrach Case]—[The Investigation of the Case by Congress]—[The Question of Increasing the Power of the President to Execute the Law]—[The Sims Case]—[Excitement in Boston Over the Rendition of Sims]—[The "Jerry Rescue"]—[The President's Rebuke]—[Mr. Foote's Finality Resolutions]—[The Failure of the Resolutions to Pass the Senate, but Their Success in the House]—[The National Conventions of 1852 and the Finality of the Compromise Measures]—[The Deaths of Clay and of Webster, and the Appearance of a Free-soil Candidate]—[The Overwhelming Democratic Victory of 1852]—[The True Policy of the Slaveholders, and Their Failure to Discern It.]
| Change of attitude of the slaveholders by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. |
Down to the time of the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, it may be said that the slaveholders were acting, in a certain sense, on the defensive. Before 1787, slavery had been regarded as a temporary relation, demanded by the moral and intellectual degradation of the Africans, and by the necessities of the social structure in which Anglo-Saxon and negro were brought together. It had been considered that the rise of the negro in civilization, by his contact with the white race, would gradually change this relation in the direction of freedom. In fact it had done so, in a considerable degree. But the formation of the Constitution of 1787, the invention and use of the cotton-gin, the acquisition of Louisiana, and the general subsidence of the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century, were all unfavorable to further progress in this only proper and correct direction. Between 1830 and 1840, a strong retrogressive movement set in, as we have seen, provoked indeed, in a considerable degree, by the Abolition propaganda; and in consequence of it, the slaveholders abandoned the only moral principle upon which slavery could be justified, and began to adopt the idea of the permanency of the relation, and to undertake the adjustment of the laws, customs, institutions, and policies of the country to this idea. And, at last, by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, they committed the whole country to this course. In a word, they made slavery by this law a national matter, and they did it from the property point of view of slavery, the point of view which exhibits it in its most hateful light, and from which no moral justification whatsoever for its existence can be found.
It is true that the Constitution commanded the return of fugitive slaves, and that the Supreme Court of the United States had interpreted the provision as vesting the power of executing this command in, and imposing the duty of its execution exclusively upon, the general Government, but it was a fatal policy for the slaveholders to insist upon the realization of this right through the general Government. In fact, it was a fatal policy to insist upon its realization at all. There was no way to effect it without requiring the aid of the North in the perpetuation of slavery. The attempt to effect it was, therefore, the assumption of an offensive attitude on the part of the slaveholders, an attitude which was bound to provoke a general hostility to slavery throughout the North, instead of the indifference which had prevailed under the idea that slavery was an institution of the Southern Commonwealths, with which the North and the general Government had no concern. Calhoun and Rhett and Davis had seen this danger, and they were not supporters of a national fugitive slave law. They preferred to consider the matter of the rendition of fugitive slaves as a special compact between the "States," and treat its non-fulfilment as a rupture of the Union. Possibly, protected as their "States" were by the border slaveholding Commonwealths, they did not feel the necessity of such a law. At any rate, it was the border slaveholding Commonwealths which wanted the law.