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Page 54
Mr. Mason. Will the Senator indulge me one moment.
Mr. Wade. Certainly.
Mr. Mason. I know he does not intend to misrepresent me or other
gentlemen. What I said was, that the repeal of those laws would furnish
no cause of satisfaction to the Southern States. Our opinions of those
laws we gave freely. We said the repeal of those laws would give no
satisfaction.
Mr. Wade. Mr. President, I do not intend to misrepresent anything. I
understood those gentlemen to suppose that they had not been injured by
them. I understood the Senator from Virginia to believe that they were
enacted in a spirit of hostility to the institutions of the South, and
to object to them not because the acts themselves had done them any
hurt, but because they were really a stamp of degradation upon Southern
men, or something like that--I do not quote his words. The other
Senators that referred to it probably intended to be understood in the
same way; but they did acquit these laws of having done them injury to
their knowledge or belief.
I do not believe that these laws were, as the Senator supposed, enacted
with a view to exasperate the South, or to put them in a position of
degradation. Why, sir, these laws against kidnapping are as old as the
common law itself, as that Senator well knows. To take a freeman and
forcibly carry him out of the jurisdiction of the State, has ever been,
by all civilized countries, adjudged to be a great crime; and in most of
them, wherever I have understood anything about it, they have penal
laws to punish such an offence. I believe the State of Virginia has one
to-day as stringent in all its provisions as almost any other of which
you complain. I have not looked over the statute-books of the South; but
I do not doubt that there will be found this species of legislation upon
all your statute-books.
Here let me say, because the subject occurs to me right here, the
Senator from Virginia seemed not so much to point out any specific acts
that Northern people had done injurious to your property as, what he
took to be a dishonor and a degradation. I think I feel as sensitive
upon that subject as any other man. If I know myself, I am the last man
that would be the advocate of any law or any act that would humiliate or
dishonor any section of this country, or any individual in it; and, on
the other hand, let me tell these gentlemen I am exceedingly sensitive
upon that same point, whatever they may think about it. I would
rather sustain an injury than an insult or dishonor; and I would be
as unwilling to inflict it upon others as I would be to submit to it
myself. I never will do either the one or the other if I know it.
* * * * *
I know that charges have been made and rung in our ears, and reiterated
over and over again, that we have been unfaithful in the execution of
your fugitive bill. Sir, that law is exceedingly odious to any free
people. It deprives us of all the old guarantees of liberty that the
Anglo-Saxon race everywhere have considered sacred--more sacred than
anything else.
* * * * *
Mr. President, the gentleman says, if I understood him, that these
fugitives might be turned over to the authorities of the State from
whence they came. That would be a very poor remedy for a free man in
humble circumstances who was taken under the provisions of this bill in
a summary way, to be carried--where? Where he came from? There is no law
that requires that he should be carried there. Sir, if he is a free man
he may be carried into the market-place anywhere in a slave State; and
what chance has he, a poor, ignorant individual, and a stranger,
of asserting any rights there, even if there were no prejudices or
partialities against him? That would be mere mockery of justice and
nothing else, and the Senator well knows it. Sir, I know that from the
stringent, summary provisions of this bill, free men have been kidnapped
and carried into captivity and sold into everlasting slavery. Will any
man who has a regard to the sovereign rights of the State rise here and
complain that a State shall not make a law to protect her own people
against kidnapping and violent seizures from abroad? Of all men, I
believe those who have made most of these complaints should be the
last to rise and deny the power of a sovereign State to protect her own
citizens against any Federal legislation whatever. These liberty bills,
in my judgment, have been passed, not with a view of degrading the
South, but with an honest purpose of guarding the rights of their own
citizens from unlawful seizures and abductions. I was exceedingly glad
to hear that the Senators on the other side had arisen in their places
and had said that the repeal of those laws would not relieve the case
from the difficulties under which they now labor.
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