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Page 64
"A person charged in any State with treason, felony, or other crime, who
shall flee from justice and be found in another State, shall, on demand
of the executive authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered
up to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the crime." But the
non-slave-holding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts, have
steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro, and that negro was
a slave, to deliver him up. It was refused twice on the requisition of
my own State as long as twenty-two years ago. It was refused by Kent and
by Fairfield, Governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each
of the then Federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we
submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead
letter from that day to this. The next case came up between us and the
State of New York, when the present senior Senator (Mr. Seward) was
the Governor of that State; and he refused it. Why? He said it was not
against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he would
not comply with the demand. He made a similar refusal to Virginia. Yet
these are our confederates; these are our sister States! There is
the bargain; there is the compact. You have sworn to it. Both these
Governors swore to it. The Senator from New York swore to it. The
Governor of Ohio swore to it when he was inaugurated. You cannot bind
them by oaths.
Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect to whip
freemen into loving such brethren! They will have a good time in doing
it!
It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried
out. The Constitution says slaves are property; the Supreme Court says
so; the Constitution says so. The theft of slaves is a crime; they are
a subject-matter of felonious asportation. By the text and letter of the
Constitution you agreed to give them up. You have sworn to do it, and
you have broken your oaths. Of course, those who have done so look out
for pretexts. Nobody expected them do otherwise. I do not think I
ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some
pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings,
hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him. Yet this requirement
of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an
extremist and a rebel.
The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under
the provisions of the fugitive-slave act of 1850, without being entitled
either to a writ of _habeas corpus_, or trial by jury, or other similar
obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee. Here is
the Constitution:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws
thereof, escaping into an-other, shall, in consequence of any law or
regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall
be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may
be due."
This language is plain, and everybody understood it the same way for the
first forty years of your government. In 1793, in Washington's time, an
act was passed to carry out this provision. It was adopted unanimously
in the Senate of the United States, and nearly so in the House of
Representatives. Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the
Constitution did not mean a negro slave. It was clear; it was plain.
Not only the Federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States,
decide that this was a constitutional obligation. How is it now? The
North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their natural
character, they commenced with the fraudulent fiction that fugitives
were entitled to _habeas corpus_, entitled to trial by jury in the State
to which they fled. They pretended to believe that our fugitive slaves
were entitled to more rights than their white citizens; perhaps they
were right, they know one another better than I do. You may charge
a white man with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not
require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is nothing to
determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he
fled, and then he is to be delivered up upon demand. White people
are delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves. Slaves, black
people, you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes
have been invented to defeat your plain constitutional obligations. * * *
The next demand made on behalf of the South is, "that Congress shall
pass effective laws for the punishment of all persons in any of the
States who shall in any manner aid and abet invasion or insurrection in
any other State, or commit any other act against the laws of nations,
tending to disturb the tranquillity of the people or government of any
other State." That is a very plain principle. The Constitution of the
United States now requires, and gives Congress express power, to
define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas,
and offences against the laws of nations. When the honorable and
distinguished Senator from Illinois (Mr. Douglas) last year introduced
a bill for the purpose of punishing people thus offending under that
clause of the Constitution, Mr. Lincoln, in his speech at New York,
which I have before me, declared that it was a "sedition bill "; his
press and party hooted at it. So far from recognizing the bill as
intended to carry out the Constitution of the United States, it received
their jeers and jibes. The Black Republicans of Massachusetts elected
the admirer and eulogist of John Brown's courage as their governor, and
we may suppose he will throw no impediments in the way of John Brown's
successors. The epithet applied to the bill of the Senator from Illinois
is quoted from a deliberate speech delivered by Lincoln in New York,
for which, it was stated in the journals, according to some resolution
passed by an association of his own party, he was paid a couple of
hundred dollars. The speech should therefore have been deliberate.
Lincoln denounced that bill. He places the stamp of his condemnation
upon a measure intended to promote the peace and security of confederate
States. He is, therefore, an enemy of the human race, and deserves the
execration of all mankind.
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