SPEECH 
 
 0,^ 
 
 HON. J; R. TYSON, OF PENNSYLVANIA, 
 
 ON 
 
 THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAWS AND COMPROMISE MEASURES OF 1850r. 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN THE HOUSE OP REPRESENTATIVES, PERRITARY 28, 1857. 
 
 
 ^^ U.S.A. 
 
 WASHINGTON: 
 
 PRINTED AT THE OFFICE OF THE CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE. 
 
 1857. 
 
 i... 
 
£>.// E433 
 
 -rA T*^.! 
 
THE SLAVERY COMPROMISE LAWS. 
 
 Mr. TYSON said: 
 
 It would seem that the English phrase " to get 
 the eye of the Speaker, "has little or no meaning 
 in its application to Congress in this Hall. The 
 stentorian effort and the vehement gesture which 
 are usually resorted to, but which I have declined 
 to make to obtain the floor, show that the ear as 
 well as the eye must be violently assailed. But 
 after many unsuccessful attempts, I avail myself 
 of the opportunity now accorded to me to proceed 
 at once to the subject which I propose to con- 
 sider, and about which I have somewhat to say, 
 perhaps hardly compressible within the compass 
 of an hour's speech. 
 
 My topic is not chosen with any relation to 
 party politics. It addresses itself to the sober 
 sense and enlightened patriotism of all good cit- 
 izens, without regard to political divisions. I 
 have selected it for the purpose of bringing into 
 prominent notice some considerations which have 
 been too long overlooked, the pondering of which 
 in the public mind may tend to allay the feuds 
 and estrangements of party warfare, and to bring 
 back into the ample fold of a common nationality 
 those who have strayed into the dark recesses and 
 wilderness by-paths of sectional error. I shall 
 not imitate those jentlemen who have spoken on 
 both sides of the House, in favor of and against 
 the President's message. While the study of all 
 seems to be to make the party lines on this subject 
 broader and deeper than before, it will be mine to 
 obliterate them altogether. The ancients were of 
 opinion that the offering of the olive branch by 
 Minerva was more acceptable and beneficial to 
 mankind, as the emblem of peace, than the sym- 
 
 bol of war, which was presented by a martial and 
 more powerful deity. 
 
 The present seems to be an opportune period 
 to address dispassionate thoughts to the nation, 
 in order to induce that calm and reflecting spirit 
 so important to the perception and appreciation 
 of truth. The Administration of the country will 
 soon be placed in the hands of a gentleman whose 
 political adversaries cannot deny to him the qual- 
 ifications of matured experience and tried states- 
 manship, of cool prudence and ardent patriotism, 
 and uniting, in an eminent degree, benevolence 
 of heart with purity of character, and habitual 
 forecast with high intellectual capacity. Recent 
 events have shown what vast good can be done by 
 the wise counsels of one man, like the Chief Ma- 
 gistrate elect, in the administrative concerns of a 
 country. Kansas may now breathe in peace, and 
 decide her own questions in her own way, with- 
 out fear of molestation from within, or of intrusion 
 from without. The popular disturbances in that 
 unhappy Territory are practically, and I trust 
 finally, at rest, thanks to the vigor and prudence 
 of Governor Geary, and his present able judicial 
 assistant. 
 
 A late vote in this House has proved to the 
 world that the moral sentiments of the national 
 Legislature are in harmony with the general voice 
 of the people against any countenance to, or revival 
 of, the African slave trade. One subject, there- 
 fore, only remains which can minister to popular 
 disaffection, and prevent the restoration of peace, 
 tranquillity, and kindness throughout our wide- 
 spread land. I refer to a repugnance in the non- 
 slaveholding States to the honest, faithful, and 
 
patriotic enforcement of the fugitive slave laws. 
 On this delicate subject I propose to speak the 
 sentiments I have long entertained, the result of 
 no little anxious meditation, but with absolute 
 freedom, and without equivocation or reserve. 
 If, after a full hearing, my opinions should be 
 regarded as erroneous, or the reasons adduced too 
 lame to support them, I hope that the mistake, if 
 indeed mistake be possible on this subject, will at 
 least be regarded as honest and sincere. Pene- 
 trated with the truth and conscious of the integrity 
 of the views I espouse, I commit myself to the | 
 reflecting and discerning North, and to the en- 1 
 lightened and patriotic tribunal of public opinion ' 
 in other parts of the country. 
 
 I do not intend to become on this occasion, and i 
 I trust on no occasion, the champion of any party | 
 on a grave question of common and momentous 
 concern. It would indeed be a happy circum- 
 stance, if partisans of all distinctions would strive 
 to keep from the vortex of party excitement, from 
 the cauldron of party strife, the question of hered- 
 itary labor and service, 'a system which existed 
 by law in all the colonies of this country from 
 nearly its earliest settlement; a system which has 
 been continued at the South, one to which the 
 habits of large districts have been conformed, and 
 under which vast interests have been growing up 
 for more than two centuries. The continuance 
 of this system, and the repose of the communities 
 in which it retains a footing, should not be dis- 
 turbed by the external agency of ignorant, rash, 
 or hostile intermeddlers. It is not merely iden- 
 tified with the habits and interests of millions of 
 people and millions of property, but it is inter- 
 twined with their social feelings, and even their 
 religious instincts. 
 
 It is asserted, I am aware, by the great body of 
 the northern people, that they have never sought 
 to interfere with African slavery, as it prevails 
 in the southern States; that though they disap- 
 prove of it as a relation, socially and politically, 
 and believe that its prevalence nourishes senti- 
 ments, maxims, and interests which are irrecon- 
 cilably at war with the highest ftciings and best 
 interests of the free States; yet, as they allege, 
 tliey oppose only its extension into territory now 
 free. This, I believe, is the honest opinion and 
 the feeling of almost the entire North. 
 
 The few persons who would kindle a servile 
 war in the southern States, or excite the slaves to 
 acts of disobedience or disloyalty, are those few 
 misguided people who are influenced bv the Brit- 
 
 ish press and the orators of Exeter Hall, or who, 
 crazed by the intensity of one engrossing idea, 
 are to be regarded as insane, and who ought to be 
 subjected to the moral treatment of lunatic asy- 
 lums. This last class is so exceedingly small that 
 they could easily be thus accommodated , without 
 much increase in the size of the present buildings, 
 or the number of their apartments. 
 
 The allegation of the North is, that they seek 
 only to prevent the introduction of slavery into 
 the Territories, as the common domain of the 
 United States, and attempt to go no further. The 
 assertion of the South is, that the question of 
 extension is one of local jurisdiction only, de- 
 terminable by the people to be affected by it, and 
 that they bow to that decision, whether the decis- 
 ion be for its admission or exclusion. Now the 
 question may be seriously asked, whether either 
 of these positions is exactly in accordance with 
 the facts .' Do the North confine their efforts to 
 territorial questions, and are the South so indif- 
 ferent as not to attempt by intimidation and vio- 
 lence, to/orce its expansion? Do not the disgrace- 
 ful scenes of Kansas, after due abatement has been 
 made for all the exaggerations and distortions of 
 an excited and a mendacious party press, deprive 
 the South of such a plea? The disobedience to 
 fugitive slave laws, on the part of whole commu- 
 nities in the North, the enactments of States to 
 restrict and paralyze them, and the popular clamor 
 which opposes their execution, show that a large 
 portion of what is called even the conservative 
 North do not confine their opposition to slave 
 labor in the common domain of the United States, 
 I call upon the North and the South to return 
 to the compromise measures of 1850, as the prin- 
 ciples of these measures must constitute the bul- 
 warks of our national Union and national safety. 
 Such men as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster 
 lent all the resources of their great minds and 
 commanding influence to the task of maturing 
 them. All parlies are formally and solemnly 
 pledged to their observance. They were con- 
 demned only by those who were led astray by 
 the unpatriotic ideas which English statesmen, 
 through a gifted but honest instrumentality, had 
 contrived ingeniously to work into the very 
 framework of social life in England, and to trans- 
 fer to this country the same poisonous spirit. 
 Peace and tranquillity were restored. All parties 
 became satisfied, except an insignificant number 
 at the North, who were obliged by the common 
 voice to murmur their acquiescence. 
 
These compromise measures o/1850 adopted, in 
 brief, a few plain principles which were practically 
 applied. They destroyed the traffic of buying and 
 selling slaves in the District of Columbia. They 
 provided for the reclamation of fugitives, and 
 fortified the provision by all the guards which 
 experience had taught and forecast suggested. 
 They gave to Utah and New Mexico the right to 
 make their own laws in their own ways, subject 
 only to the approval of Congress; and declared that 
 each Territory had the right to be admitted as a 
 State, with or without slavery, according to the 
 decision of the people of each respectively. 
 
 The Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854 is already 
 passing away, and will soon be forgotten, or if 
 recurred to, its enactments will be remembered 
 only to be avoided in all future time. It is alleged 
 to have been necessary to carry out and harmonize 
 the legislation of 1850. In order to ascertain how 
 far this ascription may be well or ill-founded, it 
 is necessary to keep in view the fundamental 
 principles of both enactments. The legislation of 
 1850 invests New Mexico and Utah with the full 
 and unrestricted right of local legislation, and, 
 like every act from the year 1787, it requires that 
 the territorial laws, when passed, shall be submitted 
 to Congress for its approval or rejection. The 
 Kansas-Nebraska act proclaims the doctrine of 
 congressional /ion-tn«eri'enHcin in territorial affairs, 
 and gives to the two Territories it ordained all the 
 powers of States, while it provides for a Delegate 
 in each, and permits them to retain the territorial 
 privilege of being maintained at the expense of the 
 General Government. By means of such a new- 
 fangled and dangerous system of territorial ar- 
 rangement, any abuse might be committed under 
 the name of law, and Congress could not interfere 
 to check or redress the evil. 
 
 The infamous practice of polygamy, as it pre- 
 vails in Utah, or any other atrocity, might be 
 sanctioned in Kansas or Nebraska, and Congress 
 would have no negative upon the act. Every 
 statute of the Government relating to Territories 
 may be ransacked from the earliest period of its 
 history down to the year 1854, and no act will 
 be found but this which denies to Congress the 
 supervisory power in territorial enactments. Each 
 and every other act, from the foundation of the 
 Government to the present time, requires the ter- 
 ritorial Uiws, when passed, to be transmitted to Con- 
 gress. The Kansas-Nebraska act has the unen- 
 viable distinction of being a regulation which 
 will stand alone on the statute-book, without pre- 
 
 cedent in the past, without having a follower in 
 the future. 
 
 Though a departure from all the lessons of 
 experience, it is praised for recognizing the fun- 
 damental principle of popular sovereignty. But 
 how does the system which preceded it— the sys- 
 tem which was devised at least by as able and 
 experienced statesmen— that under which our new- 
 States have been peaceably and wisely settled 
 
 entrench upon the doctrine of local sovereignty, 
 or encroach upon the right of local legislation? 
 These Territories framed their own enactments, 
 and unless plainly violative of some fundamental 
 law, were always ratified by Congress.— The 
 people never migrate to new Territories until they 
 are organized by law. They go from the States 
 where, as citizens, they have had a voice in that 
 legislation by which, as inhabitants of Territories, 
 they are afterwards governed. Why, then, should 
 radical theorists insist that the wild, the reckless, 
 the busy,— who make the sum of the eariy popu- 
 lajjon in those new settlements, — be permitted to 
 indulge their vagaries of social novelty, without 
 the possibility of amendment, or the chance of 
 correction.? That people who, whatever their 
 training and previous habits, are unsheltered from 
 the weather, and who, to procure subsistence and 
 animal conveniences, are obliged to smooth the 
 rugged paths of a wilderness life, are ill qualified 
 by studious leisure and calm reflection to be the 
 founders of empire. And is it just that a parent 
 should maintain a child who claims exemption 
 from parental restraint, and aspires to the inde- 
 pendence and discretion of maturity? But I have 
 done with the Kansas-Nebraska act. It is a legal 
 anomaly, a kind of legislative discovery of the means 
 of introducing discord, bloodshed, and disgrace 
 where all might have been peace and fraternal 
 kindness. "A political blunder," said Talley- 
 rand, "is worse than a crime." The apopthegm 
 is just__iji its application to this case, for the blun- 
 der of passing this act has been the prolific parent 
 of many crimes and sorrows. 
 
 There is no fear that the principle of the act, 
 which was discovered for the temporary purpose 
 of getting at something else, will ever be applied 
 to new territory. Its vitality has already passed 
 away. The doctrine of surrendering all the rights 
 of Congress to a Territory, with a Delegate to 
 represent its people, who are, by the very law 
 which created him, wholly independent of the 
 body to whom he is sent, is too great an absurd- 
 ity for any subsequent act. The notion of con- 
 
gressional non-intervention, implying absolute 
 territorial sovereignty, is a fallacy and a figment. 
 It is a caput mortuum, or at best, to remain here- 
 after in peiyetual abeyance, to be revived only when 
 some other Missouri compromise is to be declared 
 inoperative and void. 
 
 In blotting out, then, the discoveries which came 
 in with the Kansas-Nebraska act, we come back 
 to the compromises of 1850, which hereafter, I 
 ■ trust, the North and the South will, in pursuance 
 of written pledges, concur inviolably to observe. 
 They have been wantonly infringed on both sides 
 — on the part of southern members, chiefly, by 
 doing so unwise, unnecessary, and bootless an 
 act as repealing the Missouri compromise, and 
 introducing the ghost of squatter sovereignty, 
 ■when everybody looked for flesh and substance 
 as the only plea upon which that repeal could be 
 ostensibly justified. On the North, it is contra- 
 vened , in attempting to get rid of or evade the laws 
 against fugitive slaves. 
 
 I do not charge upon the large class who will 
 harborand conceal fugitives from labor, the grE^er 
 offenses of inciting them to flight, and resisting 
 the law for their restoration. There are few men 
 of the northern States who would be thus indif- 
 ferent to law, to good citizenship, to moral alle- 
 giance, to political justice, to enlightened benev- 
 olence. For myself— and I trust in this that I 
 represent the sentiment of the law-abiding, vir- 
 tuous citizens of the whole great North— if the 
 marshal of my district, charged with the duty 
 of restoring a fugitive to his owner, were to sum- 
 mon me as a part of his posse, either to overcome 
 resistance to an attempted arrest, or to prevent a 
 rescue and flight, I would at once obey the sum- 
 mons. An oflicer commissioned with the execu- 
 tion of a writ, or the performance of a duty, rep- 
 resents the majesty of the law, and no man's 
 house or person is safe if he be not obeyed and 
 assisted. The reasoning and thoughtful citizen 
 who looks to the law for his own pr^ection, 
 would not ask the question , whether the runaway 
 sought to be reclaimed was a fugitive from justice 
 or a fugitive from labor? These two classes of 
 fugitives stand side by side in the Constitution; 
 and as the law makes no distinction between them, 
 except in the manner of their delivery, so it is not 
 the part of a good and law-abiding freeman to 
 neutralize or counteract its behests. 
 
 All who honestly look into this question of 
 runaway slaves, as a historical proposition, and 
 earnestly ponder it as a proposition of enlarged 
 
 charity, must acknowledge that the conduct of 
 the North, on this subject, is opposed to good citi- 
 zenship, to practical justice, to enlightened and 
 Christian benevolence. Inquiry is seldom made 
 whether the runaway was well or ill treated by 
 the master whose protection he has deserted, or 
 about his own capacity to take care of himself. 
 Often untaught as children in the knowledge of 
 providence and thrift, ignorant of the arts of life 
 and the world, these secreted runaways are fre- 
 quently doomed to wander about in our large 
 cities under the pressure of hopeless destitution, 
 temporarily relieved, perhaps, by crime, thence 
 to be plunged into the greater miseries of a prison. 
 If the statistics of our Census Reports would fol- 
 low these pitiable outcasts, sure I am that all con- 
 scientious men and women would shrink appalled 
 from this ill-considered form of emancipation. 
 We glean from the statistics of pauperism and 
 crime, a lamentable picture of the degradation and 
 ruin of many of these unhappy beings. Shut out 
 from the paternal shelter of those upon whom 
 they depended for the supply of every necessary 
 from childhood — of those whose family bond, 
 whose direct interest, and whose legal duty were 
 alike enlisted to secure their comfort in youth and 
 health, and their maintenance in infancy, age, and 
 sickness, they exchange a life, thus free from care 
 and want, for one of nominal freedom truly, but 
 of real and unmitigated wretchedness. Is it not 
 the worst form of immediate emancipation — that 
 mad offspring of an insane modern philanthropy? 
 Coupled with injustice to the master, and with 
 multiplied evils to the existing system of slavery, 
 does it not threaten also the social and political 
 prospects of the country? Does it not throw 
 additional restraints upon those who still are in 
 bondage, and postpone indefinitely all consider- 
 ation of remedy for grievances in the system 
 itself, which, with greater security in the persons 
 of the laborers, there would be more inclination 
 in the South to regard and apply? Does it not 
 inflame and alienate the South, that for the mere 
 indulgence of an abstract sentiment, they should 
 be deprived of their laborers by their own coun- 
 trymen, in a mode not merely unjust to themselves 
 and their dependants, but involving disloyalty to 
 the plainest edict of our supreme national law? 
 
 In this country our sympathies are so much 
 in favor of abstract freedom that we act as if it 
 were the pabulwn or natural food of life, and the 
 great panacea of other ills. It has its origin in 
 one noble sentimciit of our nature, which, if it 
 
unduly carry us away, may overshadow and 
 blight many other virtues which lean upon it for 
 support. I freely admit that liberty is an abstract 
 good; but this, like all general abstractions, has 
 mar^y practical exceptions. It is a good to those 
 who know how to use it, and are capable of 
 making it subservient to their happiness. But 
 under that nanie, and ostensibly to promote and 
 secure it, have been perpetrated some of the 
 greatest crimes which have ever afflicted human- 
 ity. "Oh, Liberty," saidMadame Roland, as she 
 passed the statue of the goddess on her way to 
 execution, " what crimes are committed in thy 
 name !" In the case under review, the worship- 
 ers of Freedom, while falling down at the feet 
 of its cold and insensible marble, would interpret 
 their deity as favorable to the commission of 
 those crimes and excesses which, like the fabled 
 Astraja, she came from Heaven to prevent or to 
 punish. The demons of France, drunk with the 
 human gore they were shedding, madly profaned 
 the temple by murdering all the attributes of the 
 goddess whom they professed to worship. Our 
 worshipers of Freedom seem not merely to do 
 this, but evince a disposition, by kindling the ele- 
 ments of civil war, to fire a far more beautiful 
 and costly temple than that of Ephesus— the tem- 
 ple of American freedom itself— that fairest temple 
 of human liberty which the long ages of time 
 have witnessed, or the great volume of history 
 lias yet revealed. 
 
 On what plea is it that a system, the inevitable 
 results of which, however unseen by the multi- 
 tude, must be plain to thoughtful observers, can 
 be deliberately persisted in by sensible men ? The 
 friends of freedom profess to be the friends of the 
 slave; but instead of uniting, like good citizens, 
 in a solemn pledge to the Constitution under 
 which they live, and like good men, intent upon 
 his happiness, to send him back, intelligent per- 
 sons are found willing, on the ground of an in- 
 tangible and abstract sentiment, to inflame sec- 
 tional feeling, while they do a lasting injury to the 
 unconscious object of their exertions. The free 
 States, it is said, must be the consecrated soil of 
 freedom, and emulate England in the glory of her 
 free constitution. As an English poet has de- 
 scribed that constitution: 
 
 " Slaves cannot breathe in England ; 
 They touch- our country, and their shackles fall." 
 
 But the sentiment is merely poetical, since it is 
 fallacious and deceptive. It did poetical injus- 
 tice to the country of which it was uttered, for in 
 
 sober prose it is rather ironical than true. It is a 
 sentiment transplanted here from a soil in which 
 it never took root, except as a hot-bed plant, 
 nourished for foreign growth. Let me shbwthc 
 sickhness of this foreign flower, the emptiness of 
 this foreign notion upon which our people act, 
 and the dangers it threatens to the best interests 
 and the highest hopes of this country. 
 
 I undertake to exhibit the inconsistent course 
 and hollow pretensions of English statesmen in 
 a course of action apparently dictated by jealousy 
 of the rising power of this country, by the fear 
 of England's being displaced in her maritime 
 supremacy as ruler of the ocean, and by the ap- 
 prehension of a national echpse. In this attempt, 
 I would do no injustice to the motives and sensi- 
 bilities of the English people at large. No one 
 appreciates more highly than I do the noble spirit 
 of English freedom in comparison with any other 
 part of Europe; the truth of English philosophy; 
 the results of English science; the genius of Eng- 
 lish literature and art. Nor can there be a doubt 
 that the conservative opinions of the British press 
 exert a wholesome influence on this country. But 
 I protest against the subjection of the minds of 
 our people to the influence of the English press in 
 its madness on the subject of Jfrican slavery— not 
 unhappily as that slavery exists in Africa, butas 
 it prevails in this country— and in its sophistical 
 reasoning to bolster up British free trade, in its 
 application to the circumstances of a new nation 
 of boundless undeveloped materials, and the most 
 promising undeveloped skill. Its selfish and cal- 
 culating logic on these two subjects is intrinsic- 
 ally unsound, and eminently dangerous to the 
 prospects of a rising Power, whose unity among 
 the States which compose it, and whose inde- 
 pendence of foreign nations in its industrial pur- 
 suits, are essential to its greatness and glory. 
 The inflammable material among the English peo- 
 ple andf'ourselves, has been set in a blaze against 
 our system of domestic slavery by writers and 
 speakers whose burning tongues and eloquent 
 pens have been directed by the cold, the crafty, 
 and the calculating policy of English statesman- 
 ship. If the efi'ulgent galaxy of States could 
 be dimmed by the fall of a single star from the 
 glorious constellation — if by sowing the seeds of 
 discord, if by prompting unreasonable exactions 
 from the South, and exciting a retaliatory spirit 
 in the North — if, in short, in order to break that 
 chain, brighter and more valuable than gold, 
 which, as a zone, binds all these starry lumina- 
 
8 
 
 ries together, she could lessen the representative 
 greatness of the national flag which waves over 
 this Capitol, all the labor, the talent, the money- 
 expended would be abundantly repaid. What 
 BO likely to accomplish this result as to address 
 that instinct of the American heart, the object of 
 its idolatry, the idol of its politi,cal affections — 
 our love of liberty? The American people cher- 
 ish liberty as a positive good for its own sake — as 
 a good worthy of all vigilance, even as a deity to 
 be devoutly worshiped! But English writers 
 mistake our zeal, if they suppose, in offering up 
 our devotid^is at the shrine of this deity, we are 
 •willing to invoke a more malignant demon than 
 despotism itself. 
 
 English writers appeal, in justification of their 
 activity, to an event in their own history as 
 favoring the absolute sacredness of soil from the 
 touch of slavery. They call upon the lovers of 
 freedom in this country, in the northern States, 
 to redeem our land, and prevent it from being 
 polluted by the touch of a slave, and ourselves 
 from being defiled by sending back a fugitive to 
 his master — to that master from whose claims and 
 whose protection he has fled. In the face of all 
 these high pretensions, if we look into the history 
 of England from an early period to the present 
 time, we shall find that it is identified with the 
 expansion of the slave-trade, and with the per- ', 
 manence of American slavery, and that slaves '' 
 eould and did breathe in England when their poet 
 wrote. I do not here refer to the existence of un- j 
 mitigated serfdom, under the degrading appella- 1 
 live of villeinage ingross, which was assuaged and ^ 
 modified in many of its features several ages ago, i 
 nor to the introduction of slaves into her North : 
 American colonies, and its legal maintenance [ 
 there by acts of Parliament dov/n almost to the ; 
 era of our Independence.' No, sir, I do not now ! 
 refer to these, but, in connection with the latter, I 
 to the direct participation of Great Britain in that ! 
 iniquitous trade, to whose abuse and extension | 
 she so largely contributed by admiralty edicts, 
 acts of Parliament, and her great mercantile ma- 1 
 rine. After enjoying its rich profits for years, ' 
 when it ceased to be a lucrative branch of com- 
 merce, especially after the loss of her American \ 
 colonies, the powerful and nervous ]5ens of Eng- 1 
 lish writers aided to render the traffic which had i 
 been so diligently fostered, not merely odious,; 
 but to denounce it as inhuman and piratical. 1 
 
 In the reign of Elizabeth, and under her protec- 1 
 lion, Sir John Hawkins equipped three vessels in 
 
 1562 to Sierra Leone, on the African coast, where 
 he obtained, among other merchandise, three hun- 
 dred slaves, whom he carried to Hispaniola, and 
 disposed of to great advantage. The success of 
 this expedition excited the cupidity of the Eng- 
 lish Government itself, who, in 1564, equipped a 
 fleet of six vessels, and placed them in command 
 of Captain Hawkins, the successful commander 
 oftheformerenterprise. In 1618, James the First 
 granted an exclusive charter to Sir R. Rich, and 
 other merchants of London, of the trade to Guinea, 
 which was transferred by Charles the First to other 
 private adventurers. But it would be tedious to 
 trace, through the voluminous pages of English 
 history, the many charters to carry on the slave 
 trade, which were granted during a century and 
 a half, for the benefit not only of merchants, but 
 of the gentry, of the nobility, of royal dukes, and 
 of even the monarch himself ! Such was the pop- 
 ularity of the traffic, and the avidity to mingle in 
 its benefits, that in the year 1698 the exclusive 
 character of the trade was broken up, and it was 
 thrown open to all the subjects of the realm by 
 an act of William and Mary, (9 and 10 W. and 
 M., cap. 26.) We come next to the grand act 
 of 1713, when, by the celebrated Assiento treaty 
 with Spain, Great Bntain agreed to svpphj the Span- 
 ish colonies with one hundred and forty-four thou- 
 sand slaves at the rate of four thousand eight hundred 
 a year. In 1739, Parliament voted to private 
 traders whose interests were injuriously affect€d 
 by the statutes of 9 and 10 William and Mary, 
 the sum of £10,000, to sustain their slave factories. 
 This sum was annually continued until the year. 
 1744, when, owing to the dangers and embarrass- 
 ments incident to a war which broke out with 
 France and Spain in that year, the grant was 
 doubled. In the middle of the eighteenth century 
 the African fever was at its height in England, 
 for then it was (in the year 1750) that an act was 
 passed by Parliament, entitled " An act for ex- 
 tending and improving the trade with Africa." 
 
 The interests of English commerce, which con- 
 trolled the public mind, resisted all efforts to ar- 
 rest it. The colonies of North America, which 
 threw off their subjection to England in 1776, 
 were loud in their remonstrances and condemna- 
 tion. But in defiance of their feelings, and in 
 opposition to their interests, the lords of the 
 admiralty, and even the King himself, returned 
 contemptuous answers of rejection to their re- 
 peated petitions. 
 
 The first ship-load of Africans to this country 
 
9 
 
 was that which went directly from .the coast of 
 Guinea to Virginia, in the year 1621. Between 
 that year and 1712 — a period httle less than a 
 century — the number of slaves imported into the 
 northern and southern colonies, now constituting 
 the thirteen original States of this Union, was 
 more than two hundred thousand. Such were 
 the conyictionS of Pennsylvania against the traffic 
 that, in the year 1712, her Colonial Assembly, 
 during the life of William Penn, passed an act to 
 prevent its continuance. Pennsylvania was in- 
 continently rebuked by the repeal of this act by 
 the Glueen in council. Other colonies petitioned 
 for the abolition of the trade, but they were an- 
 .swered by a flat refusal. In 1760 South Carolina, 
 following the example of Pennsylvania, passed an 
 act to prohibit the further importation of slaves 
 into her territory; but Great Britain rejected the 
 act with indignation, declaring that the slave 
 trade was beneficial and necessary to the mother 
 country. The colonies were reprimanded, and 
 a circular letter was dispatched to all the colonial 
 Governors, warning them against a boldness un- 
 becoming faithful and obedient colonists, and 
 against the commission of an offense which in- 
 volved the commercial interests of the realm. 
 
 But passing many intermediate acts with which 
 the statute-books of England are replete, I come 
 to the year 1774, just two years after the famous 
 caseof Somerset was decided, and just two years 
 before that independence was declared which put 
 an end to these insults and oppressions. In 1774 
 various measures were enacted for the regulation 
 of slaves in those English colonies which became 
 independent in 1776; and in 1774 two bills were 
 actually passed by the Assembly of Jamaica to 
 restrict the African slave trade in that colony. 
 Liverpool and Bristol petitioned against the pro- 
 posed restriction in Jamaica, and the Board of 
 Trade obediently decided by a Report in favor of 
 the English petitioners. The colonists eloquently 
 answered the mercenary spirit of the report on 
 the grounds of justice and humanity; but the Earl 
 of Dartmouth, as president of the board, silenced 
 the remonstrants by emphatically declaring: " We 
 cannot allow the colonies to check or discourage a 
 traffic so beneficial to the nation." 
 
 But while this language was used, and this pol- 
 icy adopted, towards the aggrieved and complain- 
 ing coloni.«its of England, that same England, two 
 years before, was deciding, through her eminent 
 Chief Justice, that slavery was so odious that a 
 slave could not live on the free soil of Britain ! It 
 
 was in the celebrated case of the negro Somerset, 
 decided by Lord Mansfield in 1772, that the doc- 
 trine was proclaim^ or repeated, which has so 
 intoxicated our people and misled their own. 
 Somerset was a slave, brought by his master into 
 England from Virginia; and the questioi> was, 
 whether his residence in that kingdom dissolved 
 the relation in which he had stood to his former 
 owner.' The learned and able jurist hesitated 
 long, ordered a reargument, and finally decided 
 that Somerset was free, for the reasons that sla- 
 very was abhorrent to the common law of Eng- 
 land, and that man could not in that kingdom be 
 the legal subject of property. 1 propose to show 
 that this decision was neither more nor less thaa 
 the fiat of the individual judge ; that it was pure and 
 unmixed jtidicial legislation; and that it is opposed 
 to the whole current of English practice, English 
 history, and English jurisprudence. But the de- 
 cision was made, and the distinguished philanthro- 
 pists, among whom Granville Sharp and others 
 were active in procuring it, set no bounds to their 
 exultations. The eloquence of Curran, in after 
 times, made it the theme of one of his proudest 
 triumphs in glowing and gorgeous oratory, and 
 Cowper canonized it in verse. , But one of the im- 
 mediate consequences of this decision was to set 
 free in the streets of London about four, hundred 
 negro slaves, who, having no owners to support 
 them, were thrown upon the care and protection 
 of those gentlemen most anxious for the judicial 
 liberation of Somerset. From former comfort 
 they were plunged into extreme distress, which 
 \ drove them in crowds to their patron, the eele- 
 I brated Granville Sharp, who did all that humanity 
 I could prompt to relieve their necessities and mit- 
 I igate their sufferings. But all was unavailing. 
 I They suffered and returned again and again, until 
 1 he began to look out for some permanent plan of 
 j relief for himself and of refuge for them. He 
 finally determined to send them to some spot in 
 I Africa, the land of their ancestors, where, with 
 j proper implements of husbandry, they could 
 i maintain themselves. 
 
 j Through the achievements of the earliest ad- 
 I venturer in the slave trade, such a place as Sierra 
 Leone had become known to the English people. 
 To Sierra Leone, therefore, that first spot on the 
 African coast which England had signalized a» 
 the scene of her depredations on the continent of 
 Africa, Granville Sharp proposed to send these 
 four hundred emancipated slaves, as the seeds of 
 a future empire. The ship which carried these 
 
iWXWIWVV'VMMMWMMPkK 
 
 10 
 
 colored emigrants passed out of the Thames 
 under convoy of Her Majesty's sloop-xjf-war 
 Nautilus, on the 22d of Febriifery, 1787. Of the 
 four hundred persons who embarked, nearly all 
 perished by famine, disease, and the hostility of 
 neighboring tribes. Within two years after the 
 embarkation, the parent of those flourishing colo- 
 nies which have since gone from this country to 
 the African coast, and which are entering into the 
 barbarous and heathen interior of the continent, 
 there to sow broadcast the seeds of religion, civ- 
 ilization and liberty; — within two short years, all 
 the hopes of its noble projector were crushed, and 
 this fii'st attempt at African colonization was ren- 
 dered abortive. But great events, however fortu- 
 itous or inevitable their occurrence, though some- 
 times marked by disaster in their outset, and 
 overwhelmed by miscarriage and calamity, bear 
 about them something of the reproductive spirit 
 of the fabled Phoenix. The colony has been 
 replenished, its welfare has been watched with 
 benevolent care, and nourished into newness of 
 life with the most assiduous and tender solicitude. 
 A flourishing and intelligent colony now renders 
 worthy of our thoughtful notice that spot long 
 memorable for supplying the first ship-load of 
 Africans to an English slaver in the reign of Eliz- 
 abeth, and more recently as the place w'here those 
 men suffered and died, whose freedom the judicial 
 monstrosity of the great Mansfield had secured ! 
 The learned Chief Justice made a twofold mis- 
 take of historical fact and of legal principle. Is it 
 historically true that slavery was so repugnant to 
 the English common law as never to have actu- 
 ally existed in England ? and is it legally correct, 
 that under the English system of jurisprudence, 
 rnan could not be the subject of property in that 
 kingdom? The degradation o{ villein tenure, dis- 
 tinguished as well by the baseness and servility, 
 as by the hereditary and unalterable quality of 
 the services it exacted, existed in England from 
 the earliest times. But what mean the existence 
 of African slavery in British colonies, the slaves 
 placed there by act of Parliament, the trade pa^rti- 
 cipated in by the King and his greatest subjects, and 
 sustained and continued by pecuniary largesses 
 a\Uhorized by Etiglish law 7 If servitude be abhor- 
 rent to the free spirit of the English common law, 
 what mean those acts of Parliament to regulate 
 and perpetuate it in colonies peopled by English 
 subjects, controlled by English charters, and gov- 
 erned by English functionaries ? Did not English 
 subjects carry to their trans-Atlantic home, in the 
 
 New World, t^e fundamental maxims and distin- 
 guishing principles of the English common law .' 
 If so, and that common law was irreconcilable 
 with human bondage, did they not act in accord- 
 ance with its spirit in remonstrating and enacting 
 against its increase? And how,jin the face of 
 such a pretension, can the English Government 
 be defended &nd justified in abrogating those 
 colonial laws which looked to the extinction of 
 the traffic? In negativing the act of Pennsylva- 
 nia of 1712, in rejecting that of South Carolina in 
 1760, in dismissing the acts of Jamaica, in 1774? 
 The fact, as alleged, is denied by the whole his- 
 tory of England abroad, and the settled policy of 
 the British empire at home. The reverse is ex- 
 emplified, if not in some of her present institu- 
 tions, at least in her former system, and in her 
 colonial plan from its earliest period to the time 
 when the thirteen colonies were separated from 
 her dominion. 
 
 The popular mind of England was fully pre- 
 pared for African servitude by the immemorial 
 existence of villein tenure and service. It is true 
 that the law by which property in the off'spring 
 of an American slave was transmitted, became 
 different from the rule of succession which pre- 
 vailed under the common law of the kingdom. 
 But the partus sequitur ventrem of the civil law, 
 which prevails in the southern States as the rule 
 which now regulates the right to descendants, was 
 not the original law of this country. One of our 
 earliest colonial laws on the subject of slavery, 
 which was that of Maryland, in the year 1663, 
 enacted that " all children born of any negro or 
 other slave shall be slaves, as their /atAers were." 
 This rule of inheritance was that of the English 
 common law, the maxim being partus sequitwr 
 patrem. 
 
 The paternal rule of succession as to oflTspring 
 was abolished in Maryland in the year 1699 or 
 1700; and in the year 1715 the principle of the 
 civil law, was substituted for the ancient doctrine. 
 It is enough, however, that, as the maxim of 
 the English common law originally governed the 
 right ofj servile succession in this country, even 
 that argument of English writers is taken away. 
 It is apparent, therefore, that the whole system 
 of American slavery was not merely of English 
 origin, but that its plan was modeled upon that 
 of England, the time of succession being altered 
 from motives of convenience, arising from the 
 looseness of the marriage tie among the barbarous 
 descendants of Africa. 
 
 V't- 
 
11 
 
 The law of Maryland of 1663, which followed 
 in the track of the English precept as to the pa- 
 ternal line of succession, condemned the offspring 
 of a free white woman who intermarried with an 
 African slave, to the servile condition of the father. 
 This feature of the early legislation of that colony, 
 reflects the well-known sentiments of England at 
 that early day, and proves the antiquity of the 
 opinion now so well ascertained and universal 
 among the learned in this country as to the in- 
 equality of the two races, and the degenerate 
 re«ults of a union between them. 
 
 The dogma of the illustrious Mansfield in that 
 famous decision, that the English law did not 
 recognize man as the subject of property, was un- 
 worthy of his character and fame. In the year 
 1689, nearly a century before, that question, so 
 far as English law was concerned, had been sol- 
 emnly iecidedby tkewhole twelve judges of England. 
 At the head of this august array of learning and 
 diility, was the eminent Chief Justice Holt. The 
 question arose under the Assiento treaty with 
 Spain, and was submitted to the judges by order 
 of the King in Council. 
 
 The certificate of their unanimous opinion is 
 oouched in language alike concise and direct. 
 " In pursuance of his Majesty's orders in coun- 
 cil, hereunto annexed," say the Judges, '* we do 
 humbly certify our opinion that negroes are mer- 
 ckandise."* The document is signed by all the 
 judges, beginning with Holt, and by Treby and 
 Somers, as Attorney and Solicitor General. 
 
 But the fallacy of the idea has been shown, and 
 the system of reasoning by which the Somerset 
 case is sought to be supported, is ably reviewed 
 and demolished by that eminent jurist, Lord 
 Stowell, in the year 1827.t 
 
 This acute and accomplished English civilian, 
 better known as Sir William Scott, in referring to 
 a directly opposite opinion of Lord Hardwicke, 
 made in the court of chancery twenty-two years 
 before, that is, in 1749, (see State Trials, vol. 22, 
 pp. 4, 81,) informs us that " the personal traffic in 
 slaves resident in England, had been as public and 
 as authorized in London, as in any of our West 
 India Islands. Tliey were sold on the Exchange 
 and other places of public resort, by parties 
 
 * Vide vol. 2; of Chalmers' Reports of the Opinions of 
 EirtQent Lawyers, in colonial cases, &c., pp. 262, 263. 
 
 t See vol. 7, Haggard's Admiralty Reports, page 94. The 
 teamed reader is also referred to the case of Commonwealth 
 vs. Aves, reported in 16 Pickering's Reports, page 193, in 
 which C. J. Shaw, of Massachusetts, contributes to under- 
 mine the fabric of Mansfield. 
 
 THEMSELVES RESIDENT IN LoNDOV, and with as 
 
 little reserve as they would have been in any of 
 our West India possessions. Such a state of 
 things continued, without impeachment, from a 
 very early period up to nearly the end of the last 
 century." (Haggard's Rep., p. 105.) He ad- 
 verts to the different opinions which had been 
 pronounced from the earliest introduction of sla- 
 very into the English colonies, by judges of high 
 authority, and the greatest ability in the kingdom , 
 and the suddenness of the conversion of Mans- 
 field to a different doctrine. He is reminded of 
 what is mentioned by an eminent ancient author, 
 that on the announcement o{ the defeat of Poinpey, 
 " populus Romanus repente foetus est alius" — tht 
 Romans suddenly became quite another people. What 
 event in the history of England called up the clas- 
 sical reminiscence of the learned judge, which is 
 so delicately and plainly hinted at, is more than a 
 subject of conjecture. In a subsequent page, he 
 goes on to assert, that for the space oT fifty years 
 not in one instance had the attention of English 
 justice been called to these alleged violations of 
 law, of bringing slaves within the jurisdiction of 
 England, and allowing them to depart. " Black 
 seamen," he says, " have navigated West India 
 ships to this island, but we have not heard of 
 other Somersets, nor has the public b%n much 
 gratified with complaints of their desertion, though 
 it is probable that some may have taken, and not 
 unfairly, the advantage that was held out to them 
 by the law."— p. 112. 
 
 But if, indeed, the air of England be so pure, 
 and the soil so free as to kill the demon of sla- 
 very as soon as he inhales the one, or his px-ofane 
 foot reaches the other, how happened it that 
 down to the very period of the emancipation act 
 for the British West India colonies, the Chancel- 
 lor of England made decrees for sales in London 
 of plantations in Jamaica, together with the slaves 
 by which they icere worked ? The Lord Chancellor 
 ordered, by decree, the sale of two sugar planta- 
 tions at Nevis, and one hundred and fifty-iico ne- 
 groes thereon, to take place on the lOth January, 
 1833, in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, 
 London ! The curious may see in a pamphlet on 
 the opinion of the French lawyers in the Mau- 
 ritius, dated in 1832, and in a note at the end, by 
 the translator, the notable particulars of this de- 
 cree. But enough. The facts and the law are mis- 
 stated in the memorable case of Somerset. It was 
 not the law of England before; it has not been 
 acted upon or recognized since, as that decision 
 
12 
 
 is understood in this country^. It stands without 
 any prop in any part of the general or judicial 
 history of the British empire. In theory, it is 
 unsustained by the genius and spirit of English 
 jurisprudence, and as a measure of practice it is' 
 without precedent and without authority. 
 
 A principle has been deduced from the doctrine 
 of the Somerset case, and applied to our own 
 •country, which asserts the instant emancipation 
 of a slave, who accompanies his owner, so soon 
 as he touches a non-slaveholding State, in the act 
 of transit to another. Whatever may be the local 
 law of any member of this Confederacy, such a 
 doctrine is opposed, not merely to fraternal good 
 faith and international (not to spe^k of inter- 
 Slate) comity, but to the whole spirit of the Fed- 
 eral Constitution; while an attempt to enforce so 
 baleful a notion would be prolific of the direst 
 mischief to the peace and harmony of the different 
 States.* 
 
 The law, as declared in that celebrated decision, 
 ■will, for the future, govern the opinions of Eng- 
 lish lawyers, at least so long as it does not come 
 in contact with some controlling and predominant 
 interest in England. Whenever any such great 
 interest shall arise, such, for example, as the im- 
 portance of the Cooly trade, then we may expect 
 to hear Mbstantial reasons for the reversal of 
 Mansfield in the same spirit of his own sudden 
 judicial somerset. 
 
 Before quitting this branch of the subject, allow 
 me to say that the Cooly trade to which I have 
 adverted in the West Indies, as exemphfied since 
 the emancipation of African slavery there, is 
 shown to be, by its working in Cuba, little else, 
 and hardly better, than the African slave trade. 
 It has most of its abhorrent features, and must 
 end, if indeed the system be not in its origin 
 and tendency identified, with African servitude. 
 But this subject has been so fully unfolded by 
 my honorable friend from North Carolina, [Mr. 
 Clivgman,] that 1 forbear to enter further upon 
 that field of research. While I commend his 
 speech to the perusal of all thoughtful men, and 
 think his facts should be pondered by all phi- 
 lanthropists, I must say that he has ventured 
 some general and particular opinions which he 
 cajinot expect me either to subscribe to or ap- 
 prove. The luminous development of the same 
 
 *See the National Intelligencer of December 17, 1556, 
 and January 4, 1S57, for the fact, that in Prussia, the doc- 
 trine derived from the Somerset case is not the law of that 
 empire. 
 
 subject by the honorable and learned gentleman 
 from Louisiana [Mr. Taylor] should be turned 
 to by all inquirers into the spirit and objects of 
 this trade. Then what becomes of the value of 
 superior British pretensions to human liberty and 
 sacredncss of soil ? Is the sentiment worth more 
 than this, that the political aims and the commer- 
 cial and pecuniary interests of England form the 
 basis and groundwork of British benevolence on 
 this subject ? Since the modification of pure vil- 
 leinage, and the emancipation of African slavery 
 in her West India possessions, she has estab- 
 Ushed within the island as much liberty for the 
 sojourner and subject as is compatible with a 
 hereditary peerage and hereditary royalty, always 
 saving the distinctive demands of commerce, and 
 the other great pursuits of the kingdoiH. But 
 whatever motive may have actuated the immedi- 
 ate emancipation of her slaves in the West Indies, 
 we find the lessened production of these islands 
 has given rise to a system bearing only a differ- 
 ent name, but having all the objections to which 
 African slavery is liable. We find also existing 
 in the East Indies a system which, however jus- 
 tifiable with reference to the condition of that 
 country and the aims of England in securing and 
 extending her dominion, is totally at variance 
 with the sublimity of her benevolence in all that 
 concerns slavery in the United States. 
 
 I am no apologist for slavery in any form. I 
 believe it to be opposed to the genius of our Gov- 
 ernment and injurious in its effects upon this 
 country. But while I deplore its existence, I am 
 not insensible to the incontrovertible fact, that the 
 African, whether bond or free, has been greatly 
 elevated in character, and improved in condition 
 and happiness, by his residence among a reli- 
 gious, an educated, and a free people. That ser- 
 vitude which existed, and now exists in Africa, 
 and to which most of the progenitors of the pres- 
 •ent race of American slaves were doomed, is an 
 unmitigated, a barbarous, and hopeless tyranny — 
 that tyranny which is natural to a savage people, 
 without Christianity, and without civilization. 
 Nor can anyone doubt, who knows aught of the 
 slave system which prevailed in the West Indies, 
 and of the Cooly system which has been substi- 
 tuted under English rule, or which now exists in 
 Cuba under the laws of Spain, or even the system 
 ofpeonog-e, as that obtains in Mexico — that slavery 
 in the southern States is comparable to neither of 
 these. The different systems referred to admit 
 of more connivance at abuse, and are not more 
 
13 
 
 favorable to the welfare and comfort of the un- 
 happy subjects of them, than the more benignant, 
 generous, and in some degree patriarchal, system 
 existing in our southern States. Who ever heard 
 that slaves in our southern States were over- 
 worked, under-fed, ill-clad, or do not have the 
 Gospel preached to them? Any one who will 
 carefully study the history, the physiology, and 
 characteristics of that division of the African 
 race which has been brought to this country, can- 
 not fail to perceive that no equality of rights with 
 the races of Europe would bring about equality 
 of condition. Thenaturalinferiority of the negro 
 is physically and metaphysically a fact. You 
 may make society a level table-land , but you can- 
 not prevent the African negro from sinking in 
 intellectual stature below the height of the Euro- 
 pean. The laws of our free States, which show 
 the slow but certain results of experience, attest 
 this truth by withholding from the negro more 
 than a measured or qualified freedom. As the 
 untaught Indians are, for their protection, in a 
 state of tutelage to this Government, so the de- 
 scendants of Africa, for their security and hap- 
 piness as a dependant race, are in a similar 
 position in most, if not all, of the different States 
 in which they are placed. 
 
 That any system is a bad one which places the 
 happiness of one man in the keeping of another, 
 without more legal restraint than at present exists 
 in the slaveholding States, is certainly a grave 
 objection; but this objection would no doubt be 
 lessened, if not removed, in a calmer condition 
 of the popular elements. All I mean to say is, that 
 it is unjust to the character of this country, and 
 injurious to the social and moral standing of the 
 southern States, to confound the system of hered- 
 itary service which exists among them, with a 
 condition of law and a state of society out of all 
 comparison inferior to theirs in those attributes 
 and virtues which form and enter into the compo- 
 sition of a religious, a high-toned, and an enlight- 
 ened people. England is an exiguous territory, 
 situated in the same latitude with some of our 
 more northern States. She has no need, from 
 climate or soil, of African service any more than 
 they, as she proved in 1787, when she sent her 
 four hundred black people to Africa. She cannot 
 appreciate the want of such labor in a country 
 stretching through every variety of climate, from 
 almost the frigid zone to the equator. Where the 
 white man cannot labor, but where experience 
 proves he languishes and dies amid a fervid and 
 
 to him unnatural heat, the black man delights and 
 luxuriates. In the same proportion that the fervor 
 of a high southern latitude disables the European, 
 it is genial to the African negro, who suffers in- 
 versely in body and mind as he advances toward 
 the North. 
 
 This law of climate has silently proclaimed 
 itself, by the events of our own history. When 
 the thirteen colonies declared themselves inde- 
 pendent of English rule in 1776, slavery existed 
 in all. Let Engjand remember, and let those who 
 praise the free principles of the English Consti- 
 tution not forget, that at the moment of our sep- 
 aration, each colony held slaves under the coun- 
 tenance and regulation of English law. African 
 slavery, therefore, is to be marshaled among the 
 assets of our English inheritance. Pennsylvania, 
 in the year 1780, first provided by statute for the 
 abolition of her domestic slaves. Massachusetts 
 followed by judicial construction of her constitu- 
 tion in the same year; Connecticut aud Rhode 
 Island in 1784, New York in 1799, and several of 
 the other States in order. But is it not a fact 
 worthy of note — is it not an impressive passage 
 in our history, that all the States which have yet 
 manumitted their slaves are beyond a certain de- 
 gree of north latitude ? That slavery is still con- 
 tinued in some States where African labor is not 
 indispensable, is undoubtedly true, but the appa- 
 rent anomaly is well explained by the activity of 
 English and northern fanaticism, in preventing 
 the maturity of those wise measures of gradual 
 alteration which were deliberately meditated in 
 each. 
 
 Then the question arises, what is it the duty of 
 those northern States which have abolished their 
 respective systems of domestic servitude, or have 
 been admitted into the Union as free States, to do 
 in the matter of slavery in the southern States? 
 Have they anything more to do with it now than 
 before their own systems were abolished ? Ought 
 they not, in short, to deliver back to their south- 
 ern brethren, fugitives from labor and service, as 
 the Constitution enjoins, and as they agreed to 
 do in becoming parties to that solemn instru- 
 ment of Government ? Or should they act upon 
 the English dogma, that the soil of the free 
 States should instantaneously convert a southern 
 slave into a freeman ? I demur to the adoption of 
 that, doctrine in these Confederate States, poht- 
 ,ically and morally, as a man and a citizen, as a 
 lawyer and a statesman. I propose to show by 
 all the Hghts of history, by every consideration 
 
14 
 
 of justice, by the principles of national honor and 
 of national policy, that we are bound to restore to 
 the State and to his master the fugitive who has 
 left the protection of both. 
 
 Most of the thirteen colonies, when they all 
 had a common head in Great Britain, enacted their 
 own systems of laws for the capture and rendition 
 of fugitive slaves. These colonial laws were so 
 entirely sufficient for the protection of their re- 
 spective owners, that the Articles of Confederation 
 which followed independence in the year 1778, 
 were entirely silent upon the subject. But when 
 the Constitution was framed, in 1787, two of the 
 States had entered upon the work of enfranchise- 
 ment. Pennsylvania, whose early law of 1712 was 
 repealed by the Q,ueen in council, was no sooner 
 emancipated from the thraldom of political subjec- 
 tion to England, than, true to her original princi- 
 ples, she passed an act for the gradual abolition of 
 African servitude within her borders. This act 
 bears date the 1st of March, 1780, while the war 
 of the Revolution was still raging, and its result 
 still doubtful. But" while she thus prepared for 
 future freedom in her own territory, she was true 
 to the rights of her sisters on her own soil. It is 
 distinctly provided in the eleventh section of this 
 first great Abolition Act in the United States, that 
 "this act or anything in it contained shall not give 
 any relief or shelter to any absconding or runaway 
 negro or mulatto slave or servant who has ab- 
 ■ented himself, or shall absent himself, from his 
 or her owner, master, or mistress, residing in any 
 other State or country; but such owner, master, 
 or mistress shall have like right and aid to de- 
 mand, claim, and take away his slave or servant 
 as he might have had in case this act had not 
 been passed." This enactment, with a provident 
 and patriotic sense of justice which reflects upon ! 
 the men of that day in Pennsylvania the most i 
 distinguished honor, anticipated the requisitions 
 of the Constitution. Seven years before that great i 
 Federal State paper was framed, and thirteen ■ 
 years before the act of Congress of 1793 was 
 passed, Pennsylvania was ready by her own vol- 
 untary legislation, while abolishing her own sys- 
 tem, to do substantial justice to all her sisters. 
 This section of her act of 1780 is unrepealed to 
 the present day, and enters into her statute-book 
 as present and existing law. 
 
 The Constitution of the United States wa« com- 
 pleted and adopted by the Convention three 
 months after the enactment by Congress of the 
 great Ordinance, constituting the Territory north- 
 
 west of the river Ohio. The nearly cotempora- 
 neous dates of these two paper3,'throw light upon 
 each other in regard to fugitive slaves and to Con- 
 gressional power. Both these bodies — the Con- 
 gress and the Convention — were sitting in Phil- 
 adelphia at the same time in the vicinity of each 
 other; and the members, no doubt, in habits of 
 daily and hourly intercourse. The Ordinance for 
 the Northwest Territory originated with Mr. Jef- 
 erson,in the year 1784, in whose handwriting the 
 original draft is still preserved in the Department 
 of State, in this capital. It was modified and 
 enlarged by Mr. Nathan Dane; but the idea of 
 excluding slavery from that Territory in all time 
 to come, after the year 1800, is to be found in 
 Jefferson's original draft. But this bill was re- 
 peatedly negatived, and would never have passed 
 the Congress of 1787, if Dane had not provided for 
 the reclamation of fugitive slaves. He was a 
 northern man; and, as the author of a Digest of 
 the laws of Massachusetts, was true to their prin- 
 ciples and poHcy. All else of his bill, as it passed 
 into the celebrated Ordinance, including the pro- 
 vision for the rendition of fugitive slaves, was 
 derived from the laws of his own noble old Com- 
 monwealth. 
 
 In respect to the restoration of fugitives frora 
 labor, these laws were consentaneous with the gen- 
 eral legislation of the English provinces. At that 
 time Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and all the 
 other States were bound together by the remem- 
 brance of a recent participation in common danger. 
 Each, fired by the love of liberty, acted according 
 to its own sense of independent duty and interest, 
 in extending the blessings of that liberty to, or 
 withholding it from, the descendants of Africa. 
 But each was just to the others ; all were willing to 
 yield up those subjects of property which the laws 
 of all had once enforced. Whatever may have 
 been the sentiments of those States which had 
 adopted legislative emancipation, they knew that 
 fraternal concord, the sublime hopes of a glorious 
 national future, public peace and private atlection, 
 political union and social unity, were fur higher 
 considerations than merely absft'act sentiment in 
 favor of general liberty, however lofty, praise- 
 worthy and noble. The power of the English 
 press ceased for a time to be felt in this country. 
 The system of dividing to conquer had not entered 
 into the minds of her ambitious statesmen. The 
 interests of England were not entirely divorced 
 from the profits of the slave trade. Emissaries 
 had not been sent over the Atlantic to poison the 
 
15 
 
 minds, obscure the vision, and alienate the affec- 
 tions of the American people. At that tinne, 
 Pennsylvania would not have blurred the fair page 
 of her legislation by the act of 1847 which denied 
 the use of her prisons to the United States for the 
 detention and safe-keeping of negro fugitives from 
 labor, seeking concealment within her jurisdic- 
 tion. At that time, Massachusetts would not have 
 stained the patriotic page of her statute-book with 
 the provisions of such an act as the personal-lib- 
 ~ erty bill — a law which at one blow attempts to 
 blot out the Constitution, and to paralyze two 
 acts of Congress passed in pursuance of its pro- 
 visions. It proclaims disfranchisement of his 
 profession to that lawyer who may venture to 
 represent a claimant of a fugitive slave under the 
 laws of Congress of 1793 or 1850, and in its 
 whole scope and tendency is a moral treason 
 against the United Slates. If it be enforced, it 
 would be declared unconstitutional; and any overt 
 act of resistance under it to the Federal authority, 
 would be treated and punished as actual treason. 
 Thank Heaven the native spirit of Pennsylvania 
 was awakened, and her honor redeemed by the 
 repeal of her infamous law of 1847; but that of 
 Massachusetts, in spite of earnest remonstrances 
 and stirring appeals from her greatest sons to the 
 patriotism and national allegiance of her people, 
 > yet remains untouched upon her statute-book to 
 
 the present day. 
 
 Where is ihe spirit which, in the year 1643, 
 bound Massachusetts, New Plymouth, Connec- 
 ticut, and New Haven, together as one colony for 
 mutual and common protection ? Where sleeps 
 the spirit of a wise and provident forecast which 
 suggested, in the celebrated Articles of Canfeder- 
 ation formed in that year, a provision that any 
 servant, running away from his master into any 
 of the confederate jurisdictions, should be deliv- 
 ered to his master, upon the certificate of a magis- 
 trate, or other proof? The personal-liberty bill 
 of 1855 ignores the existence of these ancient 
 articles, and is oblivious of all existing confeder- 
 ations, as well of the duty she owes to " the con- 
 federate jurisdictions, "as to herself as one mem- 
 ber of a far greater and closer Union. — One of the 
 objections made in Massachusetts to the fugitive 
 slave laws of 1793 and 1850 is, that they contain 
 no provision for a right of trial by jury. If this 
 reason were removed, there would still be another, 
 as it comes from persons who are opposed to the 
 execution of ail fugitive-slave enactments. But, 
 in the case of alleged fugitives, there is no ad- 
 
 Tantage, but a manifestimpropriety , in such a form 
 of trial. The New England colonies were keenly 
 alive, in 1643, to all the forms and principles of 
 English freedom which did not intrench upon 
 their distinctive theological opinions: but they 
 saw nothing in the questions involved in simply 
 reclaiming a fugitive from labor, which justified 
 or required the interposition of a jury. He was 
 to be delivered to his master, according to the 
 words of the Articles, " upon certificate from one 
 magistrate in the jurisdiction out of which the 
 said servant fled, or other pi-oof." This regula- 
 tion, and others of a similar nature, were ex- 
 pressly made a part of this celebrated compact,- 
 for the reason which the convention assigns — that 
 of preserving peace, and taking away all occa- 
 sions of strife among the parties composing it. 
 Happy would it be for the honor and repose of 
 the country, if these communities would heed the 
 lessons of their own history, and adopt the senti- 
 ments and examples of their ancestors, in their 
 present policy and laws, while acting on a grander 
 and wider theater ! 
 
 But before the Personal Liberty Bill of Massa- 
 chusetts was passed, various other States enacted 
 laws within their several jurisdictions, for the 
 purpose of crippling and disabling the act of 1793. 
 This statute of Congress was one of the earliest 
 measures which the far-seeing men of that day 
 deemed necessary to the peace of the country and 
 the justice of its citizens. It was passed in the 
 administration and received the sanction of Wash- 
 ington. It was only to carry out the Constitu- 
 tion itself, as an injunction upon States for the 
 observance of a common duty which the colonies 
 had performed before and during the Confeder- 
 ation, which Pennsylvania as a Slate had volun- 
 tarily imposed upon her own citizens, and which 
 the celebrated Ordinance of 1787, so much and 
 justly extolled for its wise and liberkl provisions, 
 imposed upon the territory it forever dedicated 
 to freedom. 
 
 But State enactments embarrassed the execution 
 of the law of 1793, and combinations were mad« 
 in the free States with English subjects in Canada, 
 to facilitate escapes by what is popularly known 
 as Ike underground railioad. Every means was 
 devised by rendering fugitives secure from re- 
 capture, to multiply the motives to flight. 
 
 The southern men, from loss of their property 
 incurred in violation of good faith to our colonial 
 and constitutional pledges, and to all the circum- 
 stances of our earlier and later history, seemed to 
 
16 
 
 have become incurably alienated. The hand of 
 an enemy had tlirown the apple of discord among 
 a large family of happy States which were march- 
 ing together, as a band of attached brothers, to 
 greatness and to glory. Wise statesmen saw in 
 it all the fell mischief of the demon, who aimed in 
 undermining the affections of the people to carry 
 away the grand palladium of our country. 
 
 I call upon the intelligent North, as a northern 
 man, to act as lovers of the Constitution, to act as 
 good citizens, to act with a view to the practical 
 benefit of their own country rather than yield 
 themselves to the sublimated generalities of light- 
 headed, giddy, and theoretical sentimentalists at 
 home and abroad. No State can interpose ob- 
 ■tacles to the execution of the fugitive slave law 
 within its own jurisdiction, and be. a just and 
 faithful member of the Union. Any State which 
 passes laws to prevent or impede their execution, 
 or which does not, by its legislation, give them 
 the moral force of its countenance, and if need 
 be, the physical aid of its executive police, has 
 fallen from that devoted allegiance which distin- 
 guished the early days of the Republic. 
 
 Let us consider this subject with reference to 
 the words of the Constitution, providing for th* 
 delivery of fugitives from justice, and fugitives 
 from labor. These provisions follow each other 
 in the second section of the fourth article: 
 
 ," 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 execulive authority 
 of the State frciai wliich he fled, be delivered up, to be 
 removed to the State liaving jurisdiction of the crime. No 
 person held to service or labor in one State under the laws 
 thereof, escaping into another, shall, in conseque;ice 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." 
 
 The criminal and the slave, one flying from the 
 law, and the other escaping from his master, are 
 both to be delivered up, the one on demand of the 
 executive authority of the State from which he 
 fled, and the other on claim of the party to whom 
 Buch service or labor may be due. In these pro- 
 Tisions, intended to guard against the collisions 
 to which the preservation of distinct State rights 
 might inevitably lead, it is observable that the 
 tlave-dause is distinguished from the other by this 
 guarded language, that " 710 law or regulation" in 
 Vie Slate to which he has escaped, shall prevent the 
 delivery or rendition to his owner. This being 
 the supreme law of the whole Republic, that which 
 gives us the protection and honor of nationality, 
 it can be evaded or disobeyed only at the sacri- 
 
 fice of a fundamental as well as superlative social 
 duty. Obedience — implicit, unreserved, and per- 
 fect obedience to the Constitution, on these great 
 inter-State regulations, is at once the base of our 
 social edifice, and the key-stone of the whole na- 
 tional pile. 
 
 The two above-quoted provisions, as to crim- 
 inals and servants, are in the same category. 
 The Legislature of a State in throwing impedi- 
 ments to the fair operation of either would, as I 
 have intimated, be equally culpable. To put an 
 extreme case: — if a State dispensing with capital 
 punishments should refuse to deliver or throw 
 hindrance in the way of recapturing and deliver- 
 ing fugitives from justice in States where certain 
 crimes were capitally punished, would not such 
 refusal be an infraction of the Constitution .' Some 
 States disapprove, in their punitive systems, of 
 solitary confinement, and others approve of no 
 plan but that which separates ofl!enders. Some 
 find imprisonment for a few years abundant for 
 all the purposes of retributive justice and perma- 
 nent reform, while others shut up their criminals 
 for life. Some immure the culprit, if not in a 
 dungeon as horrible as the black hole of Cal- 
 cutta, in a prison nearly as detestable; while 
 other States provide humane places of punish- 
 ment. 
 
 Now I ask, if in this diversity of opinion and 
 practice, a sentiment should grow up in any of the 
 States against the infliction of death or imprison- 
 ment for life, or the lash — if, in self-righteous 
 benevolence, any State, yielding itself to the 
 vagaries of the hour, should come to regard these 
 punishments as cruel, and the expiation of an 
 ofi'ense by physical suff"ering as unjust or tyran- 
 nical — is such an opinion , whether righ t or wrong, 
 an admissible excuse, upon any ground consist- 
 ent with the safety of society, for refusing to 
 deliver up the offender to a State demanding him? 
 Would not a law interposing the least barrier to 
 the capture, security, and delivery of the criminal 
 be justly accounted as criminal itself, and even 
 rebellious? Is there any diflference in principle 
 between acting in opposition to law upon the idea 
 that slavery may be unjust and cruel in its effect 
 upon the slave, and opposing a law because cruelty 
 towards the criminal is deemed unrighteous and 
 forbidden ? In both cases a sickly tenderness 
 may plead that " mercy blesses him that givea 
 and him that takes." But the great poet himself 
 has elsewhere said that " mercy is not itself thai 
 , ofllooks so." Mistaken and false mercy is like 
 
17 
 
 that narrow charity which, in feeling the genial 
 warmth of its own fireside, does not realize the 
 possibility of shivering darkness beyond; while 
 true mercy, like the effulgent sun — broad as its 
 light, and warm and diffusive as its heat — vivifies 
 and gilds distant objects, as well as nourishes and 
 illumines those which are near. In order to secure 
 the freedom of a single person, you rivet and 
 multiply the fetters on thousands who remain 
 behind. You give him nominal freedom, but 
 peril, if not blight, his real chances of happiness. 
 You perhaps take him from plenty, and the care 
 of a considerate protector, whose pecuniary inter- 
 ests and domestic ties are bound up in his wel- 
 fare, and, it may be, consign him to penury and 
 suffering in a land of strangers. 
 
 But you do more than this. You violate the 
 majesty of a fundamental principle, and beget a 
 spirit of lawless disobedience, the worst of all 
 evils in a republic. You give countenance to pre- 
 texts, often for temporary and unwise expedients, 
 to set aside the restraints as well as the requisitions 
 of law. Legislative emancipation in the slave- 
 holding States is, through the same instrumen- 
 tality, indefinitely postponed. But a permanent 
 consequence of all remains behind. Thfe seeds 
 of distrust and disaffection are sown between the 
 ■different States of the Confederacy. State is 
 embittered against State, private feeling is alien- 
 ated, and that sentiment of a common nationality 
 which should be nurtured and cherished as of 
 priceless value, is neglected and thrown away 
 for an illusory and worthless abstraction. The 
 hopes of ihe country, which are identified with 
 its affection and peace, and the eyes of mankind, 
 which are fixed upon us, will be disappointed. 
 If we would cultivate the virtues of those great 
 men who wrote the New England articles of 1643; 
 of those who passed the abolition act of Pennsyl- 
 Tania in 1780; of those who shaped and carried 
 the celebrated Ordinance of 1787; if we would 
 obey the Constitution of the United States, and 
 remember the great and patriotic men by whom it 
 was formed ; if we respect the acts and venerate the 
 memory of Washington, who signed the fugitive 
 slave law of 1793: if we would defend in their 
 integrity the measures in which Clay and Web- 
 ster and Calhoun concurred in the year 1850; we 
 would stay the unfilial and suicidal hand which 
 is uplifted to destroy them all. The North have it 
 in their power, by abstaining from the mischief of 
 such interference, to bring back those noble hearts 
 of the South which beat in unison with those of 
 
 the North, in all those measures of patriotism and 
 nationality which will make ua a mighty and 
 happy people. 
 
 It is impossible to add considerations to influ- 
 ence human conduct, if motives such as are here 
 presented cannot animate, enlighten, and direct it. 
 For the single purpose of giving freedom to a few 
 runaways, who are perhaps unfitted for its enjoy- 
 ment, we may break down the proudest monu- 
 ment of human virtue which was ever reared ; we 
 may convulse the land with civil commotions; 
 and drench it in fraternal blood. And we may do 
 all this at the instance of whom.' Of a nation 
 whose whole history is at war with all its pro- 
 fessions, and whose theory of domestic govern- 
 ment and maxims of foreign policy laugh to scorn 
 the very lessons they would teach us. How 
 would England have resented any tendency in 
 this country to excite the discontents of Ireland, 
 or to foment, by word or deed, the spirit of dem- 
 agogue agitation and factious insurgency there? 
 Let alone, she has commenced a system of grad- 
 ual correction, and is proceeding — very tardily, 
 it must be admitted — to remove those complaints 
 of partiality and misgovernment which, for above 
 a century, have formed the staple of Irish litera- 
 ture and oratory. 
 
 Let me, in conclusion, cast a hasty glance at 
 our expanded country, the permanence of whose 
 undivided greatness is threatened alone by a 
 misguided benevolence and criminal perversity 
 towards fugitive slaves. The political State which 
 was formed by a union of the thirteen original 
 colonies, was mighty and colossal, even in its 
 birth. The boundaries, as fixed with England 
 by the treaty of 1783, inclosed an area of eight 
 hundred thousand square miles. But now, by 
 cessions of territory from Spain, France, and 
 Mexico, the national domain — that over which 
 the national flag triumphantly waves — has been 
 quadrupled in extent. Recent surveys make a 
 grand total of nearly three and a third millions 
 of square miles. Of the extensive and beautiful 
 surface, presenting every variety of soil, stretch- 
 ing into every variety of climate, and including 
 the richest tracts of the world, not a foot of land 
 has been acquired by indirection or conquest. 
 The acquisitions have been made, in every case, 
 after an open negotiation, and for a fair equiva- 
 lent. 
 
 The tonnage of the United States at the com- 
 mencement of the present Federal Government, 
 amounted to 274,347 tons. In the year 1855 the 
 
18 
 
 commercial marine of the world was computed to 
 be about 15,550,000 tons. Of this vast aggre- 
 gate, the tonnage of Europe and Asia was about 
 ten millions, of which amount, the half was en- 
 joyed by Great Britain alone. Nearly the whole 
 residue is the present tonnage of the United 
 States, that is, 5,250,000. This immense ma- 
 rine amounts to more than one third of the entire 
 tonnage of the globe, and exceeds the magnificent 
 Bupreniacy of Great Britain herself, the proud 
 and peerless mistress of the ocean. Without 
 any figure of speech, if we coolly look at the 
 figures of arithmetic, we may see in them the 
 maritime glory of this country, and calculate that 
 greatness to which she is hastening. The com- 
 mercial marine of Great Britain has, for the last 
 thirty years, increased twenty-eight per cent, in 
 every .term of ten years; while that of the Uni- 
 ted States in each decade, for the same period, 
 has advanced fifty-eight per cent. If we recall 
 the state of our commercial navy, as it existed in 
 1789, according to the census of the following 
 year, and consider the vast augmentation which 
 the intervening period of sixty-five years has 
 effected, it does not require the gift of prophecy 
 to foretell that American tonnage will soon not 
 only surpass that of Great Britain and the rest 
 of other nations singly, but that it will transcend 
 in magnitude the combined maritime fleets of the 
 world. 
 
 American imports have swelled in a degree cor- 
 responding with this expansion, from $23,000,000 
 in 1790, to $315,000,000 in 1856. The annual 
 revenue has gone on in a progressive ratio of aug- 
 mentation from $10,250,000 at the former period, 
 till it reached nearly seventy-four millions of dol- 
 lars in the latter. The wonderful and unheard of 
 spectacle is presented of a nation having a greater 
 revenue than some of her public men, crippled 
 by constitutional scruples, knew how to expend ! 
 And yet the increasing demands of a gigantic 
 commerce, with mighty rivers and an immense 
 extent of unimproved sea-coast, stretching in a 
 line of nearly twenty-five thousand miles — fresh 
 from the hand of benignant nature — require it all, 
 and more than such a revenue can supply. 
 
 The exports of the country more fairly express 
 the grand resultsofitsproductive industry. From 
 020,000,000, which was the sum of American 
 exports in the year 1790, these exports have gone 
 on increasing to $310,500,000, which they attained 
 in the last year. But when we reflect upon the 
 amount of domestic constjmption, and the stu- 
 
 pendous schemes of internal improvement which 
 the elastic energies and sagacious enterprise of 
 our people have set on foot, it is apparent that 
 the sum of these exports in no wise represents 
 the real resources of the United States. Above 
 two thousand patents were issued from the bureau 
 of that department, during the last year. More 
 than twenty thousand miles of railway arc now 
 traversed by passengers and merchandise; the 
 electric telegraph is penetrating to the remotest 
 settlements of the land; and a magnificent project 
 has been conceived of uniting by railroad the 
 Atlantic with the Pacific ocean. Is it, then, sur- 
 prising that, while the annual exports are num- 
 bered by hundreds of millions, the annual pro- 
 ducts of the country amount to as many thousands 
 of millions? It can be shown, by competent rfata, 
 that the industrial pursuitsof the country created 
 last year, and contributed to the wealth of the 
 world, the sum of $4,500,000,000! This vast 
 sum, the product of a single year, it has been 
 strikingly and aptly said, is greater, by an eighth, 
 than the whole debt of the British kingdom, 
 which has been accumulating for more than two 
 centuries. 
 
 The population of the United States numbers 
 nearly thirty millions of inhabitants, who are gov- 
 erned by a Constitution which is regarded'by some 
 of the greatest and wisest men of Europe as the 
 most perfect political instrument that man, in any 
 age or nation, ever conceived or framed. The 
 resources and powers referred to, must, in the 
 nature of things, give to the United States the 
 undisputed rule of empire among the nations of 
 the earth. To what are we indebted for this com- 
 manding aggregate of national wealth and great- 
 ness? Do we not owe it all to the binding force 
 of that great constitutional charter which concen- 
 trates our powers and resources as a nation — that 
 sacred charter which it seems to be the study of 
 some of our own people, in treasonable combina- 
 tion with certain English philanthropists, to tread 
 under foot, to profane and destroy? Shall we 
 slight the auspicious designs of Providence in 
 regard to this country, and disappoint the hopes 
 of freedom over the world ? Shall we endanger 
 the progress of republican government? Shall we 
 extinguish the brilliant promises of a glorious 
 future? 
 
 But whatever eulogy this greatness may be 
 worth, a greater glory than all remains behind. 
 We may boast of our territory, its imperial ampli- 
 tude and its boundless fertility; of our inland seas 
 
19 
 
 and extended line of coast; of the improvements 
 which activity, enterprise, and wealth are impart- 
 ing to our industrial pursuits; yet more than all 
 these, we have something better to be proud of 
 and to cherish. The population of this country 
 represents the effects of free institutions and the 
 influence of free schools, where the future fathers 
 of the State are educated up to the high level of 
 self-government. They exhibit that unshackled 
 freedom of thought which springs out of repub- 
 licanism, and the intelligence and happiness which 
 spring out of all. We may be grateful for a 
 bounteous soil and a noble country; but a livelier 
 gratitude leaps to American lips when we refer to 
 native genius and talent, to those useful attain- 
 ments and that higher public virtue which our in- 
 stitutions secure. 
 
 " Man is the nobler growth our soil supplies, 
 And souls are ripened in our western skies." 
 
 In what age, and in what nation, does history 
 
 or tradition speak of, since the dawn of time, 
 when the common mind and character mounted 
 up, as in this country, to the proper stature of 
 humanity? Where is the man among us whose 
 childhood has been passed in this country, that 
 cannot read for himself the Bible and the Consti- 
 tution? Where, it maybe soberly asked, in a 
 community of millions, are the religious instincts 
 of the masses systematically trained and devel- 
 oped — where are popular infelligence and social 
 virtue, better cared for — where is diffused an equal 
 amount of personal freedom and domestic happi- 
 ness ? 
 
 The earth may produce abundantly, and min- 
 eral gems may be dug out of her bowels or spar- 
 kle in her bodom, but the brightest and most pre- 
 cious jewels of our land are the hearts and souls 
 of her people — the offspring of that better soil, 
 whose high aims and elevated affections are its 
 natural and necessary fruit. 
 
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