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LEGAL ARGUMENT

BEFORBs THE

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF MVl JERSEY,
^t th* iHog Scmi^ Ig45, at t-rMort,.

FOE TUB SliLltfiRANCE OF

4,aoa

FEB SONS FKOM BON&A(?l:.

BY ALVAN STEWART, Es«.,
C<yt)>iSIIllllOlt i-t liM/.

NEW YOKK:^
rWCtf & WEED,, 118 NASSAU ST-SEEf.
1845.

LEGAL AEGUMEIT

BEFORE THE

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY,

^t t\]t iHttS ®trm, 1845, at Srfnton,

FOE THK DEUVERANCE OF

FOUR THOUSAND PERSONS FROM BONDAGE.

BY ALVAN STEWART, Esq.,
COUNSELLOK AT LAW.

NEW YORK:
FINCH & WEED, 118 NASSAU STREET.
1845.

(%'^V'^OO

3. W . BENEDICT,
Stereotyper aad Printcr^lS Sprnce Stre-ct^

^.w

a.

PEEFACE.

The public will not expect a preface to a disquisition on Constitutional
Law, which can go far to encourage them, in the perusal of a legal argu
ment ; but when that public are informed that the argument was not to
change the title to a farm, or test the Constitutionality Of a bank charter, but
that it was made for the deliverance of four thousand human beings from
bondage, and to overthrow the Institution of Slavery in the State of New
Jersey, further attempts at apology or to propitiate their kind perusal,
would seem unnecessary.
Several distinguished gentlemen of the bar have been so kind as to
wish to see this argum.ent in a more perfect form than could be expected
from the desultory notes of a reporter, which only glanced at some of the
most important topics which formed the basis of discussion ; to meet
which desire, and contribute a single mite to the deliverance of my coun
trymen from Slavery, it is hoped, will insure the reading of the following
pages.
A. S.
New Yorh, June, 1845.

SLAYEEY IN M¥ JERSEY.

SUPREME COURT OF NEW JERSEY

THE STATE,
vs. J Writ of Habeas Corpus.
EDWARD VAN BUREN.
THE STATE,
vs. ) Writ of Habeas Corpus.
JOHN A. POST. '

IScforc i\}t Instias of tl)fi StipuniE ^onrt of JJ'eu) lorsig,
The Honorable Chief Justice HORNBLOWER, '
And Judges Associated, NEVIUS, CARPENTER and RANDOLPH.
E. P. Palmer, Esq., Petitioner for the Slave and Apprentice.
Alvan Ste-waet, Esq., ofthe State of New York, Counsellor and Advo
cate for the slave and apprentice, admitted to argue these causes by the
courtesy of the Court.
A. O. Zabriskie, Esq., of New Jersey, Counsel for Van Buren.
Alvan C. Bradley, of New York, Counsel for John A. Post.
These causes were argued before the Hon. Justices of the Supreme
Court, at the Capitol in Trenton, on the 21st and 22d day of May, 1845.
Mr. Stewart occupied about eleven hours, and the defendant's counsel
five hours, durmg two days and an evening.
The argument in these two causes, in behalf of Mary Tebout, held, in
the first case, as property, until twenty-one years of age, her mother be
ing a slave, and she being 19 years of age ; and in the second case, Wil
liam, a colored man, claimed by John A. Post as a slave for life, being
about sixty years of age. Returns to the Writs of Habeas Corpus were
duly made on Wednesday, the 21st of May, 1845, in these causes respect
ively, before the .Justices aforesaid. These writs had been granted on a
previous day, on motion of Alvan Stewart, Esq., in open Court.
The object of those writs was to test the institution of slavery in the
State of New Jersey, which the Counsel for the slave and apprentice con
tended was abolished, by the first section of the Bill of Rights, in the
new Constitution of this State, which went into operation the 2d Sep-

6 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
tember, 1844. The defendant VanBuren, by his Counsel, returned to
said writ, tliat he held the said Mary Tebout, by means of several inter
mediate conveyances, from a person who owned the mother of said
Mary ; the said mother being a slave for life, and that the said Edward
claimed to hold the said Mary, as his property, until she was twenty-one
years of age, she now being nineteen years old, by virtue of a Statute,
passed for the gradual abolition of slavery, in February, 1820, by which
all slaves born previous to the fourth July, 1804, were slaves for life, and
all children born of said slaves after 1804, were declared free, but to be
held by the owu.ers of their mothers as apprentices were ; who were
bound out by the overseers of the poor, males till twenty-five years of age,
and females until twenty-one. The said male until twenty-five, and
female until twentv-one, were held by the owners, their administrators
and assigns, as property, or as other slaves are, until tiieir time was out.
The return in the case of John A. Post was the same in substance,
that he held the said William, a colored man, as a slave by virtue of the
law aforesaid, being born before 1804. To these returns general
demurrers were put .in, alleging the institution of slavery was abolished,
and thr.t the returns did not state sufficient authority to authorize the
defendants to hold said persons To which there was a joinder in
demurrer. Both of those causes were argued together, depending on the same
laws for their support, and for the purpose of obtaining a judicial deci
sion, overthrowing the system of slavery in New Jersey, in all its parts.
The following pages are intended to be the substance of the argument
and reply of Alvan Stewart, Esq., of New York, who appeared for the
slave and servant, as their Counsel.
The first article of the new Constitution of New Jersey, of September,
' 1844, is entitled " rights and privileges,"
" All men are by nature free and mdependent, and have certain natural
and unalienable rights, among which are those of enjoying and defend
ing life and lilserty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and of
pursuing and obtaming safety and happiness."
It was .supposed there were from seven hundred to one thousand slaves,
and from twenty -five hundred to three thousand servants or more, whose
liberties were involved in the argument and decision of these causes, as
well as the institution itself
Alvan Stewart, Esq., arose and invoked, as he said, the kind conside
ration of this Court, while he endeavored to break into a new, and almost
uncultivated region, to explore and investigate the long neglected rights
of man to his own body and soul. The Courts of our country had sounded
the depths of human learning, and all the vast stores of history, and the
remains of antiquity had been overhauled, sifted and analyzed, with
metaphysical sagacity, to determine with judicial accuracy, all the rights-
¦which men had to property, lands and tenements, corporeal and incorpo
real. Everything in the shape of human acquisition had been again and
again labored and belabored by the highest talents of the land, until learning
and genius could do no more, to add to man's possessions ; while the great
right of man to himself, while innocent self-ownership, under all circum
stances, is a great question, which has rather been ^azed than lifted up,
shunned than embraced, or duly considered, in all its mighty amplitude,
and its solemn importance ; and then only at distant periods of time, and
tmder the greatest disadvantage in point of time, place, position and cir
cumstance. The controversies about lands and estates, and the personal
rights of freemen, with all the subtle ramifications of the schoolmen, of
various legal questions of our age, have been pressing the highest juili-

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 7
cial forums of our land for decision, and constitute much of the drudgery
of counsel, and labor of the judges. A modern legal opinion of counsel
or judge is, that it is his opinion that he has clearly discovered what was
the opinion of Chief Justice Mansfield, or Lord Thurlow, on this question,
when Lord M., or Lord T. saw fit to express an opinion on this subject.
Considering the mighty questions of human liberty placed under the
control of twenty-seven State Constitutions, their laws, and the Federal
Constitution and acts of Congress, and the ten thousand forms in which
huinan liberty may be abused, froifl the most horrible slavery, to the
slightest invasion of a trespass ; it seems passing belief, to be told, there
is not one volume of reports, arguments and decisions, touching the great
inalienable rights of man, invaded as they are, by communities, states
and individuals, as a regular commerce carried on in crushed and violated
human rights, assaulted in every direction, overthrown, trodden under
foot as they are, at every step and angle of passing life. The attention of
our countrymen seems to have been turned to the contingencies and
appurtenances of our race, rather than to man, and the elevation of the
race itself. Congress has shown more anxiety to protect the hats, the
boots, and the coats whioh men wear, than the heads they cover, the
bodies they surround, and the feet they enclose. That grave assembly
can dispute from Cliristmas to dog-days, about the Tariff, Protection, Free
Trade and Revenue, while a petition to abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia, to give a man to himself, a wife to a huslsand, and children to
their parents, is received with profound astonishment as a moral anomaly,
and when the house has recovered from its surprise, the petition being
so completely at right angles with the course of a republican Con
gress, that unread, unprinted, undebated, and undecided, it is ordered to
lie upon the table, until the clerk removes it to its sepulchral silence in
one corner of the Capitol, to rest with the other entorabed memorials of
a nation's dishonored humanity.
Nothmg has been held so cheap as our common humanity, on a
national average. If every man had his aliquot proportion of tlie
injustice done in this land, by law and violence, the present freemen of
the northern section would many of them commit suicide in self-defence,
and would court tbe hberties awarded by Ali Pasha of Egypt to his sub
jects. Long ere this, we should have tested, in behalf of our bleeding
and crushed American brothers of every hue and complexion, every new
Constitution, custom, or practice, by which inhumanity was supposed to
be upheld, the injustice and cruelty they contained, emblazoned before the
great tribunal of mankind for condemnation ; and the good and available
power they possessed, for the relief, deliverance and elevation of
oppressed men, permitted to shine forth from under the cloud, for the re
freshment of the human race.
Yet these laws and constitutions should have long ere this felt the
weight of judicial pressure, and their good or evil been made prominent to
the men of America, and the breadtli and depth of the stream of national
justice ascertained, so that we might know the exact distance between
our self-glojifications, or our pompous anniversaries, and the pretended
magnitude of our personal liberties, as compared with the stern and
inexorable mandates of judicial decrees ; or what was the difference
between an abstract dogma of liberty, and a practical decision of tyranny
Alas ! said Mr. S., how vast the distance between an abstraction and a
practicality ! Oh ! when, said Mr. S., shall we see that glorious day, when
the lion and the lamb shall lie down together ? that day when the law,
w^ith its mercy, shall be extended to all, when none shall be so powerful
as to override its injunctions, none so low as to fall beneath its merciful
protection, defending all in their possessions ; the rich man iu his castle.

8 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
the poor man in his liberty, and the value of his labor, whether in the
wilderness, or the city, on the highway or in the closet ; let this law of
liberty brace the strong man on his journey, and its precioua breathings
fill the lungs of the infant in the cradle.
Oh ! for the glorious day when we shall have freedom for all, vvages
for labor, education for all, mercy to all, justice for all, and God's religion
in all ! Mr. S. said it was a horrid thought, that in the 19th century, there
should be found educated men, who were so weak, or so ignorant, as to
suppose the title to the great inalienable God-given rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, depended upon the complexion of a human
being, whether white, black, brown, red, or in combinations of these,
with curled or long hair, thick or thin lips ; the body is the casket, the
soul, the immortal mind is the jewel. The jewels are homogeneous, the
caskets may be infinitely diversified. To deny the existence of the jewel,
from the caskets being more or less plain than some other we have seen
(when we know the jewel is within), is not more absurd than to make a
man's right to liberty depend upon the color of his skin. But, said Mr. S.,
such are the raw material of apologies for gross wickedness, and the viie
ness of the material is never improved by its manufacture. The raw
material, its manufacture, the manufacturer, and the consumer of such
strange productions, ought to be bottled and hermetically sealed, where
they might be seen through a glass case as certain lusus natura, or a§- a
calf with two tails and no head are seen in some of our museums.
In order, said Mr. S., to understand the blessings which the new consti
tution of this State confers on the subject of liberty, it may not be amiss
to look, for a few moments, at the past ages of the world, on the stibject
of- slavery, and see how the men of antiquity saw and treated this ter
rible perversion of human rights. The ancient world, before the advent
of our blessed Saviour, was filled with this awful crime. All pagan lands
abounded with idolatry and slavery. But the glorious new religion,
wherever it made a lodgment, amidst cruel scourgings, the faggot and
the flame, the block and the cross, the dungeon and the gibbet, obtained
the ascendency ; and this dreadful institution fell before the mercy of the
cross. From the conversion of Constantine in the 4th Century, until
the 12th, Christianity fought her victorious battle with slavery, and came
off conqueror and drove it from the entire regions of continental Europe,
or wherever Christianity obtained a foot-hold throughout Christendom.
To be sure, said Mr. S., there existed, owing to the Feudal Law, a sort of
serfdom, in some countries, whioh was different in appellation and cha
racter from the chattel-hood of slavery. Time fails, said Mr. S., to tell
how tbe various devices of Pope, Pontiff, Bishops, ecclesiastical councils,
decrees of councils, of kings, diets and parhaments, accomplished during
what is called the dark ages — this most glorious work.
Said Mr. S., but the ever-memorable year of 1492 came for ever to be
reckoned the most wonderful in the history of our race since our Saviour
was born,— a new world was discovered by Christopher Columbus, the
grandest man of his race.
The human passions burst into a mighty flame, fed by the accursed
thirst of gold, discovery, and conquest. The peaceable and inoffensive
red man of the islands of the Antilles was forced as slaves to do work in
the fields and iu the mines ; and that age of innocent red men, a whole
generation of which found that mercy in death, which their Spanish con
querors denied them. The good Las Casas, moved by a considerate sympa
thy for the red man, absurdly recommended to his prince and country, to
repeal slavery as to the red man who could not endure its cruelty, and in
lieu, abduct and kidnap laborers from the burning tropics of Africa ; and
from 1520 this dreadful wound was opened in the side of Africa

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 9
which has continued from year to year, and from century to century, to
flow on without intermission, until this very hour. For more than 300
years has Africa been despoiled of her people by the kidnappers from the
nations of Christendom, until Christendom in tliree centuries had made it
the law of nations to rob the men of Africa of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness, and made and revived the extinct law of slavery, and with
armed bands marched into defenceless villages on the Senegal and
Gambia, set their habitations at midnight on fire, and with pistols, swords,
fetters, and ropes, pursued and overtook the distracted people and bound
and sent them to this continent amidst hunger, thirst, contagion, disease,
and death, tlie survivors in the pirate's ship, and in a land of strangers,
they were sold to drag out life on the plantation of the haughty, the thank
less, and the cruel. By such deplorable means has this continent fought
agauist her own prosperity.
Mr. Stewart then said he had two cases in his mind, which illustrated
what all knew respecting slavery, and few w^hose opinions were entitled
to respect would dare deny them.
Said Mr. S., lifting his head and turning to the north-east, directing all
to look, and see what they could behold on tlie last day of November,
1620, on the confines ofthe Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Lo, I behold
one little solitary tempest-tost and weather-beaten ship, it is all that can be
seen on the length and breadth of the vast intervening solitudes, from the
melancholy-wilds of Labrador and New England's iron-bound shores,
to the western coasts of Ireland and the rock-defended Hebrides, but one
lonely ship greets the eye of angels or of men, on this great thoroughfare
of nations in our age. Next in moral grandeur, was this ship, to the great
discoverer's ; Columbus found a Continent ; the May-flower brought the
seed-wheat of states and Erapire. That is the May-flower, with its ser
vants ofthe Living God, their wives and little ones, hastening to lay the
foundations of nations in the occidental lands of the setting suii. Hear,
the voice of prayer to God, for his protection, and the glorious music of
praise, as it breaks into the wild tempest of the mighty deep, upon the
ear of God. Here in this ship are great and good men. Justice, mercy,
humanity, respect for the rights of all ; each man honored, as he was
useful to himself and others ; labor respected, law-abiding men, con
stitution-making and respecting-men ; raen, whom no tyrant could
conquer, or hardship overcome, with the high commission sealed by a
spirit Divine, to establish religious and political liberty for all. This ship
had the embryo-elements of all that is useful, great and grand in North
ern institutions ; it was the great type of goodness and wisdom, illustrat
ed in two and a quarter centuries gone bye ; it was the good genius of
America. But, look far in the south-east, and you behold on the same day in 1620,
a low rakish ship hastening from the tropics, solitary and alone, to the
New World, what is she ? She is freighted with the elements of unmixed
evil, hark ! hear those rattling chains, hear that cry of despair and wail
of anguish as they die away in the unpitying distance. Listen to those
shocking oaths, the crack of that flesh-cutting whip. Ah ! it is the first
cargo of slaves on their way to Jamestown, Virginia. Behold the May
flower anchored at Plymouth rock, the slave ship in James river. Each
a Parent, one of the prosperous labor-honoring, law-sustaining institu
tions of the North ; the other the Mother of slavery, idleness, lynch-law,
ignorance, unpaid labor, poverty, and duelling, despotism, the ceaseless
swing of tbe whip, and the peculiar institutions of the South. These
ships are the representation of good and evil in the New World, even to
our day. When shall one of those paraUel lines come to an end ?
Mr. Stewart then proceeded to the definition and origin of the word

10 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
slave. He cited the encyclopedia under title, slave, as authority. The
word, according to Vossius, is derived from sclavus, the name ot a
Scythian people, called the Sclnvoni. Th-e Romans called slaves servt,
from servare, to keep or sar;?, being such as were not killed in battle, but
were saved, to work or yield money. A slave bred in a family was
called verna, hence our word vernacular, or the slave's tongue.
A Roman slave being set free, took the cognom-en of his master for his
sur or sir-name, and his slave name for his Christian— hence, our sur
name means the name ofthe lord or sir. So curiously has slavery inter
woven itself in the affairs of men, that all m-en are made most singularly
to feel the disgrace ofthe institution in their paternal name. The Romans
had those called mercenarii, who had been rich, but having become
poor, sold themselves for a time.
The Greeks had those called Prodigals, who, having lost their estates by
their extravagance, were sold to discharge their debts by law, for a longer
or shorter time. Delinquents to the revenue, or unfaithful subtreasurers
of the Roman Empire, were sent to the oar as slaves. But Tacitus
describes the most reraarkable slaves, De Moribus Germanorum, called
enthusiasts, who were gamblers, who having staked and lost their
money, goods and lands, finally staked their own bodies, and if they lost, the
strong and the yomig lifted up their hands and received the fetters thereon,
from the aged and weak, and were marched off forthwith to the slave
market and sold by the winner as slaves for life. This 'was done under
the code of a gambler's honor.
Those are the two kinds, among the ancients, of slavery, voluntary and
involuntary. Some think slavery did not exist before the Flood. But
Alexander Pope thinks differently, and says :
" Proud Nimrod first the bloody chase began,
A mighty hunter, and his prey was man."
A man has no right to sell hhnseif, and if he had, he could not bind his
posterity. A man is not allowed to kill himself.— £/oc. Book 1, C. 14.
Montesquieu Spirit Laws, B. 15, C. 2, and tJ. — Both say, if a man might be
taken in war and made a slave, this war-right of the captor could not
extend to the captive's posterity. This alone would abolish slavery.
The Romans exercised the power of life and death over a slave. So do
slaveholders in the United States under certain circumstances ; if the
slave refuse to work,.he, the master, may, by slave law, whip and beat
Mm until he is dead, unless he submits to go to work ; or if a slave
attempt to run away, and the master commands him to stop, and he
refuses, the master may shoot him down, and the slave laws of more
than ten States say, amen. The Romans were very cruel, and had an
Island in the Tiber, where by law, they might send old, useless and sick
slaves to starve to death or die. It is said as an evidence of slavery's
hardening of the heart to human suffering, that the elder Cato sold his
superannuated slaves for any price rather than maintain them. The
Eomans had slave dungeons under ground, called " ergastula," where
the slaves were worked in chains. The same in Sicily, which country
was cultivated by slaves in chains. Eunus and Athenio excited an insur
rection of 60,000 slaves and broke up the dungeons.
But we are more immediately interested in the light in which our
English ancestors viewed these great questions of human rights, and we
have derived most of our ideas of law and liberty from that interesting
source. The case of Somerset, to be found in the 20th Vol. of British
btate Trials, also m Long's Reports and Burrows', is one of manifold inter
est. It was justly said by that great lawyer and civilian, Mr. Hargrave
the counsel of the slave Somerset, though greatly aided in his brief by

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 11
that eminent philanthropist, Granville Sharp, " that slavery comrpts the
morals of the master by freeing him from those restramts so necessary for
the control of the human passions, so beneficial in promoting tlie prac
tice and confirming tlie habit of virtue." Itis often dangerous to the
master, as exciting implacable resentments on the part of the slave.
Said Mr. Stewart, slavery communicates all the afflictions of life to
its victim without leaving scarce any of tlie pleasures ; it depresses the
excellence of the slave's natiue, by denying to the slave the ordinary
means of improvement and elevation in the social scale of existence ; it
brings forth tlie gross, malignant, cruel, mean, deceitful and hypocritical
portions of human nature, without a counterpoise or a power of suppres
sion. The slave is always the natural and implacable enemy of the State,
he owes it nothing but deadly hate.
Said Mr. S., instead of the Constitution andthe laws being his shield
and his uiheritance, they are employed to strip hira of his natural rights,
of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, existing antecedent to all
human compacts ; and what should be einployed for his protection and
defence in the shape of law, is used for his prostration and destruction.
It is the element of constant fear to the family and the State, and is
tiierefore real weakness to the State from the constantapprehension from
insurrection at home, or invasion from abroad, ¦when it is always
expected the slave wil! range himself in tlie ranks of the invader of the
land. The slave has no country, no real home for wliidi he will fight.
Judge ofthe surprise of General La Fayette, said Mr. S., when on thefirst
day of being introduced to the American Congress in Philadelphia, m the
summer of 1777, he listened to the extraondinary request of South Carolina
to be released from raising and equipping the quota of troops designed
by Congress to be raised by that State as her proportion in flie eventful
struggle of the Revolution, on the ground if she spared that number of
troops from the State, it ¦was feared that there might be a servUe insur
rection, that it Avas necessaiy the troops should reraain at home to restrain.
a domestic enemy m her own bosom. If aU the States had been under
the weight of slavery like Soutli Carolina, our Independence could never
have been achieved. Such States as South Carolina may bluster and
threaten their brethren in time of peace with nullification and revolution,
but when war comes, her power to act out of her oivn territory will be
in the uiverse ratio of the noise and threats she made in time of peace.
The enemy of her own household will furnish a good market, not only
for her capabilities but her courage. If tlie home market is the best one,
she will find one at her own door, as ample as her productiona maybe
abundant. In the late war, about midsummer of 1814, this nation, said Mr. S-.
tvas overwhelmed ¦with shame, grief and astonishment, at the capture
and sack of the city of Washington, by a body of British troops, soldiers,
sailors and marines.
The public authorities had sufficient notice of the enemy's mtention,
the militia of tlie three cities of the District, and of the suiTounding coun
ties in the adjacent portions of the old States of Virginia and Maryland,
could have driven the British force into the sea, had not a report been
universally cnculated on the morning of the battle, and ou the battle
ground at Bladensburgh, that the slaves of the District and of the adjacent
counties, from which tiie militia were dra'wn for the defence of Wash
ington, were to rise that day in insurrection during the absence of their
masters. The moment the British approached our troops. President
Madison, with the Secretaries of the Departments, fled from position to
position, abandoning, as all who know tlie ground, one favorable place
after another, aud fii;ally retreated eight miles from Bladensburgh to

12 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
Washington, and at last the retreat became a general rout ; each man
having his mind on the danger he feared in his own house or plantation
from the insurrection of his slaves, rather than the immediate work of
defending the Capitol of the nation. This, said Mr. S., is a perfect
solution of that disgraceful affair. It was the natural consequence which
the weakness of a servile population creates, and the fear in a day of
adversity which it will inspire.
Mr. S., said he learned the cause of our disaster in 1818, while going
over the ground of this disgraceful retreat, with a General, who was a
Brigadier on that raortifying day, who assigned the above reasons to Mr.
S., as the cause ofthis most shameful result.
Mr. S. said, John Locke declared a right to preserve life is inalienable,
that freedom from the exercise of arbitrary power is essential for the
exercise of this right.
Said Mr. S., in the sixth year of the reign of Edward III., 1334, a law
was enacted declaring that all idle vagabonds should be made slaves,
fed on bread and ¦water or sraall drink, and refiise meat, and should wear
an iron-ring around their necks and legs, and should be compelled by
beating, chaming and otherwise, to perform the work assigned, were it
never so vile ; the spirit of the English nation could not brook this, as
applied to the most abandoned rogues, and repealed the law in two
years after its enactment. But nothing places the judiciary of England
on higher ground, than its patient work in extirpating villeinage from
England. It was an institution connected with the feudal system, and the
Norman Conquest of 1060, and the other conquests obtained in previous
ages, and was nearly allied to slavery, in everything but the name, so
that it is supposed at one period, there was not less than three quarters
of the population of the kingdom, who were either villeins regardant, or
villeins m gross. The dishonor of such a state of things has been so
¦ deeply felt by thousands, who are descendants of these bondmen in
England, and who now rank high in the scale of society, that there is
rather a desire to conceal than reveal the odious state in which our
ancestors existed ; therefore, David Hume and Sir William Blackstone
are very niggardly in dealing out information on an uifamous and obsolete
institution, so humihating to our ancestors, and humbluig to their
descendants. But, said Mr. S., to understand the terrible hardships endured and suf
fered by our ancestors, for many generations, and the glorious "way of
their deliverance by the judges of England, may furnish us with valuable
deductions, whioh may be applied to solve any difficulty growing out of
the causes under consideration, by leaming what use a court may make
of law to establish justice.
A villein in blood and by tenure was one whora the lord might whip
and imprison. The villein could acquire no property except for the lord.
" Quidguid acquiritur servo, acquiritur domino." A villein regardant passed
with the land of his lord, on which he lived as a kind of property like the
trees, but raight be severed and sold when the lord pleased.  Co. Little
ton 117 a. If he was a villein in gross, he was an hereditament, or chat
tel real, according to the lord's interest, being descendable to the heir,
when tiie lord was absolute owner of the soil, and to the executor, when
the lord was possessor for only a term of years. The coinmon law held
if both parents were villeins, or the father only, the issue were ¦villeins
The child at common law foUowed the condition of the father, Partm
sequitur patrem ; whUe the civU law held. Partus sequitur ventrem. ' There
fore, it was a departure from all principle, for the slaveholders of the
United States, who if they inherited anything from England it was the
common law, to substitute the principle of the civU law, because they

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 13
could make more money by it, and say the chUd in slavery should follow
the condition of the raother, when the common law said it should follow
the father ! But why reeison on a subject, when brute force and selfish
ness stand in the place of right reason and truth? Had, said Mr. S.,'the
doctrine of the common law been foUowed, slavery from its mulattoism
a significancy of the times, would have been in its last quarter. The
object, said Mr. S., of drawing this all but obsolete learning from past cen-
tm-ies, was not to make a public parade for the sake of its strangeness ;
but to show ui the great struggle, m past ages, between slavery and lib
erty, how the judiciary of England conducted itself in those encounters
between the powers of light and darkness.
The Courts of Law in the British Isles, from the Conquest down, employ
ed every intendment of humanity, every device, every fiction, in behalf of
the unfortunate serf One rule was for the court always to presurae in
favor of liberty ; but in sorae thirteen States of our Union, if a raan is of Afri
can descent, he is presumed a slave, until the victim proves a negative. In
England the onus probandi lay on him who asserted slavery or vUleinage
to prove it. If a vUlein prosecuted a ¦writ of Homine Replegiando against
his lord, on the trial the lord had to prove affirmatively the plaintiff was
his villein, and the villein, though the plaintiff, might stand still in court
till that was done by the defendant. The lord's remedy for a fugitive vil
lein was the "writ Native Habendo, or Neifty. If the lord seized the
villein by his -writ of Nativo Habendo, the villein procured the writ of
Homine Replegiando, or Libertate Probanda.
By the "writ of Nativo Habendo, the master asserted slavery, and if the
master was once nonsuited, he could never sue the serf again, and the vU
lein might plead the record of nonsuit as a perpetual bar. Not so, if the
poor villein ¦was nonsuited on the ¦writ of Homine Replegiando, or Libertate
Probanda. He might sue again for his liberty, and the record of nonsuit, if
made ten times or more against hira, oould never be pleaded oi used agauist
him. The slightest mistake on the part of the lord, or accident, was laid
hold of by the court to defeat the recovery of the lord. — Somerset's Case,
20th vol. of Haswell's State Trials. So this honorable court of New Jersey
should do, said Mr. S., under the new constitution of this State — the con
stitution adopted by the people in 1844. This court, in accordance with
the noble example of England's judiciary, should make every intendraent
in behalf of your bondmen, as between the selfish and cruel demand of
slavery and the ceaseless cry of liberty. Give the slave the benefit of
every sensible doubt, which may cloud the mind ofthis Honorable court.
Sueuig, or being sued by a vUlein, freed him. The lord's granting hun an
imparlance, manumitted him, or asking an imparlance of the vUlein did
the same. Almost, said Mr. S., the last case of vUleinage reported, was
near the year 1600, on the accession of James I. Crouch's case is re
ported in Dyer. AU of these obstructions thrown in the way of this sort
of slavery, are most interestuig legal relics of servitude, showing the meta
physical dress in whicii it was clothed by our subtie and ingenious
ancestors. These were patterns of extinct fashions of opinions, now only
to be found in the ponderous tomes of antiquity, garnered up in the library
of the legal antiquarian ; as the visors, steel and brass armor, of the
10th century, disclose to us the mode and appearance of the knights on
the field of battie in the days of chivalry.
To establish viUeinage, the viUein must be proved such by two other
male viUeins, ex eodem stirpe, from the same stock, or the viUein mig^ht con
fess in open court, being a court of record, that he was one. The female
vUlein was not allowed her testimony to prove a man a vUlein. A vUlein
was called nativus, as well as villanus, from the lord's villa , nativus
firom beinff found on the soU — a native. The lord, on declaring on a writ

14 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
nativo habendo, had to bring his two witnesses with him at the same in
stant he declared, and if he did not, the villeui went for ever free. A man
might plead bastardy, ui himself, father, grandfather, or ancestor, and if
the plea be true, that alone manumitted the vUlein, for the Jihus nullius est
filius populi. For if there was a link of iUegitimacy, it set the line of de
scendants from the bastard free, because the lord could not show that he
¦was the son of his bondmen in particular.
Anotiier plea of the -pillein was caUed adventiff hy the Norraan French
Law, showing that a person was born off from the manor, and if true, it
set the man and his descendants free.
Said Mr. S., Su: Thomas Grantham, about the year 1684,bought a mon
ster in the East Indies, and brought him to England as a show. The
monster had growmg on his breast, the entire parts of a child, except its
head. The monster being carried through the kingdom as a show, was
baptized, and he brought a writ of Homine Replegiando against his master,
and was set free.
Said Mr. S., I have done with vUleiiiage in England,— such in a dark age
was the view whioh learned jurists and judges took of this important
matter. The judiciary in many countries have been, at different
periods of civilisation, the last branch of human government, to feel
the force of popular opinion, in behalf of liberty, or employ its power in
accelerating the march of freedora, or the overthrow of strongholds of
fortified oppression. It is not, said Mr. S., a matter of complaint that the
judiciary is the hold-back power of the State, or conservative in its charac
ter, but with all that, it has a high mission to discharge on the part of
liberty. And the English judiciary have shown the world during those
dark ages what they understood to be contained in their commissions,
touching England's bondmen, even, under the iron rule of the haughty
Norman and his imperious descendants, who, by rights of conquest, and
by the subserviency of supple parliaments connected with the agency of
the Feudal Systera, had reduced four-fifths of the inhabitants of England
to the condition of vUleins regardant, and villeins in gross, attached to the
soil, or the person of some grandee of the realm, as slaves, whom their
lord might scourge, sell, or transfer with the soU, or at will.
The judiciary of England became the Temple of Mercy to wbich these
Hufortunate bondmen cast their imploring eyes for relief through a suc
cession of five cruel centuries, during eighteen generations of men
The courts of English law during this long period, employed all the
subtleties, fictions, and presumptions, inwhich the English Law abounds,
in behalf of the liberty of these grossly injured men, so that at last, the
sublime moral spectacle was presented to this world, of many unrepealed
statutes, and the common law stil) in full force in favor of viUeinage,
whUe the bloody useless fetters hung on the tyrant's dungeon walls, but
the last bondman of the three-fourths of the population of a raighty
kingdora was enfranchised from captivity by force of England's glorious
judiciary alone. The king, and iron-mailed barons, the land owners, and
man-holders, were foUed, and their prey taken from their power by the
resolution of the judges, who, being determined, did admmister justice
tlirough the law.
Montesquieu says that Aristotle.in reasoning to sustain slavery as deriv
ed from war, cites authorities from barbarous ages, and appears in this
matter as unphUosopMcal as he does in the nature of the thing. The
war-power to be the source of a right, when the war is prosecuted for no
other motive except the value of the captive, is as rational as to give the
robber titie to his spoU, because he had the courage to take it— making
a crime the most bold and daring, the parent of a civil right. Behold
bleeding Africa, for three hundred years her bleeding side- has flowed, and

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 15
yet flows on, unstaunched by the humanity of the Nations. Behold this
accursed crirae which has crawled up with beastly impudence, and
enthroned itself as one amongst the laws of Nations. Laws of Nations !
What was this law of Nations? That Christendom had a common right
to plunder, burn, murder, enslave irredeemably, and make property of
the inhabitants of that iU-fated continent, in and through all coraing
generations of tiieir posterity. A law of Nations! that aU law, justice,
mercy, humanity, should be suspended, as to one quarter of the globe ;
a law of Nations, that piracy, murder, fraud, arson, kidnapping, ra^vish-
raent and stealing, should be considered la-wful as an injmiction of the
law of Nations, to be honored and obeyed. A law of Nations
directiy at war with every other law constituting that code ; a law of
Nations, striking justice down, and sending it into eternal banishment
from the ¦world, subverting the decalogue of God, blaspheming Omnipo
tence, brandishing the powers of perdition in the face of the AUseeing,
caUing this bold defiance of the Almighty, the law of Nations ! Out upon
suoh infinite perversion, such inexpressible criminality. Russia, Prussia,
HoUand, Austria, England, France, Sardinia and the United States, in
the last forty years, as it regards themselves, by treaty and legislation;
have abolished their respective portions- in this frightful la-w of .Nations,
¦\vhile Spain, Portugal and Brazil, three of the basest kingdoms of earth,
are no^w retrogi-ading into the darkness of barbarism and uifamy, and
w^ithout competition are now almost the exclusive proprietors of this
la-w of Nations audits abounding criminality. Look at Spain three hun
dred and fifty-three years ago, as she stood on the day of Columbus' dis
covery, head and shoulders above the powers of Europe. Conquest,
avarice, slavery and idleness, whicii she introduced to the New World,
re-acted on her, and in our day, she has been stripped of her mines, her
provinces, viceroyalties, kingdoms and one half of a continent, and is
no-w reduced to the Island of Cuba, with its crimes of fiowing blood,
slavery, idlehess and avarice ; these relatives have been punished in so
signal a manner, in the case of Spain, by Him who rules the destuiies of
Nations, that to deny it, is a proof that our ignorance is only surpassed
by our infidelity.
The Court will pardon me in these remarks, which in the first instance
may appear remote from this question, yet when we consider the charac
ter of rhe human mind, they will all be found tobear on the great question
in the Constitution of this State. What do we mean by liberty and inde
pendence ? Infinitely absurd to say, a man has power even in himself, by
contract, to dispose of his own liberty and allthe rights he possesses.
Society has clauns on him, his wife, his chUdren, and his God, which he
cannot cancel by seUing himself to another. Yes, coming generations
have a voice in the question. He has no more right to sell his body than
he has to commit suicide, for, by so doing, he passes from raanhood to
thing, or chattel-hood, and becomes a piece of breathing property. The
great rights of manhood are not given to us by our Creator, to give, seU,
and barter away. The powers of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi
ness, cannot be resigned to a power inferior, to that ofthe one, from wliom
they have been received.
As to consideration that might be given for those God- inherited rights,
described in your Constitution, said Mr. S., as unalienable, who is rich
enough to buy them, who is able to make titie to them ? Suppose that
some CrcESUS owned this continent, and the mines of Golconda, and should
offer them to me to becorae his slave, according to the laws of South Caro
lina and Louisiana ; at the sarae instant, he executes for the considera
tion of ray person, a deed of the continent and mines to me, and I execute
to him a deed of my body. The purchaser of me, by the operation of ths

16 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
slave laws, instantiy becomes repossessed of what passed to me by grant,
under the maxim that the slave and aU he hath, or may find or acquire,
belongeth to the roaster, therefore, I the slave would say the considera
tion having faded, and by operation of law, my raaster having becorae re-
seized of his continent and mines, I am free again. Thus, it would be
found impossible to make a bargain resting upon equity, for the sale of
one's person, as the whole subject revolves in a circle of never-ending
absurdities, justice leaving the parties where it found them : raan with
equal success having attempted to quadrate the circle, create perpetual
motion, and make a contract for the sale of a man, by his own agree
ment, on consideration of value for value received by the slave upon the
principles of slaveholding law ! If a man could not perform the act of
making himself a slave, how could another do it for him, or a state or a
government, without doing an act repugnant to that law of nature spoken
of in the first article of your new Constitution ? When, said Mr. S., I
applied for these writs of Habeas Corpus some days since, to one branch
of this court, it was remarked by one member of tiie court, that this case
would require great consideration from its effect on the towns of this
State, as it might subject said towns to the maintenance of worn-out, aged
and infirm slaves, in the shape of paupers. That contingency is possible,
said Mr. S., but forms no ground against awarding to the bondmen, that
constitutional justice, so long withheld by the consent of these towns, as
weU as the avaricious masters. It was argued in the Somerset case by
Mr. Dunning, the Counsel of the claimant of Somerset, that if this slave
was set free by the judgment of the court, there were then at large fourteen
thousand slaves in England, belonging to, gentlemen in the West Indies,
who, for their own convenience, had brought them to England, and valu
ing them at de50 per head, they would amount to £700,000, or $3,500,000.
What was the memorable reply of Lord Mansfield ? It was, " that a man's
natural relations go with him everywliere, his municipal to the bounds of
the country of his abode." And in answer to the suggestion of a loss by
the proprietors of the 14,000 negro slaves in England, said Lord Mansfield,
'.' we have no authority to regulate the conditions on which law sliall operate."
We cannot direct the law, the law must direct us."
So, said Mr. Stewart, the argumentum ab inconvenienti should not apply
in this case. If these slaves have been wom out by the consent of the
public, if that public have folded their arms in sUence, and witoessed the
robbery of these men, from year to year, of their earnings (which raight
have supported them in the evening of life), it is right they should sup
port them when they can toil no more in the enjoyment of their just
liberty. For it is always dangerous for men to see liberty struck down in
others, and because they do not taste its bittemess personally, passively
to look on without resistance. It wiU sooner or later strike back on
themselves. That man is not worthy of liberty, who wiU not fly to the
rescue of his brother when he sees his freedom struck down or assailed.
Our liberties are always invaded when the humblest individual is depriv
ed of his, without our making all the resistance within our power. At the
tune of the argument of the Somerset case, in 1771, the world was full
of slavery, especially the West Indies, and the colonies of this continent-
it was tolerated in all. But behold what may be done by the indomitable
perseverance of one man, if that man be Granville Sharpe. He was a gen
tleman of smaU means, but of a great heart, and had for sorae time made
h ^'^'^y of human rights a subject of great consideration. He had read,
thought, and written in their behalf, and was the prosecutor who interested
himself for Somerset, the slave of one WUliam Stuart, a West India
planter, and prepared much of the brief of Mr. Hargrave, and obtained
the writ of Habeas Corpus, returnable in the court of King's Bench, at his

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 17
o^wn expense, llie court heard the argument patiently the live-long
day, and decided against the slave, onthe authority of a case in 1749, in
Lord Hardwick's and Lord Talbot's time. Nothing discouraged Granville
Sharpe; at the next term he brought up Somerset a second time, and
tile question was so important, the court heard the argument a second
time, and decided as before against the slave. Poor GranviUe Sharpe
StiU contended tiiat a slave " could not breathe m England," and having
spent months in deep study, upon the law of England, though a layman,
he brought up Soraerset for the third tirae before the court of King's
Bench whicii had Lord Mansfield for its chief, who did not meet poot
Sharpe and his counsel with a rebuke for his unconquerable fanaticism
and obstinacy, uor did the court throw down tiie coraraon impediment
to the march of mind and further consideration, by saying " res adjudicata,"
"¦res adjudicata!" No ! where human liberty was concerned, or the great
rights of self-ownership staked upon human reasoning and judicial deter
mination. Lord Mansfield was not in haste to say " we have decided
against human nature." The cause vvas argued a third time for a day in
Westminster Hall, and Granville Sharpe had, since the last arguraent,
descended into the deepest wells of English hberty and brought up
a draught of the waters of life, liberty, rasrcy, and law, so pure, that when
it Was commended to the lips of the judges,'' they ¦were made wise, the
scales fell from their eyes, and they saw in its length and breadth the
mighty truth beaming on the forehead of justice herself, — " that slaves
caimot breathe in England," and the light of that day has shone on with
increasing stiength and beauty, until •we can now say, that the sun which
never sets upon the realms of the British Empire, beholds in his circuit
through the heavens, no slave to crouch beneath her vast Ulimitable
power. But oh ! -what shall we say of the sublime humanity of Lord Mansfield
and his compeers, ¦who -^vere not afraid to confess they had been ¦wrong,
and had the magnanimity to say it before a slaveholding age .' This day
saw the longest stride which British greatness ever took on the Mghway
of human glory.
Would to Heaven, said Mr. S., that all courts might imitate the illus
trious example in administering justice in the sublime humility, which
dignified the court and exalted our kind, as in the case of Somerset !
The great principles established in the Somerset case awakened the
philanthropy of England, and put forth its strength in 1783, '88, '92, '96,
'97, and finally, in 1806, was successful in the abolition of the African slavo
trade by Parliament. Wilberforce, Pitt, and Fox were foUed again and
again, m Parliament, the theatre of their eloquence, and seat of their
power, but justice finally prevailed. This was the first great blow stmck
for the man of Africa, in three hundred years from the beginning of his
American and West Indian enslavement. But from that day, the vindi
cation of his rights has been onward. Congress, in 1774, recommended
the ceasing of the African slave-trade in December, 1775, but it was not
abolished untU Jan., 1808, by a law passed the March before, in 1807.
Tliree acts of Congress were passed ui 1814, 1820, and in 1824, increasing
the penalties against transgressors, untU it finally declared aU who were
engaged therein, were pirates, and subject to the pirate's doom. An act
of Congress passed in 1787, declared involuntary servitude, or slavery,
should never exist in the North Western Territory, comprising the present
States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and the Territories of Wiscon
sin and Iowa. These early acts of national legislation show which way
the mind of the nation pointed at this time.
A slave is a rational huinan being, endowed with volition and under-
Standing, lUie the rest of mankind, and whatever he Ia^vfully acquires
2

18 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
and gains possession of, by finding or otherwise, is the acquirement and
possession of his master. — 4 Dessaus., 266. 1 Stewart Rep., 320 — s. p. A
slave connot contract matrimony ; their earnings and their children belong
to the master. — Slave-Law. Indians are held as slaves in New Jersey. —
Halstead's Rep., 374.
Behold the shameful injustice of the Law of Slavery.
If it be found by a jury on inspection, that the person clainied to be a
slave is white, the claimant must prove him a slave or he wUl go free ;
but if the jury find the person to be of African descent, the law of slavery
presumes the person a slave, by whomsoever he may be claimed, and
the burden is thrown on the aUeged. slave to prove a negative, that he
is not a slave — Wheeler's Law of Slavery, 22. The o-wner of a female slave
may give her to one person, and the chUdren she may thereafter have to
another ! — Law of Slavery, 2. A slave cannot be a witiiess before any
Court or Jury against a free white in the land for the greatest injustice. <
This is one of its raost horrible features.
Look, said Mr. S., to the case of an alien-white-chUd. Suppose her to
be the daughter of parents of the lowest class of those who raigrate
from Ireland to America, and that these parents should die on their psis-
sage over the Atlantic, leaving to the mercy of New Jersey Laws, and
the good people of Perth Amboy, their daughter, twelve years old, who
cannot read or write, barefooted, destitute and friendless. Under your
laws, the Overseers of the poor bind her out, to the Mayor of Trenton;
she has lived with this rich, popular and influential citizen but one littie
month; when by violence she is dishonored, by her master, the Mayor.
Is he safe from the retributions of justice ? Is she deprived of her oath ?
No. She comes friendless and lonely, and knocks at the door of your
Grand-Jury -roora. Humble and feeble as is that knock, it is quicldy heard
by the acuteness of humanity's ear. She enters the vestibule of the great
temple of justice, and immediately the majesty of the entire law of the
land, not only of Nevv Jersey but of this vast Empire, stands in its
mighty invisibility around for her protection, ready to be revealed in its
power. She is invited, on oath, to tell the story of her wrongs, the
indignant Grand-Jurors listen and believe, and find a bUl against the
Mayor; she goes and comes under the law's broad shield. This haughty
raan is found by the officers of the law, is arrested by its power, and
brought before a Court to plead to this indictraent. He is tried ; a secoud
time, she, the friendless, coines and tells the tale of her dishonor ; con
fiding justice, humanity, loving and honoring men believe her story ; he is
convicted and atterapts to fly the power of the State and Union, which
is by that child's oath already set in motion, and will prevaU against
money and mobs of rescue, all of these cannot save the big criminal
from the vengeance of the law; to the Penitentiary, for ten long years, he
must and does go ; yes, the raerciful raajesty of the law shines gloriously
on the head of the friendless foreigner. This is being bom free and inde
pendent by the law of nature, under your Constitution.
But not so of the poor injured slave, man or woman, native born though
they be, however cruel or terrible the wrong inflicted on them, by their
owner or other free raan, the slave is not to be heard to tell his or her
story, however true, before any human tribunal in the land against a free
white person. Is this bemg free and independent by the law of nature ?
Is this possessing the safety and happiness described in the first Article
of the New Constitution, which your organic law declares to be the
portion of all, of woman born ? Slavery imports perpetual obligation to
serve another ! Does that look like being free and independent ?
Slavery, said Mr. S., is so abhorrent to all justice and mercy, that all
the mtendments of law and justice are opposed to it ; so that the legal

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 19
•vvriters of slave countries say that it can only exist by force of positive
law. The lex scripta must be its foundation, and that I think you no
longer have. The lex scripta must be the source of all of its mischievous
power, which one human being can exercise over another, by making a
fellow-being his slave, his chattel. The foundation of slavery which
sprang up in our colonies, had, as a general rule, nothing but the barbar
ous Custom of a few inhuraan planters, in its origin, which custora was
one witiiin legal meraory, and ran not back to that unsurveyed point of
antiquity, transcending ail huraan memory, where its source was hidden
in the night of byegone ages. It has not that common law authority for
its support, which was supposed to be handed down from generation to
generation, in th"^ libraries of judges and lawyers, as copies, as some con
jecture, of obsolete, worn-out aud extinct statutes. As the soul survives
the body, so it is supposed these customs called comraon law, are the souls
or spirits of departed statutes, the tomb-stones and graves of which can
uo longer be found. Cineres perierunt. But their imperishable souls
StiU remain to guide and direct us on the journey of life, and as far as they
speak in the language of authority over this land, they forbid in trumpet-
tongues, the existence ofthis vile institution of slavery
Institution of slavery! Institution of horse-stealing, institution of gam
bling, and the i istitutions of highwaymen, sound equaUy sensible, to a
just and philosophical thinker. But slavery is within the meraory of
men, so far as its advent to the New World is concerned. We track
it from the middle passage to this hour, from its first unholy foot-print
at Jamestown to the last ones made this day by those no-w held in
New Jersey ; and if the Court finds a well-grounded doubt as to the
authority for this institution existing, -which is trying to nestle down
on our soil, and taking rank with your scientific, religious and agricultural
institutions, then give humanity the advantage of that doubt, and put it
to death. As between strength and wealcness, power and imbecUity, if a
strong doubt arise iu the minds of the judges, the mercy of the law says,
decide in favor of imbecUity and weakness, " those who are ready to
perish," let their blessing come upon you. Every intendment is in favor
of natural rights, until the contrary doth most manifestly appear. If the
ne-w Constitution has seriously drawn in question the villainies and
crimes of this complicated institution of wrong, then this Court, acting
within the spirit and scope of American institutions, are bound to give
the slave the benefit of that doubt and set him free. A solid doubt should
secure emancipation. But thanks to the freemen of New Jersey, the
court is not obliged to look through clouds to see the clear sky of Liberty
beyond, for its Constitution, in its first section, asserts in the strongest
form of the English language, the explicit principles put forth in the
Declaration of Independence, when our country was introduced into the
family of nations, by which we declared the great self-evident truth to be,
that all men were created free and equal, and possessed of certain inalien
able rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
which is the proposition ofthe Constitution of New Jersey, expressed so
distinctly, that cavil itself looks on in humble silence, and hangs his head
in mute despair. For these great man-rights, said Mr. S., as I have said,
there is no buyer, no seller, no market. They are a trust confided to
man, by his Maker, in order to place him at the head of the created life,
and give him dominion over it ; and his rank he can never sell, lose,
or forfeit, so as to take his station as property among the quadrupeds
and animals. In the fall of Adam man never fell so low, as the slave
holder would have wished; for, according to the law of slavery, the
poor slave in the disastrous fall of the first transgression " which brought
death into the world, and with it all our woes," the slave feU out of bis

20 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
manhood into chatfel-hood, and fell on till he lost his wife, his children.
and in the amazing descent as he further fell, he lost all his property,
and all he should thereafter acquire ; and as he further fell, lie liim
self became property, and brought not up on solid ground, until he could
say to the neighing horse, on the one hand, " thou art, as property, my
brother," and to the lowing ox, on the other, "thou art ray equal, ray
peer." Such is the slaveholder's fall, but this is one of man's pit-falls, and
not one of his Maker's. Said Mr. S., he had an argument, which the Court
might regard as novel, which he wished to urge— that each and every
branch of our governraent, state or national, were under a raost solemn
covenant with one of the great nations of the earth, to use our best
endeavors to abolish slavery, iu every part of our country ; and we have
been living under the weight of that solemn and disregarded undertaking
for the last thirty years. Said Mr. S., I understand a treaty made by the
treaty-making power to be the solemn and paramount law of this land,
and if I am right in its construction, the duty is imposed upon our nation,
£is I may well urge it even upon the judiciary of this State, as a co-ordi
nate branch of the government, to employ aU the power it constitution
aUy may possess by its decision, to fulfil this engagement of the nation.
The article, said Mr. S., to which I refer, is the 10th article of the
treaty of Ghent, of the 24th December, 1814, made by the United States of
America on the one side, and his Britannic Majesty on the other. Lest
there should be some attempt to cavil, and pretend this article of the
treaty had reference to the African slave-trade, I may be aUowed to say
there is not one word in the treaty, except in the 10th article, which
touches or relates to the subject of slavery, and it is an engagment re
lating to slavery as to the traflic generally in the two countries, for each had
abolished the African slave-trade under tbe most tremendous penalties
long before 1814 ; therefore the treaty referred to slavery generally in the
two countries. The words of the 10th section of the treaty of Ghent are
as follows :
"10th Article, Whereas the traffic in slaves is irreconcilable with the
principles of humanity and justice, and whereas both his Majesty, and
the United States are desirous of contributing their efforts to promote its
entire abolition, it is hereby agreed that both the contracting parties shaU
use their best endeavors to accomplish so desirable an object."
Signed 2ith December, 1814. " Gambier,
Henry Goulburn,
William Adams,
(" Done in triplicate.") John Quincy Adams,
J. A. Bayard,
H. Clay,
Jonathan Russel,
Albert Gallatin."
United States Laws, 1st vol., 699.
This treaty, so long dishonored on our part, has been most faithfully
respected and obeyed on the part of Great Britain, They imraediately
began to adopt raeans for the subversion of slavery as a systera in the
West Indies. To be sure the violence, disorder, and Lynch-law of the
slaveholders of the West Indies defeated the kindness, and deferred the
approaching justice of the English nation for sorae years. It was aston
ishing to see the impudence of the West India planters, threatening dis
memberment of the empire, revolution, and treason, as often as the raother
countiy originated a measure in any degree preparatory to emancipation.
T-iese contumacious slaveholders did all in their power to frighten

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 21
England from her high purposes, 1st, by asserting that the slaves would
cut their masters' throats if eraancipated ; 2d, that the slaves were so
brutified, they would all starve to death, and die from laziness, and could not
take care of themselves; that the slaves were thieves and drunkards ; that
the whites would have to abandon the Island if they were set free, and lose
their estates ; in fact that slaves were not men, and had no souls. Amalga
mation, house-burning, and universal desolation would be the first fruits of
such procedure.
The Moravian, Baptist and Methodist ministers exposed themselves to
great rage from the slaveholders in attempting, as Christian rainisters
and good subjects, to preach the Gospel to the slaves, and aid them in
information in furthering the objects of the mother country. Baptist and
Methodist meeting-houses or churches were torn down and burnt, and
these blessed ministers were in constant peril of losing their lives, and
were occasionally imprisoned and bani.shcd from their homes and fami
lies. In fact, everything, which is said against emancipation and aboli
tionists in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, was said in the British
West-Indies thousands and thousands of times by the press, resolutions of
public meetings, the Island Legislatures, and the voice of raan, against
emancipation and British abolitionists; but on the passage ofthe great Re
form Bill of England in 1833, about 500,000 new law-makers or voters were
added to the old Parliamentary constituency of England, and wheu this
fresh stream of popular power flowed, it rose so high, that on the bosom
of its flood it carried into the New Parliament men deeply sympathizing
with the great principles of justice, and one of their first acts of legislation
was to declare slavery abolished in the West Indies, paying £20,000,000
sterling to the slaveholders, and giving them, the raasters, six years
more of the services of the slaves, so that emancipation would not take
place until the first of August, 1840. This apprenticeship-system, regu
lated by a most complicated law, with especial justices to stand between
master and apprentice, proved, if possible, more bitter than slavery itself.
Nothing could have been more unfortunate, or fraught with greater injus
tice to the colored people.
The master's avarice and cmelty arose in proportion to the shortness of
the time he could exercise his despotism. The special justices intended
for the slave-apprentice's friend, eat sumptuous dinners with the planter,
and decided controversies in his favor. The humanity of the government
in the apprenticeship was entirely defeated by the greediness, cruelty,
and avarice of masters. The horrid flogging, the treadmills, and other in
struments of slaveholding vengeance and torture were in full play during
the probationary state. The mother country had been overreached in pay
ing twenty mUlions of pounds sterling to see the objects of their solicitude
so shamefully tireated. The mistake of the home government was in
supposing it possible to engraft a system of apprenticeship, education,
and a preparation for freedom, on the old tiee of slavery, and in having
confidence in those brutal, crael, and avaricious slaveholders, who, with
their twenty miUions of pounds, and six years of labor, only hated tho
poor slave the more as his liberty advanced day by day in his chains.
Finally in January or February, 1838, the British minister wrote to the Gov
ernors of these Islands, requesting them in the coming spring and sum
mer to convoke those insular legislatures and ask them forthwith to
abolish the remaining two years of the apprenticeship system, if the
islands wished for the future good will of the slaves, or m fact, the pro
tection of the parent country, in case of insurrection. This stimgent
measure brought the obstinate slaveholders to their senses. The West India
Island Pariiaments were convoked, and the final acts of emancipation
pa,ssed, to take effect simultaneously on the 1st August, 1838. except tire

22 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
Island of Antigua, whose Parliament, with great good sense, abolwhed
slavery and apprenticeship both, in 1834, in an island of 30,000 blacks,
and 5,000 whites — six to one. Great kindness, love, education, and pros
perity followed tills island. However, the eventful first of August, 1838,
at last came, and instead of blood and insurrection, as prophesied by the
selfish and cowardly, the blacks throughout the British West Indies, to
the number of 800,000 human beings, who had been slaves, met in the
evening of the 31st of July, 1838, and there continued in a solemn and
quiet manner until the moment of midnight came, when the bells of the
churches of the British West Indies strock and played from island to
Lsland, wliile cannons were roaring throughout the Great Antilles — they
were the glorious peals of freedom, the joyful freedmen raising notes of
thanksgiving and praise to Heaven from bended knees, falling with hys
teric transports of wild and delirious joy, into each other's arms. ' No
mortal tongue or pen can describe the overflowing ecstasies of these
naked and scourged bondmen, now standing up as British freemen —
slaves no more. They sung, they cried, they danced, and thus in wUd
and rapturous joy they passed the terrific bourne so long wished for by
them — so long feared and dreaded by the guilty white man. But the
first drop of the white man's blood has not yet been shed, by these
deeply abused and emancipated people. Many thousands of these long-
injured people are now proprietors of two, four, eight, ten, and fifteen
acres of land. Their wives and children stay at home and cultivate and
raise enough for the family's food and clothing; the father works, or
some older sous, on some neighboring plantation, — the money he or they
eam pays for land : — his wife and children create subsistence from his
O-wn fields. Hundreds of schools, and many colored churches, have
sprung up for the adults and colored chUdren. Once the planters raised
nothing but sugar, molasses, rum, and coffee, and bought all their pro
visions from abroad ; now tjhe laborers' farailies raise their provisions on the
island. Less sugar, to be sure, is raised, but two-thirds of the sugar goes,
as a money question, farther now than all did in slavery, as more than
one-third, sometimes one half, was spent for provisions which are now
raised at home. So they have gone on with remaritable prosperity, both
master and freedmen. The plantations have arisen, some twenty, thirty,
and others forty and fifty, and many sixty and sixty-five per cent, above
their slave value. , In fact, the English government now feel that they
acted unwisely in giving the twenty-raillions of pounds, for the lands
alone of those slave islands are now "worth more than slaves and land
both were ia 1830. In fact, that is a matter of regret now, that the slave
had not received what England had to give. On the same day, the
fetters fell from the slaves of South Africa ; from the Cape of Good Hope,
six-hundred mUes north, inland, the institution expired on the last acre of
British supremacy — from ocean to ocean. On the 1st of April, 1844,
England, through her East India Company's mighty powers, struck slavery
dead through her Oriental Regions— twelve millions of slaves, serfs, and
caste— crushed beings, Ufted their unfettered hands to God to bless his
power, and that of England's, which, araidst a population of one hundred
miUions of Eastem Indies, left them in chains to pine no raore. Has not
England most gloriously, ui thirty years, frora 1814 to 1844, perforraed
her high and glorious undertaking with these United States in the treaty
of Ghent ? Has she not blotted out that great dishonor of our race from
her vast dominions J What havo we done to fulfil our part of this great
national covenant ? When the abolitionists presented from year to year,
petitions clothed in dignified and respectful language, praying Congress
to abolish the internal slave trade between the States, in the Territory of
Florida, and in the District of Colimibia, signed by tens of thousands of

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 23
names, unread, undebated, unprinted, and unconsidered, they were laid
upon the table. This being esteemed too great a privilege for humanity,
during three years, these petitions, by a rule of the House of Representa
tives, were forbidden a reception by the House. The abolitionists, for
endeavoring to fulfil the paramount law of the land, the 10th Article of
the treaty, were defamed in Congress and out, their names cast out as
fanatical and incendiary, they were mobbed by the countenance of men
in high places, their churches destioyed, their halls burnt, and their people
imprisoned and murdered ! If slavery not only forbids and restrains a
nation from perforraing its most solemn treaties, but violates thera, and
thus endangers the peace, prosperity, and happiness of the whole people,
can it be doubted that it contravenes the 1st Article ofyour Constitution,
which assures us that man has the right of "acquiring, possessing, and
protecting- property, and of pursuing, and of obtaining sa/rfy and happiness."
Can safety, property and happiness be maintained by men or nations
who violate faith, who are truce breakers? Is not that slavery which
hazards the peace of a Nation by refusing obedience to the highest law
of individual and national preservation, soraething that is contrary to the
great lawof naturel Every branch of our government — legislative, ju
dicial or Executive — should have lent every encouragement and aid in
their power, to the removal of this cancer, battening with its roots in the
jugulars of the Republic. But instead of Presidential and gubernatorial
messages urging Congress and the State Legislatures, under this standing
paramoiint treaty -law, to do all in their power within their respective
jurisdictions to abolish slavery, slavery has mounted the highest placea
of power, and has rescinded and annuUed the treaty, and corapelled
Presidents and Governors by raessages and inaugurals to forewarn the
Legislative Assemblies and the people to violate this treaty, and turn their
entire power and legislative action against those who had petitioned for
the abolition of slavery. Is not this high treason against the State and
man's best interests ? Has not slavery caused these high dignitaries to
comrait official perjury ? And is not such a terrible institution hostUe to
man, his safety and happiness as a man and as a citizen, and is it not
within the inhibition of the first section of your Constitution, and does it
not violate that freedora and independence conferred upon him by the
law of nature, and does it not stand between you and the enjoyment of
the first article ?
What is that law of nature, by ¦which all men are raade free and inde
pendent ? Allow me to define it as I understand it, said Mr. S. The lawof
nature is that great Omnipotent law of God, ever in full force araidst the
busy hum of thousands in your eraporium, or in the solitudes of the wUder
ness, on the sea, or on the land ; it follows man down into the mines of the
earth, it ascends with him to the Chimborazo's top ; it has no latitude, no
longitude, no length, no breadth ; it is truth, and is as earnest in its plead
ings, amidst the inhospitalities of polar cold, as in tbe boundless prodi
galities of the burning tropics ; it is the everlasting justice and meroy of
the Etemal ; it is the great iraprint of God upon man, which can never be
counterfeited, erased, or repealed ; it is so immutable that it never
changes, man cannot repeal it ; it is a part of each human being's inherit
ance, ¦which -without crirae he can never spend or squander ; it abides
¦with him, though unhonored, under all circumstances of bereavement,
and guarantees man's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as
inalienable. The law of nature is taken up and recognized by the good people of
New Jersey, in the most solemn form as a rule of action, in her organic
law. TMs first section declares that amongst mau's unalienable rights

24 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.

are

ar« life, liberty, and the right of acquirmg property What, can a slave
have safety, or acquire property ? he who is nothing bu a chattel, a piece
of property himself, can he acquire safety ? No ; of all the innumerable
murders committed by white men and woraen upon the slaves ot the
soufli (and there is no day goes by in which there is not more than one
murder in each slave State, on an average), not a single white person has
yet been executed for the murder of the colored man. The white is
frequentlv hung in tiie slave States for stealing slaves, but not for killing
them. Oh, sum of all human villanies, let the curse of God rest upon it,
let every wuid of Heaven be charged with its destruction, every risuig
sun be its destioyer, the rolling seasons its executioner!!
Said Mr. S., slavery isthe exact converse of every proposition contamed
in the first article of your new Constitution. ,
Slavery throws down every human right in the market to the highest
bidder. If slavery or serai-slavery, in the shape of children of slaves in
this State continuing to be slaves, males until twenty-five, and females
untU twenty-one years of age, and this operation is to pass under the
name of being bom free, and persons forty-one years old and upwards to
be retained as slaves for life, and slaveholders are to stand asserting
their wicked power, then the first great section of your Constitution is
converted into a vapid and senseless abstraction. Shall your Constitution
be ¦withered by the power of slavery ? Shall this Constitution stand gUt
with the gold of high pretension, while within it is full of ravening and
dead men's bones ? ShaU this slave institution continue to exist in hos
tUity to so plain a provision ? This frightful institution claims to exist
by the apology of some since the 2d of last Septeraber, even since this
Constitution went into operation, without a platform on which to place
its accursed feet. Said Mr. S., the best foundation I can see for slavery
in this State, at this time, and the length of tirae it should continue,
should be the amount of time it would take the people of this State to
recover from their astonishment at its inexpressible impudence.
The institution of slavery is the converse proposition of the Ten Com
mandments, the essence of injustice and raeanness in its raost compact
form ; and it would seem that no nation not strack down by a mortal
paralysis, would wait a raoment before rising and striking down the
monster, the first instant they discovered his seven heads and ten homi
emerging from the forlorn regions of " Eldest Hell."
Said Mr. S., which shall stand — the great written, organic law of liberty,
or the un^written and inexpressible vUIany of slavery ? Which shall
stand — the natural God-inherited rights of life, liberty, property, safety
and happiness for each human being in New Jersey, or that of an insti
tution which subverts every object for which a good Constitution was
ever made ?
A Constitution ex vi termini imports a covenant made by the whole
people, with each person, and each person with the whole people, to
protect and defend their God-inherited rights of life, liberty, property and
safety from violence and invasion. A Constitution is made for the
defence of human rights and not for the destmction ; a Constitution is
the highest evidence of man's weakness; and to combine society's
strength, for the defence of each individual. How is it possible that
a Constitution, whether of this State, or of the United States, which
were created on purpose for the protection of life, liberty, property and
Safety, can exist and be entitled to the name, without overthrowing
every institution villany or stratagem created or made, intending to cheat
man out of life, Hberty, property, safety and happiness ?
The men who framed the old State Constitution of New Jersey in the

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 25
year 1776 were not such hypocrites as to stamp fliat Constitution with
the protection of human rights. No, they said nothing on that subject,
for they knew there were no inconsiderable class of the population of
this State, who were wedded to the insatiable desire of appropriating the
labor of others, without compensation, by compelling negroes, mulattoes,
mestees and Indians, to work for them for nothing, and make chattels or
property of their persons, their wives and children, — yes, of tiiose human
sinews as a marketable commodity, men were to be degraded and for
bidden, under penalties of thirty-nine lashes, from wandering from their
masters' homes on Sunday, for the infliction of which stripes, by the
order of a justice of the peace, a constable did and yet does receive from
the master the sum of f 1 for performing the brutish service. To add to
aU other ignoble acts on the part of the State, was a provision forbidding
emancipation ofthe slave, if forty years old or more, for fear of the dis
tant contingency, that this freedman raight become a public burthen to the
township, by being a pauper in Ms old age, and rather than subject the
towns to that they preferred to let the man and his posterity remain in
slavery. Such was the gross inhumanity of the age ; thus cheap were
human rights held by the people of this State at large. Gross inhumanity
to the master himself; it took away his locus penitentia, his space of
repentance. And if slavery is not abolished, this infamous provision is
still in full force. The reason, said Mr. S., why slavery was not abolish
ed by name in Massachusetts and New Jersey is to be found in this, that
the conscious shame of the fact restrained the framers of those Constitu
tions from immortalising their own disgrace by admitting slavery's pre
vious existence, in and by its distinct abolition. They therefore put it to
death by suffocation by the hands of liberty, without a name, hoping the
judiciaries would attend its funeral and burial, and for ever remove its
unsightly corpse from the sight and sraell of men with as little parade as
possible ; and further hoping a generous posterity would disbelieve their
early public Mstory, and consider it as apocryphal and slanderous of their
illustrious ancestors, as the Constitutions of these States do not so much
as name so great a moral blemish on their historical fame.
Said Mr. S., by the statute of this State (which he contended was re
pealed by the 1st section of the new Constitution) passed February, 1820,
all cMldren born of slaves after 1804 were to be free, but belong as ser
vants, and be held as apprentices, who are bound out by the overseers of
the poor to the owners of their mothers, their administrators, executors
and assigns, males till 25, and females until 21. These persons were pro
perty in every sense of the word, until their time expired ; they are pur
chased and sold in private and at public auction, pass under the insolvent
acts and bankrupt acts, the same as oxen and horses. What is the differ
ence between this Mary Tebout and her mother ? Nothing, until Mary has
passed 21 years of unrewarded toil. She is called a servant, she is said
to be born free, now but 19, and has been sold three times. The South
em States call slavery involuntary servitude, or persons bound to service
by the laws ofthe States. The domestic institutions ofthe South, the patri
archial institutions and the peculiar institutions of the South — by such soft
hypocritical use of words, do they raean to raake the English language a
partner in their guilt, by using it as a cloak to conceal the hideous visage
of that frightful monster, whose mouth is filled with spikes, and cover her
face with iron wrinkles, with burning balls of fire for eyes, whose every
hair is a hissing serpent, whose fetid breath would kill the Bahon Upas,
whose touch is ruin, whose embrace is destruction, who is fed on blood,
tears and sweat, whip-extracted, from unpaid toil — her music is unpitied
groans of broken hearts, of ruined hopes, and blasted expectations.
Away, said Mr. S., with such artifice to sMeld deformity, by those

26 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
cruel and wicked States, boasting of their republicanism, and rights of
^aan. Even New York and Pennsylvania once held persons born free,
whose mothers were slaves, the males till 28, and females till 25, as slaves.
Terrible nick-naming of human rights, as in bold derision of them. These
New Jersey servants are property, in its base sense, slaves for years, the
parents deprived of all jurisdiction of their offspring, all direction of their
education, and paternal tenderness ; the law confining these poor servants,
and obliging them to live with those who have owned and abused the
mother who bore tiiem, and are still continuing to hold their parents untU
death as slaves. The master can sell this servant and horse together.
TMs servant-woraan at 15, and the male-servant at 18, contract marriage,
and when the woman is 19, and man 22 years of age, having three little
children, the father is sold to one end of the State, and the raother to the
other ; their littie children left in the street, the raarriage relation broken,
the paternal and maternal relation dissolved ; these little ones not to see
their parents for two years or raore ; the husband cannot see his wife or
little ones, nor the wife her husband or babies for two years to come. Call
you this being born /rec 7 The man is deprived of his wife, and the wife
becoraes a widow, and chUdren orphans, according to law, to satisfy the
claims of certain old slaveholders in this State ! Is this being born free?
This sort of being born free, " is keeping the word of promise to the ear to
break it to the hope." This looks none like respect for the law of nature,
by which we are born free and independent. We can never honor or
respect the new Constitution, till we feel there is meaning, power, vitality,
in those blessed words of justice, truth, mercy, freedora, safety; and
further, feel that there are no birth-impediments, or interest of others in
the use of our bodies, inconsistent witli our own happiness. Each indi
vidual should be left to fulfil the object of his mission to this world iu the
best way he may; society should not load him with burdens for the
benefit of others, but should give him every facility to run his race of
existence, with dignity to himself, and thus truly serve the ends of society
and his own creation, in passing from the great eternity of the past into
the illimitable future. Here, Mr. S. said, we are not left in the dark, as
to the raeaning of the words of the New. Jersey new Constitution, for it is
almost an exact copy of the first section of the Massachusetts Constitu
tion of 1780. Here Mr. S. read the first section of the Massachusetts Con
stitution ui these words.
"Article 1st. All men are born free and equal, and have certain
natural, essential, and inalienable rights, ainong which may be reckoned
the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties ; that of ac
quiring, possessing, and protecting property ; in fuie, that of seeking and
obtaming their safety and happiness."
Here Mr. S. asked Mr. Zabriskie, counsel for the claimant of Mary
Tebout, if he contended there was any difference between the two sec
tions of these Constitutions ? Mr. Zabriskie replied, he did not.
The New Jersey Constitution has in the 10th Article these words, "The
common law and statute laws now in full force, not repugnant to this
Constitution, shall remain in force until they expire by their own limita
tion, or be altered or repealed by the Legislature."
Further, Mr. S. said that he relied on a portion of the Constitution of the
United States for emancipation, by this Honorable Court, to wit, the
Magna Charta portion, where it asserts " that no person shall be deprived
of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."
Mr. S. said that the case of Winchendon v. Hatfield, ith Mass. Rep., 123,
is the ca.se of one Edoin Landon, in relation to the question as to wMch
of the towns should support him, he having been a slave in Massachusetts,

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 27
and sold eleven times, enlisted twice in the Revolutionary army, the
second time for three years, his raaster receiving his bounty and his wages,
— also, 4th Mais., 539. Chief Justice Parsons decided in this cause that
slavery had been abolished by the first section of the Massachusetts Con
stitution, as had been decided in formerly unreported cases. This is
legal authority, in effect, on the very words of the New Jersey Constitu
tion, 1st article; Massachusetts being the sarae in substance, as admitted.
Need I say Massachusetts has shed from the lamp of her Judiciary as
pure, bright and steady a light as any Court in the ne-w world, and has
done her fair share in elevating the science of the law. I repose with
great confidence upon this authority ; it covers the whole controversy.
The case of the slave — Med. 18th Pickering, 193, known under the
name of Commonwealth vs. Thomas Aves, presented w-ithin the last half
dozen years this same great question collaterally. The argument was
elaborate, and opinion of Chief Justice Shaw luminous.
The Chief Justice Shaw says, Massachusets in 1641 abolished slavery,
except of captives taken in lawful war or guilty of crime. But slavery grew
up in Massachusetts, and in 1 703 an act was passed in that colony, imposing
restrictions on the transmission of aged and infirm slaves ; and by an act
of 1705, a duty -was levied dn tiie importation of slaves, showing slavery
in full force nntU abolished by their Constitution of 1780. The Chief
Justice, in this case, says it is now well established law that slavery was
abolished by the Constitution of 1780, and before the adoption ofthe Con
stitution of tne United States, slavery being repugnant to the principles of
justice, of nature, and the declaration of rights, which are a component
part of the Constitution of Massachusetts. Slavery, said he, crept into
Massachusetts by force of custom existing in the West Indies and in several
other States, encouraged by the mother country (miserable apology better
than none, even in Massachusetts).
Chief Justice Shaw says, " Slavery is a relation founded in force and not
Ul right ; existing where it does by force of positive law, and not recog
nized and founded m natural rights." Slavery, he says, " is contrary to
natural rights, to the principles of justice and humanity." He then says,
" Bond slavery cannot exist in this Commonwealth, because it is contrary
to natural riglit, repugnant to the Constitution and law, designed to secure
the liberty and rights of all persons who come within the liraits of this
State, as entitied to the protection of law."
But what case can I have stronger than the opinion of Chief Justice
Marshall, himself a slaveholder? Borne do-wn by slaveholding construction
as he was, still his innate integrity triumphed over cultivated wrong, and
compelled him to define slavery as contrary to the law of nature, for the
definition of slavery by the civil law, showed it an institution contrary to
the law of nature, which law of nature New Jersey has adopted. In
case of the Antelope, 10th Wheaton, 120, the Chief Justice Marshall says,
" That slavery is contrary to the law of nature will scarcely be denied ;
that every man has a natural right to the fruits of his own labor is gene
rally admitted, and that no other person can rightfully deprive him of
those fruits and appropriate them against his will, seems the necessary
result of that admission " Chief Justice Marshall quotes the definition
of slavery in the Latin from the civU law, which, with his own opinion,
would seem to put the question in this cause for ever to rest. It is this,
" Servitus est constitutio juris gentium qua quis Domino alieno Contra natu
ram subjicitur." Slavery is an institution by the laws of Nations, by which
one is subjected to another man, as master, co»<rar-i/«onafu?-e. Slavery strikes
down and repeals, if it could, the law of nature referred to in the 1st article
of your Constitutioa ; what can be stronger aud more complete ? said

28 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
Mr. S. Here Mr. Stewart gave way for an adjournment untU 3 P. M.
for dining. „ , ,
The court being present at 3 o'clock, P. M., Mr. Stewart resuraed by
saying. Has any lawyer the courage to say that the legislature of New
Jersey could create the institution of slavery to day in defiance of
the new constitution ? Perhaps raost, if not all, would say No. Why
could not the legislature enact such a law so as to create the relation of
slave and raaster ? It would be correctly answered, and would be by all,
it would be repugnant to the new Constitution and its first section. Do
not we discover that a law sustaining slavery is equally repugnant to the
new Constitution, whether passed ten years before it, or ten years after it ?
and that the repugnance is not a question of past or present time ? If it
is repugnant, it is equally so in the one case as the other, — " it is so odious
nothing but positive law can sustain it," says Lord Mansfield.
Mr. S. said that he confessed himself to have much respect for a heing
so highly honored as man by his Malter, a being created in the image of
God, who showed at all times the grandeur of his descent, and the illus-
triousness of his lineage by that great unimpeachable record written
upon his countenance sublirae, by the finger of God, which no poverty,
sorrow, or crime, could erase : its raarks of origin were open to all, read
of all, and should be coraprehended by all. In the first place we must
look at the immense natural wealth, or God-given possessions, which be
long to the meanest man, who prhits the green earth, with his foot, or
drinks from its waters, and renews life every moraent from the unbought
atmosphere — is fanned by the wings of the wind, cheered with the eye-
possession of the universe ; yes, his every-day existence could not be
sustained, at a less expense than the fitting up of two worlds, for his ac
commodation, the earth and sun ; the bread he eats, the wool, the flax,
and cotton he wears, is warmed into life by rays of light from the sun,
sent over ninety millions of miles in profusion, without stint, each ray
having its definite office and distinct commission to aid to life, strength
and joy, a single human being. If there were but one raan on this
globe, these vast structures of two worlds must be reared in all their archi
tectural grandeur and fitness. This globe must revolve around on its
own axis every t'wenty-four hours, and shoot along upon the vast plane
of the ecliptic, at the inconceivable rate of sixty-eight thousand iniles per
hour. Man perishes, if the globe were to revolve around the sun at the rate
of thirty -four thousand railes per hour ; man could not live in these regions
with a year of seven hundred and thirty days, with the unbroken severities
of a double winter, or the scorching heat of a protracted summer.
The outlay of Almighty power, which sends this noble earth careering
round the sun with such prodigious force, and brings it back to the same
point, in absolute space with infinite precision, with the punctuality of
God, is a portion of each man's inheritance ; and all the powers ever
displayed by man, exerted by beasts, felt frora winds, or overwhelmed
by tornadoes, or moved in tempests, or lifted or sunk by earthquakes,
swept by tides, or driven by inundations, put forth since the morn
mg of creation, would not furnish a sufficient force, to propel our globe
on its everlasting journey, a single day. Yet for man these high demon
strations are made, to fit him up an abode with the finish of Omnipotence,
commensurate with his every want, it is his God-inherited estate ; and
were the poorest man on earth to exchange that estate, for the power of
Bonaparte, when all Europe shook beneath his tread, and trembled at his
power, this poor man would be undone, by the exchange ; the property is
too great for any one to buy it, of another ; this is tiie benevolence of
Heaven to his honored creature, man. When each man's God-inherited
estate is reckoned and computed, though possessing nothing "Ise, and com-

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 29
pared with that of any other man's God-inherited estate, they are
equal ; and if one possess a million of pounds, and thc otiier no money,
stUl when their whole possessions are oouKidered, one has one hundred
and the other but one hundred and one. This proposition or statement
wUl for ever -^-indicate the goodness of Hea\'en, and show the absolute
equality of all men, if considered possession- wise.
Therefore it seems to me, said Mr. S., the Declaration of Independence,
in asserting, that all raen are created free aud equal, istrue as a proposi
tion, and is not a rhetorical flourish, but a sublirae estimate, no less grand
than true, when we refer to the vast possessions of each human being ;
and that any accidental variance by the acquisitions of one, of more wealth
than another, does not disturb the great result any more than the dust
¦which may fall upon one of the scales shall change their general equipoise.
All men are created equal, and shall abeingof such amazing dignity and
iraraense possessions, of such grand lineage, be made a slave ? God
forbid. Equality, life, liberty of locomotion, the rights of acquiring hap
piness in every way we see flt, not violating the rights of our brother
raan, or the edicts of Heaven, with the God-inherited estate, constitute
what your constitution and that of Massachusetts and the Declaration of
Independence, describe as rights inalienable. Is it not so ? What kind
of a deed, said Mr. S., must that be which should attempt to convey my
right and title in the ¦wind, atmosphere, earth, and my share in the
power that propels this ponderous globe around the' sun ? — ray title to the
exhaustless fires and light of that great luminary, and of those rays which
might fall on me or on the earth and produce my raiment and food ? Is
there not deep and philosophical truth in asserting the inalienability of
rights like these, so essential to raan's existence, and his everlasting ac
countability, to the Father of all, for his abounding munificence, witii which
man can inve.st no other being, or divest himself Can it not truly be
said that a being who is born to such great possessions, is born free and
independent ? The greatest blot on American character is, to have been
deluded by slaveholders into a belief that those great words expressed by
the men, ¦who wrote and adopted the Declaration of our Independence,
were mere abstiactions and the flourish of oratory, wliere they declared
the great self-evident truth " that all men are created free and equal, and are
possessed of certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and
the pursmt of happiness," and that the same were meaningless. These
truths are self-evident, and why ? said Mr. S. They are evident in every
breath of air we respire through our lungs, every step we take, in every
object we behold printed on every tree, written on every cloud, bursting
forth in every faUing drop of rain, reflected in every ray of light, by which
the universe is warmed, and in glory lit up, and by the succession of day
and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, in fact, its self-evi-
dencie is stereotyped in eternal beauty upon the earth, the sea, the moun
tain, the vaUey, upon the raoon, the sun, and stars of heaven. This con
stitutes the great record of ever-during self-evidence, that all raen are creat
ed free and equal, and are possessed of certain inalienable rights, &c.
Said Mr. S., this rises to a moral, if not a mathematical demonstration,
and that a great nation should, so far as individuals, forget the dignity of
their origin, the vastness of their inalienable possessions, and should hunt
for arguments to force their debasement and search for reasons to under
value such a being as mau, especially in a great selfocracy, where each
man is a sovereign, is among all strange things, one which would exceed
belief were we not met by the strange phenoraenon at every turn of hu
man affairs. Had we incorporated the Divine sentiments of our great De
claration into our minds, as an everiasting first-principle, and lived under
the sway of its glorious dominion, no slavery would then have disgraced

30 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
our magnificent country ; no half cultivated, foriom and deserted sections
of Slave States, would have told the worid their melancholy tale. No
coffled gang of slaves would have dishonored our nation, driven from
State to State, for sale. No, our prosperity, riches, glory and moral eleva
tion, would have presented so imposing an example of raan's capabUities
for his own advanceraent, that king-craft aristocracies and all of that
coarse mode of working, taxing and governing men, as family-jobs, would,
long ere this, have been thrown into the rear of the carap of huraan pro
gress, and new forras of self-government would have succeeded, in which
the governed should have been the governors, and the interest of the gov
erned would have prevaUed, in the true advancement of the human race.
We, said Mr. S., have terrible penalties to pay, for abandoning princi-
pies so glorious, so wise, of which we had a full view, and by saying,
most shamefully, the Declaration of Independence is a formula and not
serious, it is the poetry of excited rainds. By thus forsaking these great
truths, certain and as practical as the Decalogue, we fell back into the
arms of a low, base expediency, and relived the forms of crimes and fol
lies of former ages, holding these sublirae truths as abstractions, fitted
only for the meridian of Heaven, with angels for their operatives, to carry
thera out, while we fed ourselves upon the husks of former absurdities,
rejecting truth, holding it too beautiful for practical use.
Said Mr. S., will not this Court set the nation the shining exaraple of
doing right, on this question, by acting up to the full measure of their
judicial and moral power ?
Said Mr. S., a nation may lose its liberty in a day, and not raiss it in an
hundred years ; this nation lost its true liberty, the clear light, the first raoment
the great words of the Declaration of Independence ceased to be honored
and respected as household, every-day truth, the fundamental rules of
action, as the political and moral mathematics of the nation.
Although ¦we raake several hundred voluraes of fourth of July orations,
poetical self-glorifications and boasting eulogiuras for the home-inarket
yearly, in which the raost beautiful descriptions are given of the dress and
form of liberty, as a wonderful unknown goddess, and amuse ourselves in
describing her altar, the costiiness of her sacrifices, and the riches of her
perfume, and the curling sraoke of her incense ; if in the everyday inter
course of raan with man, of courts of justice with causes, in expounding
the doctrines ofthe great declaration and of legislation, in framing new
rules of action, we should with one consent, have asserted that in the
Declaration of Independence and other national and State Constitu
tions contauiing the same thoughts, that liberty was sincere, in declar
ing the freedom and equality of all raen, and the inalienabUity of the
rights, of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; for not so doing, we
have lost liberty, though we do not raiss it; we have only liberty's casket,
but the jewel is gone ; we are playing and satisfying ourselves with forms
when tho substance has departed. We make the loud acclaim, we fire
the cannon of salutation, crackers burst under our feet, our toasts may be
drank in three times three, in the wildest uproar of animal excitement;
still these demonstrations are worse than senseless, because they make
us think we are true believers in liberty and the divine dignity of man,
while we are only high-heeled hypocrites and fanatics, spinning in con
centric circles, like brain-turned dervishes around an abstraction of liberty,
being neither flesh nor spirit, being the great indefinable, our adoration
increasing with our ignorance, until the beatitude of our worship i s raade
coraplete in the perfect idealess. StUl for a pretence we make long
speeches about Republicanism and Deraocracy, whUe we have naUed and
crucified, in and through our colored brother. Liberty on the cross. We
have so long been absent from true Uberty, that we should require a for-

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 31
mal introduction before we should dare address her, for she is not that
tawdry dressed cyprian bearing her name, who had sold her charms to
demagogues, pimps, panders, pirates, buccaneers and slaveholders, whip
in hand, who have declared that slavery is the chief corner-stone of our
republican mstitutions : while the clergy ofthe south have most impiously
averred slavery to be a Bible, God-honored, Christian institiitionto be kept.
Shameful impiety and desecration of the fountain of Eternal trutli !
Said Mr. S., the Court will pardon me wliUe we look for a raoment at
the sublirae teaching of that wonderful and holy book the Bible, so often
lugged iu to uphold piracy at the expense of the Eternal's justice and
raan's happiness. The Alraighty has done a thousand-fold more, to
express his infinite abhorrence of slavery, than of all other crimes and
offences agauist his law. He has suspended the laws of nature and in
one instance of tirae, smote two and a half miUions of people with death,
and caused the sea itself to retreat before the fugitive slave, and made, as
predicated on these amazing exercises of power, a direct revelation of
himself, and imraediately caused our revealed religion to be produced, to
express his everlasting detestation of a crime which would unthrone
Him, and crush his creature man, and place him beside the beast of the
field. Said Mr. S., our Maker destroyed the first edition of mankind.
Inthe second emission and publication of ourrace Egypt became thc school
master-nation ofthe human race, and the great instructor of mankind.
The nations ofthe earth, on camels and dromedaries, came, inthe uifancy
of antiquity, to Egypt, to exchange their rude materials and ignorance for
the Egyptian works of art and knowledge. In fact, no opinion was con
sidered ¦worthy of general acceptance, by the surrounding barbarians, un
less it had an Egyptian endorsement, and their wise raen's starap and
mark upon it.
It appeared the Israelites in near 400 years had increased to two and a
half millions of people, as ¦would seem from the number of men spoken
of in their Exodus. The Pharaohs had a slave market for centuries. The
poor Jews had become slaves of the most distressing type. They had
their overseers, their distinct tasks ; they were scourged, and had every
mark of human debasement and slavery inflicted. The day of their de
liverance was ill an age, in which the passion for public structures, im
posing in their magnitude, wonderful in their display of high-wrought
efforts of genius, constituted the chief employment of their kings, and
great men, for centuries. The poor Hebrews had often laid their petitions
before Pharaoh tMough Moses and Aaron, asking to be perraitted to go
into the wildemess, and worship their God. But Pharaoh, as a slave
holder, stood between this people and their conscience, and refused to let
them go. Slavery strikes down the rights of conscience always, for there
is not a slave in the United States, who is inforraed in any reasonable
degree in the Christian religion, who does not reraain in slavery, contrary
to the plainest teachings of his own conscience. The Almighty having
warned the Egyptian government of the great crirae of holding raen in
bondage, was deterrained, in the early ages of mankind, to settie the ques
tion of his infinite abhorrence of slavery, in a manner so elementary and
signal, that the stamp of His finger-marks should remain unerasable
through all coming ages. For slavery overthrows the will of the victim,
and the claim of the Almighty to the adoration of his creatures; and no
power can get m between God and man, and interfere on this subject,
unless it is slavery. Slavery breaks down the will, volition, and choice
of its victim; the slaveholder steps in between the slave and his
Maker, and says. Oh, slave, talk not of conscience, your religion, or your
God; do ray wiU, or die; my wiU is your law, and not your God's;
my wiU yau must obey, or die. Slavery always disputes our Malier's

32 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
supremacy; warning after warning, miracle after miracle, had been lost
upon the obduracy of Egypt's king.- One raorning, as the population of
that kingdom of 15 mUlions of people arose and looked at their beloved
Nile, lo ! and behold, it was one vast river of blood, from the cataracts
where its tumbling torments of blood fell in mighty roar, and pursued its
sweeping course for 600 mUes to itsseven mouths, where the Med i terranean,
receiving its tribute from this ancient servant, blushed for twenty leagues
around, at Pharaoh's impudence. The stranger from afar, the traders,
seekers of knowledge, and the citizens, stood that livelong day, and
wondered at the bloody NUe ; and as reasons were asked and given, I
think I hear them say, the reason why the NUe runs blood is tiiat
Pharaoh holds the Hebrews as slaves, and the Hebrews' God demands
their release, and shows his anger and his power at Pharaoh's refusa).
The stranger wonld carry this news to the utraost bounds of livuig raan,
saying, one entire day I saw the Nile run blood, to express the abhor
rence ofthe Hebrews' God against the crirae of slavery. Again, the hea
vens were darkened at noon by the gyrations of armies of locusts, which
shut out the sun, and they consumed the vegetation of this fertile land;
men cried for raercy, and in a few hours this array of destructive locusts
was carried on the wings of a strong west wind into the depths of the
Red Sea, not one left. The Egyptian and the stranger knew that the He
brews' God had done this, to cause these poor slaves to be delivered from
the mighty monarch's cruel power. On a certain other day the obstinate
Pharaoh refused, after raany promises, to let the poor Hebrew slaves go
free. It is noon ; the burning power of a June sun strikes the land ; anon,
all eyes in Egypt are turned to a black cloud rismg out of the west, over
the Lybian desert.
Said Mr. S., this was the first thunder-storm in Egypt, and the last, for
it neither rains nor hails in Egypt, owing to the great Lybian desert of
eand on the west, and the Arabian desert on the east, as philosophers
suppose. It skirts the western heavens, and the terrific clouds raise
themselves higher and higher ; men turn pale ; anon the low and
solemn tones of thunder are heard ; men tremble, and say it is the voice
ofthe slaves' God, — in a moraent the flashes of forked lightning play with
infinite quickness, men fall on their knees and declare it is the flashing
of the angry eyes of the Hebrews' God at the Egyptians' cruelties. The
clouds rise to the high altitude of noon ; the lightning, the winds, and
roaruig thunder send consternation into the hearts of affrighted men. It
appears like night, nature in agony, men fear to speak, and believe they
are on the eve of doom ; men and beasts hide themselves in extrerae ter
ror ; the thunder makes the earth tremble from pole to pole ; the pyraraids
rock from their deep foundations, the rains descend, the haU beats the
earth, fire and ice leap from the clouds, while the lightning strikes down
the tiees, plays round the pyraraid tops, sraites the sphinx, and runs
along upon the ground, men in agony praying for deliverance ; Pha
raoh and his court lie prostrate in the palace, the earth seems shaken out
of its place, and all nature in convulsions. The king implores mercy,
and the Father of all hears, pities and delivers, the faithless king and peb
ple, and ere the sun went down, that storm and desolation had for ever gone
by, and the last cloud sunk below the horizon, in the Red Sea, while the
beautiful sun rolls down the -vyestern heavens, smiling in raercy from and
beyond the dark solitudes of the interminable Lybian sands. This
storm, all men knew, was an evidence of God's displeasure at slavery.
But Pharaoh would not let the people go.
It is in Egypt, and is midnight, when the young wife, but two years
maiTied, awoke and placed her hand on the shoulder of her youthful hus
band; he was as cold as marble, he would not awake at her mournful

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 33
cry— he was dead, he was the first born of his parents. She arose in wild
despair, she ht a flambeau, and looked at her little babe on the raattress;
the fixed smUe was there, rigid in death, never to be relaxed ; lie was the^
first bom of his parents; she flies to her father's and mother's bed in
the next roora, she awakes her father, but none but the archangel can
arouse her mother from death's sleep, most profound ; she was the first
born of her parents. She sends her man-servant to her neighbor for help
m this awful hour; the servant enters the neighbor's, a light is there,
waihng and horror meet hira. The aged father of the second house was
the first born of his parents, and is dead, and the infant first born is also.
No contortion, no groan was ever heard of all who fell in a single instant,
on that dreadful night ; they lay with all the peace of eternal sleep upon
them. The servant finds another servant in this second house of death,
they go out, they hear tiie survivors' waU, and see the baleful torch lit up
in every house around ; they ascend a tower on tiie baiUis of the NUe,
high above and all around as in a moment for forty miles, as far as eye
can raeasure light upon tiie earth's dark face, the bearas of the death
torch of that direful hour frora all directions strike their wretched eyes.
The lara6ntations were loud and long ; and when the raorning sun arose,
the angel of death for long hours had been gone from the abodes of man and
beast, and there Avas not one house in all the land of Egypt in which there
was not one dead, or about two and half milhons, ur one sixth of the
people, or a life of one of Egypt's slaveholders had been taken, for each
Hebrew slave detained. No mistaking the power and wUl of the God of
the bondmen longer, and the affrighted Pharaoh and his court cry to these
slaves, " up and be gone, or we are all dead men." The funeral, the most
terrible in time, tiien followed. Nothing like these deaths or funerals, in
the history of our race. The fugitive slaves had raarched to the north
east and reached the Red Sea, and were in great fear, reposing on its
banks between two mountains, the one on their right, and the other on
their left. Soleran hours ! As they rested we raay feign that young
Hebrews climb to the mountain tops, and saw the rising clouds of dust
on the south-western edge of the heavens. That army is led on by
Pharaoh's generals, of chariots and cavalry, the notes of trumpets
feU upon their ears, and the young men cry to their friends below, " They
come ! they come ! we hear their trumpets on the plain !"
Then the desponding fugitives cried, " Were there no graves in Egypt ?"
The night came, portentous ; a mighty cloud rested between the slave
holders and the trembling fugitives. On the side next to the poor slaves,
the cloud beamed as from a pillar of fire, all light, the smile of heaven.
On the other side of the cloud the pursuing slaveholders saw it all dark,
lugubrious, presaging to them the horrors of their last day. This was
another finger-mark of Divine power. The morning lowered, and in
clouds, to these sad and imjDious slaveholders heavily brought on that day
whose end they -would never see. The trembling fugitives stood looking
nine miles across the intervening Red Sea, whose waves broke
in melancholy murmurs at their feet. Despair was on every face.
When Moses spoke, " stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,"
another finger-mark of Omnipotence was made, and Moses stretched out
his rod over the Red Sea, and anon a long line of subsidence of the waters
appears. Every fugitive eye saw it. Then the re-flowing of waters from
that central line, the pUiiig of waters follow ; the waters ascend and pile,
ascend and pile, until the naked bottom across appears with perpen
dicular water walls of great height, by Oranipotence held up, and proba
bly one mUe wide is left like a clean beach. The fugitives pass down on
this mitraveled road, and fuially division after division rose upon the
fnrther side. At length the weak passed up, the cripple climb the bank.

34 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
and lo! there see those liMle orphans pull themselves up by twigs, and
that poor old man on his crutches, they help pull him up--they are a,ll
up and over Now rises the wildest, grandest, and most sublime music
vvhich ever burst from human lips— the fugitives' song ! The head oug
vindictive slaveholders, burning with rage, thirsting for revenge, follow
on the fugitives' track into the sea ; aud as tiiey were at the ceutial depths
of the Red Sea, gravitation was permitted to re-assert her ancient law,
when down came these mighty mountains of waters to their ancient bed.
Pharaoh and his haughty hosts expired in the centie of a miracle. For
forty years the Almighty fed these poor fugitive slaves directiy from His
own table. , , . ,
Said Mr. S., tiie God of Heaven, as in mercy to man, that he might
never again commit the atrocious crime involved in slavery, caused
Mount Sinai to quake from its deep foundations, and amidst the thunders
and the lightnings the Almighty, with his own finger, wrote the tables
ofthe law, his ten eternal orders, which is most eminently anti-slavery
in character, that the crime which had shook Egypt to its foundations
might never occur again for want ofa Divine prohibition. This was the
decalogue, " Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, and strength,
and thy neighbor as thyself" This coramand obeyed, destroys all the
slavery in the worid. What slaveholder can kindly love Ms slave
unless he manumits him ?
The preface to these commands, in the sixth verse of the fifth chapter of
Deuteronomy, " I ara the Lord thy God, which brought thee outof the land
, of Egypt, aud from the house of bondage."
" Honor thy father and mother." No, says the slaveholder, I wUl sell
your father and mother, you must obey your master.
" Thou shalt not kUI." I will kill, says the slaveholder, if it is necessary,
by flogging to obtain subraission ; or if the slave wiU run frora rae when I
tell him to stop, I will shoot and kill him, and Southern law says, amen.
" Thou shalt not commit adultery." I wiU commit adultery, aiid break
the marriage covenant between my slaves, and compel them to marry
over when my interest will be promoted, or separate man and wife by
sale, or purchase and make them marry again.
"Thou shalt not .steal." I wiU steal, and appropriate, says the slave
holder, all the raan hath, all he can earn, and the man himself, when my
interest can be promoted thereby.
" Thou shalt not covet." I wdl covet that man's or that woman's body,
and I will possess myself of them, and appropriate them to my own use,
says the slaveholder."
Said Mr. S., look at the condescension of the Alraighty. He made these
poor fugitive slaves, the Librarians and Custodians of the revelation of
his will to mankind. Slavery treads this revelation under foot, and quotes
the Bible to prove slavery, when there is the raost incontestable evidence
that there never would have been a revelation in the decalogue, but a
the finishing stroke of those awful wonders and miracles, on the faith
of which our religion rests, all originating, converging and terminating
m that great fundamental proposition, that God infinitely abhors slavery,
because it supplants his direct authority over the will of His child, and
throws His cliUd, with an irhmortal mind, raade in his own iraage, into
the category- of bmte-beasts, thus for ever overthrowing tiie fundamental
relation of God to man, of raan to his neighbor, and of man to himself.
To vindicate the character, power, and justice ofthe Suprerae, and bring
man home again to his true relations, was well worthy of a display of
such awful power, introducing Himself as God to the ancient world.
Mr. S. said there was another proposition which he wished to glance
at in passmg. That was the Constitution of the United States, for he con-

SLAVERY IN NEW^ JERSEY. 35
tenaed, were he before the King's Bench, in Westminster HaU, he would
dieie insist, and he believed with entire success, that there was not a
slave ill New Jersey, or iu any slave State, who had been deprived of his
liberty according to law. I mean slaves as they are generally and at large,
and not those who have been convicted of criraes ; and therefore there is
not a slave, if you adrait him a person, as slaveholders contend, but must
be discharged by a judge or a court, on being brought before said court
on the ground that he has never been deprived of his liberty by due pro
cess of law, according to the Constitution of the United States, 'fhat
record must be produced, originating in a decision or an indictraent of a
grand jury, and the finding of a petit jury, and the pronouncing of judg
ment thereon, by a court of competent jurisdiction. This, Sir Edward
Coke, and Judge Story on Sir Edward's authority, in his Coramentaries,
440, says is the meaning of due process of law at coramon law, as used
in Magna Cliarta. But 1, said Mr. S., am willing to reduce the character
of the court, and even strike out the petit and grand jury from the instru
mentality — ^and then I say that " due process of law" means a court or
some judicial personage, one or more raaking a court, who have adjudi
cated the raan to be a slave ; and if that record cannot be found, the man
must go free, or the individual must not lose Ms liberty wiihout due
process of law. That record cannot be found in this land. Will any
man pretend that plantation a!nd cart- whip discipline is due process of
law^ ? Will any pretend that being deprived of the right to learn to read,
or ¦write, as in some of our States, under the penalty of twenty-five lashes
on the naked back of the teaeher and the taught, is due process of law ?
Yes, for the mother to teach her child to spell the name of the Saviour,
for the second attempt, mother and chUd are to be whipped one hundred
lashes ; for the third offence, the punishment is death. Is this the due
process of la^v, named in the Constitution of the United States? The
pursuing of fugitives with blood-hounds, cannot be the due process of
law of the Constitution ?
The separation by sale of husband from wife, and wife from husband,
and children from both, to suit the convenience of the raaster, cannot be
due process of law ? The being born of slave mother, on a slaveholder's
plantatioui cannot be due process oflaw? The being torn away from
home, kindred and friends, and sent by the middle passage to a slave
auction in South Carolina, and sold on the boards into hopeless bondage,
cannot be due process of law ?
Is not slavery a punishraent or an infliction on men beyond the track of
the common misfortunes of mankind, of suflicient magnitude to have it
left to the adjudication of soiife raortal man, in the shape of a justice or
judge, adjudicating a man into the great drag-net of slavery? For, we
find it takes the strongest judicial power in the land to get him out.
Slaveholders claim him under the word " person" in the Constitution, be
cause they say, there is no other word by which they can denote slavery;
The word person, I have, in this arguraent in relation to due process of
law used in the slaveholding sense, which is, after all, downright per-
version. , . , „
The word person, in the Constitution of the United States, raeans a
human being possessed of natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness. The word person means a huraan being in the fullness of
his natural rights, and nothing raore. The Greeks, Roraans, and English,
whether using the word in law or in coramon parlance, mean this, and
nothing more ; and you can legally rio more express the idea of a slave
by it than you can that of a King. A man who is a slave according to
slave law, has lost his personage, if I may so speak, and has passed into
chattelhood, or thinghood, and all the rights of person are annihUated, or

36 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
in astate of suspended animation, until the pure air of Liberty inflates his
lungs again. The Constitution of the United States is an Anti-slavery docu
ment, in its general spirit and tendencies ; and under other auspices and cir
cumstances would have been called a great act of universal emancipation,
and have set every slave free in the land, being paramount law, without
doing the thousandth part of violence in constiuction which has been done
by a slaveholding interpretation, by which it has been raade mto a slave-
holding document, to create the horrid institution by re-enacting the slave
laws of the two States of Virginia and Maryland, thereby covermg the two
sections of the District of Columbia, in creating and regulating by territo
rial laws, slavery in eight of the new States, five of which, Florida, Louisi
ana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri, were not a portion ofthe United
States or its territories at the adoption bf the Constitution of the United
States. The Congress of the United States under slaveholding dictation
created slavery, therefore, in Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, a portion
of our territory at the adoption of the Constitution ; and in the other five
States the nation purchased the territory and created the institution in
them, as territories, and the Congress then brought these five slave States
into the sisterhood of the republic. And now we are told slavery is a
State-institution and is beyond the reach of any power of Congress, for
its exterraination ; that is, that Congress has power to create and fasten
this infernal institution on a tertitory, but has no power to abolish it any
where, after it has enacted it once into existence, either in its territorial
or State character ; it has no power to lop, restrain or eradicate slavery
from a State or territory, but is bound to foster and nurture it with
parental care, as one of the patriarchal, domestic and peculiar institutions of
the south. Permit me to assert, as it regards these States, that Congress
had no more power to create slavery there in the beginning, than it had
to create an autocrat in either of those States or territories, in whose
hand and his heirs, all power, legislative, judicial and executive, should
be centred for ever with full power to sell or dispose of the bodies
of all the people or inhabitants who should or might come within the
bounds of his territory or State. For the power exercised in the case of
slavery by one half of the inhabitants, over the other, is precisely the
same in degree and kind as that described, only the number of the
autocrats is increased. Each autocrat has a less number of subjects, but
the power exercised is precisely the same in extent, and in relation to
those on whom it operates, is the same precise autocratism, as though
there was but one despot. Now I deny that Congress has lawful power
to do any such thing.
Many persons run to the Madison papers published in the last few
years, to ascertain the meaning of the framers of the Constitution, who
met in Philadelj:)hia in 1787, as a mere committee of the nation, sent out
to report to the people the form of a Constitution for their adoption in
the summer of 1788. I deny in any event, the right to resort to this mode
of interpretation, to contradict the noble and glorious text of that docu
ment; but supposing this a correct mode of getting darkness into the room
to show the light, still it is not applied at the right point. Thirteen
State conventions were held in the year 1788, by the authority of their
respective legislatures, to adopt or reject what had been framed, by a
committee-convention of the nation, as a body of draughters of the form
of tiie Constitution, who had been sent to PhUadelphia, during the sum
mer of 1787, to do that very work ; not to adopt that Constitution, but to
report the form of one, to the people of the States.
In the summer of 1788, the people, m their thirteen State Conventions,
by the constitutional number of nine, adopted this Constitution ; and if
this rule of mterpretation now sought to be adopted, could be made ap-

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 37
plicable anywhere, we should have to go to tbe adopters, and not the
framers. What, and how did the adopters, the people, understand this in-
sti-ument when they adopted it ? Did they understand it in any sense dif
ferent from what it imports on its face ? Where are the secret intentions,
private understandings, those implied guarantees and curious fanciful
compromises of those thirteen Conventions of adopters ? Have they ever
come to light except in sorae long speech of some Southern slaveholding
orator? How come the descendants of those slaveholders of 1788 to be
made the special depositees of all those secret guarantees, compromises,
and implied miderstandings, in behalf of slavery, now spoken of with a
confidence as startling as the inforraation communicated is important,
novel, and false. This was not so. These are mere after- thoughts of
despotism. No man has ever shown one word from the adopters, con
flicting ¦with the text. Shall a committee Sent out by the nation, affix to
well understood language of the coraraon law, and of every day use, some
secret cabalistic meaning in hostility to the text; and then get the people,
through their Conventions, to adopt the Constitution for the beautiful
prmciples it expressed on its face, and after that was accomplished, to
¦wait till the framers and adopters are dead, and then to come out and say,
ah, the people have adopted this Constitution, for what it purported on its
face, but ¦we, the sons and grandsons of the Southern framers, have a caba
listic key left by our grandfathers in the South, by which, when the word
justice appears, our grandfathers meant slavery or injustice ; when we used
the word persons ¦we meant slaves sometimes, and sometiraes free persons ,-
when we said " no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property
¦without due process oflaw," we there understood a slave to be a chattel or a
piece of property, and not u person ; we had a sliding-scale by which
we used the word person for slave when the interest of the slaveholder is
to be promoted, but when the language can be applied to him as a person
in another part of the instruraent, and tiiereby set him free, the intend
ment is to be against liberty, and that we did not mean that he should
have any of the blessings of the Constitution, but- only its curses and its
cmelty. When the word person means bitter, it is the slave's portion ; when
the word person means sweet, he has no lot or part in that matter. Although
the word person never meant slave in any written document before we
affixed, it among ourselves, or our grandfathers did, in this peculiar sense,
and refused to use the word slave. This was the secret opinion of the
drafters, who supposed they could thus deceive the adopters into adop
tion. When we enacted that Article by which we said " The United
States shall guarantee a republican form of government to each of the
States," we knew the old and true raeaning of a republican govern
ment to be one in wluch the governraent was raade by and for the benefit
of the governed, and that each person in a republican form of govem
ment was bom fi-ee and equal, and entitied to life, liberty, and the pur
suit of happiness. This, we knew, would, by force of this provision
in the Constitution of the United States, if faithfully honored, blot
out slavery from every State Constitution, and every State upholding a
proposition of slavery by State legislation, it being diametrically opposite
to a republican form of government ; therefore, it was agreed secretly, as
a compromise, by the fraraers of the Constitution, as one of the secret
compromises or implied guarantees, against liberty, that this should be
an unexercised article, or an unused function of the Federal Constitution, as
a sort of fifth wheel -to a coach ; because, if carried out, it would cut up
slavery, root and branch, in the old States then made, and in the new to
be made. Therefore, says this secret compromise-keeper, we, at the ses
sion of Congress in 1845, in pursuance of our secret comproraise of inter-
prelation of language, witii its use and disuse, aad under the suspension

38 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
of that article ofthe Federal Constitution guaranteeing a republican form
of government, we admitted Florida as a State, as we had several slave
States before, iu which we permitted this Article of the Constitution, guar
anteeing a republican form of government to each State, to be overridden
and totally disregarded, as though it did not exist ; and in the Florida Con
stitution Slavery is held such a sacred and central right among her Insti
tutions, that it is Jilaced out of reach and beyond the control of her own
legislature, and that colored freeraen coming into that State from Maine,
JVTassachusetts, or otiier free States, may be sold as slaves : and the right
the Constitution guarantees to each citizen of one State in enjoying all
the privileges of citizenship in anotiier State, says our secret conii)roniise-
kecper, raeans, as it was understood by the framers in the cabalistic cata
logue, tiiat this part of the Constitution should never ajiply to a Massa
chusetts or Rhode Island citizen, if his great grandmother had a drop of
African blood in her veins; and that altiiougli the Constitution of the
United States had abolished attainders in this country, still, so far as free
colored citizens were concerned in coraing from free to slave States, they
were to be regarded, iu defiance of the Constitution of the United Stales,
as attainted, — yes, the victims of a colored attainder, and subject to tlie
awful judgment of perpetual slavery for showing tiieir colored heads with
no helmet but the Federal Constitution for their protection in a slave Stale.
And if the old State of New Jersey had had the benefit of the Federal
Constitution before the adoption ofyour new Constitution of 184-1, and if
Congress had given this State the practical benefit of a Rejmblican form
of Government, by abolishing in Congress your State slave laws, as con
trary to a Republican form of Government, it would not have been neces
sary for me to have troubled yonr Honors, the legislation of Congress
being paramount to all State Constitutions and State legislation on all
points within its Constitutional jurisdiction. Aud although the Constitu
tion ofa State raay be silent on tiie subject of slavery, still, if slaveliolding
legislation dishonor the State statute book, then Coiigre.'^s has jurisdictiou
to abolish such State law, as renders the forra of tiiat State Government
hostile to a Republican form of Government. The form of a State Gov
ernment may be Republican in its Constitution, but legislatipm may
spring up in that State, by which one half of the people iiiny assume to
own tiie other half, indirect hostility toa Republican forraof Governinent,
and the United States, said Mr. S., is then bound, by some exercise of
sovereign power, to re.store to tiie peojjle of New Jersey, a Republican
form of Governraent, either by legislation in Congress or by the exercise
of judicial power through the Federal or State judiciaries ; and if through
the latter, theu I am iu ray proper place to contend here tiiis day tiiat
tills old law of slavery was unconstitutional ever since the adoption of
the Constitution of tbe United States, as being contrary to the fundamen
tal guarantee of the Republic, aud all State laws conflicting with said
guarantee of a Republican form of Government are null and void, as
much as a State law violating the liberty of conscience secured by the
Constitution ; and if this ground be a sound position, the slave laws have
been void from the adoption of the Constitution, as being in direct hos
tUity to the solemn guarantee in tiie Constitution in favor of a Republican
fomi of Government. Give me, said Mr. S., a Republican form of Govern
ment in the Constitution and the legislation of a State, and I defy any
rnan to hold a huraan being in tiiat State as a slave, according to the law
of that country, until tiie meaning of language is revolutionized.
Said Mr. S,, the very idea of a Constitution of the United States in an
enlarged view, if he were able to take one, wonld be replete with conse
quences full of glorious import to the bondmen of this land. As has been
said by me before in the course of this argmnent, a Constitution springs

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 39
from our weakness and need of protection, and is a covenant of the whole
people with each person, and of each person with the whole people, for
the protection and defence of our natural rights, of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. Is it possible to conceive that a people raeeting
from thair mutual weakness, and after coming together, conclude to make
a charter party of piracy ? That, although they agree to protect and
defend five-sixths of the people in their natural rights, yet, as it regards
the other sixth, they solemnly covenant and guarantee, to give them no
protection or advantage tiierefrom, but covenant to strip said one-sLxth of
their natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and
reduce them to chattels, men-breathing-property, so that they would be
infinite losers by forming a Constitution. Instead of having their natural
rights protected, they are stript of the right to themselves, and delivered
over to masters, who, drunk or sober, reasonable or unreasonable, sensi
ble or foolish, are to make for them Constitutions and laws, in the height
of passion, prompted by lust, avarice or meanness, frora hour to hour,
and day to day, untU life's end. The slaveholders contend the Constitu
tion of the United States secured them these terrible advantages. If it
did, and the adopters had so understood it, I do not believe a single State
would have seriously entertained an idea for its adoption for a single
moment, north ofthe State of Delaware.
To be sure, said Mr. S., we have lived under an invisible Constitution
of slaveholding construction for fifty- five years, which we have never
seen, but have often bitterly felt — the good honest anti-slavery Constitu
tion which should have gone into operation on the fourth of March, 1789,
as it was honestiy adopted, and if carried out, in the integrity of its high
and glorious purpose, would, long ere this, have extirpated slavery frora
tills guUty land, and made it the paradise of the New World. But the
government, from its adoption, has been under, as a general proposition,
the control of slaveholding Presidents, Vice Presidents, Speakers of the
House of Representatives, who organized the legislative power with five
millions of whites at the south, and ten millions of whites in the north.
The south should have had three ofthe nine judges ofthe Supreme Court of
the United States, but they have five and the north four ; they have two-
thirds of the foreign ministers, the principal officers on the sea and on the
land. The south have furnished the spiracles tMough whicii the governraent
has breathed, yes, and the eyes v/ith which it saw, the ears with which
it heard, and the tongues and pens by which it spoke and wrote. It is no
wonder the ship lost the track of its conteraplated voyage, and became
the abused organ of a section of the land whose supposed interests prose
cuted an implacable war upon human rights, or in other words the
basis and prosperity of whose peculiar institutions were quickened into
life by tears and blood, and found their proper aliment in crushing and
prostituting tiie rights of one half of their own population, and hold
ing human labor in contempt, by which three millions of their own pop
ulation being white men, could not labor by the side of the slave with
out disgrace ; and they, the whites, having no capital but their labor, sunk
down to a point of degradation but littie above the slaves, no schools,
they became the lazaroni of this continent, while some forty thousand
oligarchists, owning most of the land and the slaves, and being prorapted
by ambition and money, moved by the common spirit of slavery, the
true bond of connection and source of their political power ; these men
have snatched this Constitution from the nation, and have given us by
the force of suppression, violation, construction and interpretation, com-
imngled with tiieir fanciful guarantees and compromises, a Constitution
as by thera admhiistered, bearing a faint resemblance to the one given
lis by the fathers of the Revolution, witii their wounds yet unhealed from

40 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
the battie-fields of freedom. The preamble of the Constitution of the
UnUed States must have been adopted after the whole document had
been prepared by the fraraers, as the grand exponent of intention ; and as.
so much is said by slaveholding casuistry, that 1 have often thought the
framers of that instrument had a melancholy foreboding, that attempts
mi<rht be made by the crafty and designing of an after age, to pervert
that document so plain and so full of good sense and virtuous principle
to some sinister purpose ; therefore, as au everiasting finger-board point
ing to the straight road of intent, they virtually said,—" Here we unlock
our hearts, as to object and design, and we say, trust not those who tell you
this is not the truth. This is our design : We, the people of the United
States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, secure
domestic tranquillity, provide for the coramo-n defence and proraote the
general welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty, for us and our pos
terity, do establish and ordain this Constitution for the United States of
Araerica." What purity and nobility of object ! How much have we had practi
cally of this Constitution, by slaveholding construction ? said Mr. S. Let
us see how it would read if made for the object contended by slavehold
ers and their apologists, and as we practically see it administered. " We,
five-sixths ofthe people of the United States, in order to secure a rmion
among ourselves, which shall raake the other sixth curse the union, and
to establish justice for five-sixths by the most cruel injustice to the other
sixth; to provide for the common defence of five-sixths, by taking away-
all public and private defence frora the other sixth ; to proraote the parti
cular welfare of five-sixths by destroying the entire welfare of the other
sixth ; to secure the blessings of liberty to five-sixths, and the curses of
never-ending slavery to the other sixth, we do ordain this Constitution for
the United States of Araerica."
What would the adopters in the thirteen States have said to such a draft
of a Constitution ? Most of the thirteen States, on organizing the conven
tions of 1788, for rejection or adoption, would have resolved to have tet
the common hangman hang this Constitution on the gallows, with carica
tures of the leaders in the convention of 1787, and closed the scene by
burning it up, and have adjourned sine die. Another Convention of the
United States would have been called by an indignant people, and the
first article would have abolished slavery, by name, in fhe United States,
as an everlastuig disturbing cause, no- longer to be tmsted to disgrace our
soU. Many seem to think, we derive our natural, as well as citizen,
rights, from a Constitution. That, said Mr. S., eannot be so. Our natural
rights are derived from our Maker, and the Constitution is like a fence
around thera to protect thera from the invasion of others. Men derive
titie by letters-patent from the Supreme power of the State, to their land,
and the fence is placed around it to protect it from the wandering herd.
Constitutions may aiso be said, said Mr. S., to be of American origin, and
it is not possible we were so corrupt in the moming of the science. To
be sure England talks of her Constitution ; she speaks of Magna Charta
obtamed by fierce and ignorant barons, in the year 1215, with sword in
hand from feeble John ; also the introduction of the Protestant religion,
by Henry VIIL, and the Revolution of 1688, and some other important
epochs like the Reform Bill, which added to the current stream of impe
rial Legislation, all considered, being " moles indigesta," make the sum
and substance of what an Englishman mearis by the Constitution of
his country. France made several Constitutions diiring the political par
oxysms and revolutions of that curiou^ people, during the latter end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, but at last
this gallant people revolved in a circle of elementary expedients, from

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 41
1789 to the war of the Barricades in 1830, making organic experiments,
to collect the true sense of the nation respecting the safest place or hands
in which to lodge power, from which the greatest amount of protection
might be expected with the least burden to the people. Different forms of
primal law were submitted to the people for adoption or rejection.
But, look at Russian, Prussian, German, and Italian States; here each
person is looking to imperial, royal, or ducal prerogatives, for that se
curity of life, liberty, and property, which should never have been ab
sorbed by the Crown, but should always have constituted a fundamental
layer of human rights, coming from, and adopted by the people, as their
wall of defence.
Our Colonies were in the habit of receiving gifts of a political character,
carefuUy sent over the Atiantic after thera, m grants, patents, bills of
rights, and charters; the very rights which they could not have left
behind them, and been men. These Constitutions, anywhere and everywhere,
as a general rule, are made to defend huraan rights and not to crush
them. The very idea of a Constitution is lUie a life-preserver, made to
save men in their danger in the water, and is not to te loaded with lead
to sink thera. There are innuraerable modes by which human rights
have been crushed, -without calling in the very thing which should pro
tect thetn, with which to accomplish so diabolical a purpose. To sup
pose ships made on purpose to preserve five-sixths, and expressly to
drown the other sixth who sailed in thera ; the bridge to precipitate its
sixth passenger over it into the river ; is not more absurd in supposition,
than to suppose a United States Constitution an instrument of ruin and
destruction to every sixth man who sought its protection. Instead of an
asylum he finds it to be a dungeon with fetters ; that he is to be bereav
ed, and Ms posterity in all coming generations, of all capacity to have
natural rights ; the forlorn victims of avarice, lust, cruelty, and contempt ;
himself, property owned, and in the most abject forra, shorn of the power
to assert the s^trength Heaven gave him to protect his raost valuable rights.
Rights! Araazing ! he has no rights but the right to be abused, to be whip
ped, to starve, to suffer, and to die ! ! This idea of a Constitution being
used as a death-warrant to execute human rights, is a horrid solecism !
incomprehensible, yea, a sublime absurdity; the greatest insult ever
offered to the human understanding; and certain men pretend such
is the Constitution of the United States. If the Constitution was an ani
mated being, with reason and a voice, said Mr. S., and were you to ask
her to speak and say, was she made to uphold slavery, and destroy
human rights, she would answer, " As to slavery I know not what you
mean by the word, I never used it in my life ; I was bom and brought into
this world for the single purpose of protecting the rights of persons, de
fending men from the violations of their human rights, from invasion
from abroad, or forceful wrong on the sod. I know no one, except
as a. person possessing the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi
ness, and for tiieir protection I put forth my power. When the free men
and women of this country are counted as a basis of representation in
Congress and for Presidential Electors (Indians not taxed excepted), and
three-fifths of all other persons are to be counted, and if States or indi
viduals call those three-fifths slaves, serfs, or connecrtmg links between men
and monkeys, and even treat thein as such, I only know them as I do
the rest of mankind, as persons ; my eyes can only see men as persons,
my ears can only hear the cry of men as persons, possessed of natural
rights. I cannot be used to destroy the liberties of any innocent man. It
is not within the range of my power, unless I am perverted to purposes
contrary to my instincts." Who dare affhm, says she, that 1 guarantee
slavery and make compromises for its support. Oh ! says she, it is all

42 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
false, it is directly the reverse ; I guarantee to each State a republican form
of government, which confers the equal right of Ufe, liberty, and property
to each innocent human being in each of the twenty-seven States ; that
is my right, my power, my nature, prerogative, scope, end, and object of
my existence ; and slavery exists in this country to my unutterable confu
sion, by my violation direct, and by reason of the people of this land
having refused to allow me to prostrate slavery tMough the judiciary or
Congress, under my guarantee of a republican form of government to the
States. Persons bound to service or labor by laws of one State, I say,
shall not be withheld, but shall bo dehvered up on claim of him
to whom such service or labor is due. Here I deal with persons
again. If the wife, the son, the daughter, the apprentice, the prisoner
from his bail, escape into other States, I order all of these persons
to be delivered to the husband, or the father, or the master, or their baU,
to whom such labor and service is due, and for this purpose I ara a per
petual treaty between the States, to accoraplish these just objects, and save
the effusion oi blood. If, says the Constitution, a slave is not a person
within the protection which I afford to all persons where I say " no person
shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of
law," then he is a being I have no right to touch and deliver up, for I can
only deliver up persons bound to, or who owe service or labor as persons
and not as slaves ; and if these persons are slaves, then I am under the
most soleran promise and obligatiou not to explain away, but to see that
slave-persons, if you please, are not deprived of life or Uberty, without
due process of law, which must have been sorae distinct adjudication
that the being was a slave by a court, acting on the principles of the com
mon law. No such court has been organized in this land, no such judg
ments have been rendered. If he is within the protection ofthe magna charta
part of my character, then I will not deliver the man to his master, as you
are pleased to call hira, until a judgraent of sorae kind, showing that the
man owes service to another, and has been deprived of his liberty by due
process of law. Sorae record of that kind raust be shown, or I cannot
deliver him up.
Said Mr. S., I deraand that these persons be delivered up to enjoy their
liberty, on the ground of the declaration in the Constitution of the United
States declaring that " no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or prop
erty, without due process of law." There is not a slave or servant, so
held, of the four thousand of both sorts in New Jersey, but what are
entitled to their liberty by the Constitution of the United States.
Said Mr. S., it is a curious and a ridiculous idea of some, that our
fatiiers had secret thoughts of crime against man, which they had not the
courage to express, under the name of intentions, when they drafted the
Constitution of the United States ; and that we, out of respect to the
unrecorded, unwritten, villanous intentions, and wicked ¦wishes of our
venerable ancestors, should take those wicked thoughts and unrecorded
mtentions of crime against the rights of man, as our Contsitution, under
the idea of intention, rather than the beautiful text itself, so full
of life, liberty, and justice. Said Mr. S., the Constitution of the United
States, on its own face, is safe, and raore to be relied on to explain its
own meaning with justice to the framers, adopters, and us, their posterity,
than all we could leam from each drafter and each adopter, could we
summon them before a court of justice to explain it as they understood
it, on the 4th of March, 1789, the day it went into operation. To be
sure, if the adopters ever thought of slavery, they did not think to name
it, and must have supposed it near its end, and they did not wish to dis
grace the nation by the adraission that so foul and base a thing ever exist
ed. This is truly lamentable, to thmk the human mind is yet in such a low

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 43
State of civilization, that from this point to enter goose-hood, would be
elevation, and that men should delight to lay hold of absurd views, as the
one exposed, to justify themselves in the perversion of that glorious
instrument, to some low and grovelling purpose, pecuniary or political.
Mr. S. said that he felt mortified to thmk it should be necessary foi
him, in the 19th century, to stand in Republican America, the live-long
day, before one of the highest courts m intellect, learning, and station,
to prove a human being a man, and not a thing. The proposition that
the colored people of this State held in bondage, are raen, born free and
independent, by the law of nature, is one above all demonstration, out
strips all logical deductions, and addresses itself to our every perception,
for its truth, which can gain nothing frora analogy, and borrow noth
ing from iUustration, comparison cannot aid in its development, and
simUes cannot make it more clear to the human mind. Antiquity and
to-day utter the same response. It is the same yesterday, to-day and
forever. Every degree of latitude and longitude renders the sarae verdict,
whether at Timbuctoo or at Trenton ; whether in raind, or in body, for
time or eternity, they are men and women, creatures of hope, gazing on
the same bright, strong, beautiful and ancient Heavens, on which Adam
and Solomon, Daniel and Paul, Copernicus and Columbus, tumed their
admirhig eyes ; the frames of colored men, their huraan countenance
divine, containing the same unerased lineaments, vindicating in celestial
heraldry the grandeur of their descent, the greatness of their origin —
showing that God is their Father, that all raen are brethren of one blood,
that the sweets of life, the joy of liberty, the hope and pursuit of happi
ness, are the gifts of the Great Father, to all, and each of his children,
with a power and privilege for ever to clirab the ascending heights of
eternity, through the merits of His Son, increasing ui happiness and
knowledge, through the endless day of Heaven.
Said Mr. S., the greatest announcement affecting the interests of man
ever made since the advent of the Redeemer, was the synopsis of the
rights of raan, made by the iraraortal signers of the Declaration of Inde
pendence, on the 4th day of July, 1776.
The announcement was antagonistic to the opinions of all forraer ages,
and the then existing powers of this world. Russel, Sidney, Milton,
Cromwell, and Locke, were permitted to ascend the mount of discovery,
and behold, as by prophetic sight, in the land of the settmg sun, beyond
the vast Atiantic, apeople asserting what these phUosophers believed ; that
all raen were created free and equal, and possessed of certain inalienable
rights, amongst which were life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What they hoped for man, we have seen and heard. When this sublime
declaration was made on the 4th of July, 1776, it was high treason, and
political atheism, in every other Government on earth.
To all other governments witb birth-born kings, birth-born legislators,
birth-born judges, this declaration of the American revolutionists was d
thousand times more formidable, said Mr. S., than war or revolution
itself. This was a great fundamental proposition, placing all men on a
level, and as equals, in the start of the journey of existence ; stating the
value, the riches of their elemental capital, which no insolvency could
divest, no bankruptcy carry away. Slavery, or the inheritable dominion
of man over man, with its complicated train of truckling dependencies,
artificial distinctions, the iron-raUing of caste, were in one day, by the
great proposition of the 4th of July, strack down as false m principle.
This was the sentiment of a New Worid, and the signers of the great
human being postulatum, spoke for themselves, and the unborn nations of
this great continent, representing this great Americanism of the new
hemisphere. The glorious sound went careering through the worid, that

44 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
all men are created free and equal. The Massachusetts slave heard its
music, and joined in the chorus, and his freedom was confessed. The
slaves of New York and Pennsylvania listened to the joyful acclaim ; the
man-chattel of New Hampshire caught the still-small voice, and joined in
thanks to Heaven, that all were free. Congress caught the sound, and
said, the African slave-trade sbould cease on our part for ever, and that
no slave should tread the States of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and
the territories of Wisconsin and Iowa. The angel of deliverance flew
with the mighty scroll in her right hand over valley and mountain to the
vast lands of Mexico, and proclaimed from the surarait of her smoking
volcanos, that all men were born free and equal ; and iu one day, 50,000
black slaves, and two miUions of enslaved Indians, in their repartimentos,
in the mountains, in the mines, in the workshops, and on the roads, in
their chains, heard the glorious decree, and they all in chorus joined, and
sung, " that all raen are created free and equal," and in that instant they
stood up free. The angel cried again m Guatimala and Peru, from the
depth of the blue heavens, " that all men were created free." The black
and red slave heard his voice, from the mountain and the mine, the
hill and the hollow, that all men were created free and equal, and their
fetters fell from their delivered hands as they lifted them to Heaven ; and
then they sung, " all, men are created free and equal," for they were
free. Alongupon the mighty Andes the angel flew, and from Chimborazo's icy
top, she cried again so loud and long, that the tens of thousands of poor
bondsmen of Chili heard, some in those unvisited regions, subterranean,
damp, dreary, digging gold ore and veins of silver, far under the floor of the
roarhig Pacific, who never saw light; whUe others were delving in the
depths and bowels of the Andes, to satisfy the accursed thirst of gold ; others
in smelting-houses loaded with chains ; others driving, as serfs, their master's
flocks of goats and sheep on the mountain's side, and the loaded mule along;
others with loads upon their heads, in the rounds of coraraon life, who wore
out their being for thankless raasters; others to galleys chained; others
bound to posts, whose backs were being scourged ; others in a defer
ential form were listening to the raging words of graceless masters. All
heard the long, the loud trurapet sound, " that all raen were created free
and equal." All around the whips and fetters fell, and in one joyful
hour, in time, up went the glorious chorus of response from men who
were slaves no raore, who said and sung " all men are created free and
equal." The joyful proclaraation, by the angel made, and the sublime
chorus, and humanity's reply, rolled over the great mountain, and down its
eastem slant, and the slaves of Guayaquil, Colurabia, Venezuela, and
Bolivia, learnt to sing the holy notes, " that all raen are created free and
equal ;" and in one day deliverance came to all these sons of sorrow and
of toil. The angel then to the West Indies flew, and the men of Hayti
said, throughout that Island, all men are free, and one million stood up
enfranchised ; the anthem of deliverance was sung in each British Isle
on the 1st of August, 1838, and 800,000 slaves in one raoraent becarae
800,000 British Freeraen. The angel flew to the Cape of Good Hope, and
sung her celestial song, and in one day, 100,000 bondraen cried from the
Cape inland 600 mUes East and West, from sea to sea, " we all are free."
The angel balanced on his pinions, flew and cried in the ears of the Bey of
Tunis, and in the Egyptian Ali Pasha's, " that all men are created free and
equal." These sons of Mahomet heard, and the Heaven-made-decree obey
ed, and in those lands of darkness and of death, in one day each slave cried
out, " I ara free ! lamfree!" Onthe 1st of April, 1844, the angel of peace
and good wUl towards men, blew a louder and longer blast than he ever
yet had done ; it was heard over the hundred miUions of the East Indies,

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 45
saymg " all men were created free and equal." In a moment the here
ditary serf, the caste-marked million, aud slaves by descent, for ages,
in all 12,000,000 told, started into life and joy, amidst rattiing chains and
broken fetters falling from them, their eyes streaming with tears, grateful
to Heaven as they flowed, and they all joined in the glorious song which
tiiey now sung, " that all men are created free," and " that thev were
slaves no more !"
Said Mr. S , we live in an abolition age, when the dungeons which
have incarcerated suffering humanity, are being broken in, and unlocked in
every coraer of our benighted worid, and the captive bid come forth ;
and may I entieat this Honorable Court to share in the unfading glory of
opening this castle of slavery. New Jersey, with the key of the new Con
stitution, and the other keys he had the honor to submit to this Court,
by which to let oppressed men go free.
Here Mr. S. closed his openmg argument, havmg spoken untU six
o'clock P. M.
The Court adjourned until Thursday morning, atten o'clock, A. M. The
Court met at ten o'clock A. M., on the Z2d of Ma.y, and Chief Justice
Hornblower raade a very able, eloquent, and affecting address, to two
fine looking young men, who were sentenced to be executed in August
next, for the murder of Parke and Rasner.
At eleven o'clock A. M., Mr. Zabriskie opened his argument for the
defence of the Claimants of these persons, and spoke tilt half after one,
¦with a good deal of talent and power. The Court adjourned uutil three
o'clock P. M. Mr. Zabriskie resumed, and concluded at half after three,
P. M.
Mr. Bradley, as Counsel for the Claimants, spoke with much energy
and ingenuity until five o'clock P. M., when he closed.
Mr. Stewart replied from five o'clock P. M. to six. The Court
adjourned until seven, P. M,, and Mr. Stewart spoke from seven P. M.,
until half after ten, and closed.
It is regretted that the arguments of Messrs. Zabriskie and Bradley, could
not have been given at length, but many of the points which they raade
will appear in Mr. Stewart's reply. It is not expected we should
report aU Mr. S. said, Mst and last, in eleven hours of delivery.
Mr. Stewart said in reply, that he must express his gratitude to the
learned Counsel, for the kind compliments paid to his intellect, by one
who had given us so strong evidence, that he hiraself enjoyed the singular
fortune of a fine mind, embellished with the advantages of a polished
education, and what he could not command from research, he raight still
enjoy by the power of reflection.
Mr. S. said the learned Counsel had aUuded to the fact, that the first
person they had seen alive, who was an abolitionist, in the county of
Bergen, was the person, who Served these writs of Habeas Corpus, Mr.
Palmer, and the Counsel gravely informs us, that the people did not tar
anA. feather him. Said Mr. S., I suppose this statement is raade as a dis
tinguished corapliment to his neighbors in that county, and as the highest
proof they have ever given of their civilisation ; and it is to be hoped they
may never, in an evil hour, fall below this high water raark of their
advancing elevation. Mr. Zabriskie has told us, to frighten and alraost
alarm us out of this effort m behalf of crushed raen, and to raake us leave
these slaves in the great man-trap, that if your Honors let those slaves
go free under your new Constitution, the Courts will be compelled to
hear arguments by wives and children, to be set free from the dominion
of their husbands and parents. The bare statement of so strange a pro
position relieves me from a reply to it. The gentleman has endeavored
to alarm the sensibUities of the Court, by a parade of several distinct

46 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
orders of modern phUosophers, known under the name of Fouriers, Anti-
Renters, Socialists, Owenites, Fanny Wrighters, Non-Resistants, and No-
Humau-Government-men, Dissolvers of the Union, NuUifiers, and Infidels.
And he would wish to fasten the opinion upon the Court, tiiat there is
some sort of relation between these philosophers' views and this dry law
question, which is, whether slavery -in the State of New Jersey, is a legal
and lawful institution or not. I confess I cannot discover any more rela
tion between the philosophical dogmas of these different phUosophers,
than there is propriety in the following question : " If it is two hundred
miles from this place to Boston, what is the araount of the first quarter's
salary of the Lord Mayor of London ?" I think when the pertinency of
one of these propositions is made inanifest, the other will then appear.
But, said Mr. S., as there have been several attempts to lock and hook
together during the gentleman's reply, things the raost dissimilar and
uncongenial, I will take, if the Court permit, the present opportunity to
define the Uberty party abolitionists' creed, a body of raen who, at the
late election, appeared to nuraber about 62,500 voting men, of which body
the speaker was an humble member. The liberty party abolitionists, in
the United States, had been a political party, with its candidates, ever
since AprU, 1840; and was formed from necessity, to overthrow slavery,
after having tried both of the old parties in vain, each of the old parties
having a slave end to it, so it was impossible to get either to undertake
this work. The liberty party hold the Constitution of the United States
to be, when properly interpreted, an anti-slavery docuraent, replete with
tendencies in favor of freedom; but that the slaveholding portion ofthis
country have seized upon the reins of government, and perverted the Con
stitution's high intent, to the base purposes of sustaining, and increasing
the power of slaveholders in every possible way, and have violated the
Constitution by employing it to sanction slavery in many ways, and in the
overthrow of the right of petition. The liberty party abohtionists mean
to employ the Constitution, and in pursuance of its authority, and not con
trary thereto, to overthrow slavery in every way, and by all lawful means.
We mean as a body, and it is a part of our creed, to cling to the Union or
Confederacy under all circurastances, and never give it up ; slavery in, or
slavery out, Texas in or Texas out : we hold on to the Union and every
acre of its soil, whether it be the sands of Georgia or the mountains of
Verraont, for the exaltation, purification, and enfranchisement ofthis land
from slavery, root and branch. It is a cardinal principle from the begin
ning, never to vote for a slaveholder, or an apologist of slavery, but hold
it our duty to vote at every election for men for town, county. State, and
national oflicers, who will employ all lawful power to banish slavery from
the nation, for the sake of three raillions of slaves compelled to work
without wages, as well as three mUlions of ignorant, poor, and unschooled
whites in the South, the lazaroni of this continent, who are ruined by the
most abject poverty, it being disgraceful, for them to labor for wages by
the side of the slave. To save six raillions of human beings from ruin
or desolation, or one-third of our countrymen, is the exact object of the
liberty party abolitionists, let it take ever so long to accoraplish it. We
have no raotive for advancing the one, or retarding the other of the great
parties, as we raean, in the end, to overthrow thera both as soon as we can
get our countrymen to adopt our belief; we are law-abiding and law-sus
taining men, and there is no more connection between the liberty party
abolitionists, and the list of phUosophers just enuraerated, than there is
between the Chinese wall and the Erie canal. We believe in short, a
man has a better right to his own wife and chUdren, than any other man ,
and we suppose the curse of slavery has, as a mass, neariy mined the
men of the South, as well as the land of the slave States, and we wish to

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 47
improve and save our country and our people, by our party organization
And my apology to tiie Court for this statement, defining our position,
is, said Mr. S., the atteinpt to injure and dishonor as high-minded and
pure body of men as breathes, by making tliera keep company with those
philo.sophers, however respectable they may be ; yet we have not chosen
their society, or opinions, in the prosecution of our enterprise. The
counsel of defendant, said Mr. S, has attacked New York for calling
a State Convention, — 1 can see nothing ultra or radical, once in a
quarter of a century, in a State's reviewing the ground it has passed over,
and thus lay hold of the improvements time suggests, or brings to light,
for perfecting her great social edifice. The old way to amend the fabric
of government in Europe, was on the battle-field, amidst the clangor of
arms and roar of artUlery, with buUets for yeas, and cannon balls for nays.
Mr. S. confessed he much preferred the raode adopted by the State of
New York. The learned counsel, to get rid of the force of the first Article
of tiie new Constitution of this State, says it is a mere abstraction, a rhe
torical flourish, and is not a part of the Constitution, iu reality, not binding
us to do anything. Said Mr. S., I should like to know -where I am to
begin to read tiie new Constitution, and how much of it is to be rejected
as surplussage ?
The otlier counsel, Mr. Bradley, says this section of the Constitution
is a mere braggadocio, a mere telling England that all men are free and
independent by nature, and it is so said, to let England know that our
people know that we are as good as her Lords and Coramons, Kings and
Queens, and that it grew out of our revolutionary jealousy, of our own
importance, when we first inserted it, in the Declaration bf Independence.
Said Mr. S., this is queer indeed ! New Jersey, in her old Constitution, made
two days before the Declaration of Indejiendence, was perfectly silent
then ; when the reason for bragging might have operated, she is very
meek then ; not one word is said about human rights ; but 68 years after
wards in September, 1844, when all danger is for ever passed, according
to the gentieman. New Jersey sticks up her bristies, and says, " I would
have you know, old England, yes, old John Bull, and you Miss Victoria
Guelph, and Mr. Albert Coburg, that we are as good by nature, and as
independent as any of you, yes, that we be." But the sober-minded, brave,
and considerate Jerseyman never had such a thought pass through his
mind, at the time he voted for its adoption. He had too much regard for
his own dignity, and too much respect for England, to employ hiraself in
such a miserable smaU game of swelling and surf-makmg, to elevate the
character of his country. The noble-rainded Jerseyman is willing that
other countries should arause theraselves with the baubles of kings,
queens, and lords, as national dolls and play-things, without considermg
himself undervalued in the lea.st by not being used for the same puerUe
and harmless purpose by his own countrymen; and the last place m the
worid he woiUd seek to curi the lip of scorn, would be iii his own great
fundamental and organic law, asserting his own freedom, dignity, and
indep-iideuce Said Mr. S., Mr. B. contends that Moses' law sanctioned
slavery, and the buying the heathen around about for money Yes, there
was a kind of servitude which looks hke the buying the heathen by those
ancient Jews for raoney. But, said Mr, S., the Jewish government was a
theocracy, and everyl aw, decree, or order of government, began with
"Thus saith the Lord," as a standing formula ; whether the document, law,
or proclamation, came from the elders, a king, a general, or a h.gh-priest,
from a o-ood raan, or bad one, whoever had occasion to employ the
character of the government, as that was a theocracy, and these rulers
alwavs used " Thus saith the Lord," as a universal preface to the law.
All of Moses' laws were not from God ; but Moses' system was a code of

48 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
particulars, some from God, and others from man. Tlie Saviour setties
this question in the case of that law of Moses, by which a man might
live with his wife, a month after marriage and if he did not like her, then
gave her a bill of divorcement, and sent her away, however vhtuous and
he worthy. The Saviour says, " Moses suffered it from the hardness of your
hearts, it was not so in the beginning," &c. Now, said Mr. S., this
month divorce ; the case of a Jew being permitted to take a cow, or an
ox, which had suddenly died, to the gates of the city, and there seU it to
the heathen and strangers to eat (forbidding the Jews to eat it), also the
case of takmg interest of the heathen, and none of a Jew. Polygamy is
a fourth case, and the fifth is a raan's raaking his captive into a wife, living
with her as long as he pleased, and then setting her adrift, as in
the 21st chapter of Deuteronomy, all of these cases have thus " Saith
the Lord," as much as good laws. These laws Moses suffered this
ignorant people to adopt as a raatter of expediency, but they were not
the laws of God, but are properly recorded, as our laws formerly in New
York were, in favor of lotteries, and regulating Long Island horse-races.
But the terrible injustice of these laws, proves that raan was their author,
and not God ; but they are recorded under the general appellation of
" thus saith the Lord," because the Government was a Theocracy. This
view, Mr. S. believed necessary, to vindicate the purity and glory of
God. There was a law of Heavenly origin which said, " whoso stealeth
a man shall surely die or be put to death," whicii form he did not recol
lect, and is found in these same chapters. He, Mr S., did not see how
that law of God could be reconciled with American slavery ; for every
man and woman, or his or her ancestor, had been stolen in this country.
Again, if slavery is a Bible and Heavenly institution, we should not be
opposed to it in the abstract, as the defendant's counsel are, but everything
should be done to foster and encourage it, and their honors should resign
their seats rather than decide in Mr. S's favor, however plain the new
Constitution or other thing might be for the slave ; for if the Bible coun
tenances slavery, it is abstractly right, and the plaintiffs counsel com
mits a great sin in opposing slavery in the abstract, which they intend to
atone for by going with all their might for it practically, and thus purge
themselves for opposing what the Bible sustains in the abstract and con
crete. If it is a Bible institution, which we have been abolishing in
New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, let us repent in dust and
ashes, and run down all the colored, the weak, the young, the Irish, the
English, and the strangers on their first arrival ; and catch our few suffer
ing Indians, who are still straggling as wanderers among their fathers'
graves^ and make them aU into slaves, and their posterity in the free
States ; and thus secure the blessings of Heaven, that are poured out so
bountifully on Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas.
Mr. S. said that of all remarkable arguments for ingenuity, he had
heard one urged by both of his learned and mgenious adversaries, and,
Ul fact, the main one, on which they sought to continue the institution of
slavery, in this State, which surprised, yes, astonished him, by its subtiety
and cruelty. In the 1st section of the 10th Article of the new Constitution
of New Jersey, among other things, it says, " The comraon law and statute
laws no-\v in force, and not repugnant to this Constitution, shall remain in
force until they expire by their own limitation, or be altered or repealed
by the legislature ; and all writs, actions, causes of action, prosecutions,
contracts, claims, and rights of mdividuals, and of bodies corporate, and
of the State, and all charters of incorporation, shall continue, and all in
dictments which shall have been found, or may hereafter be found for any
crime or offence coramitted before the adoption ofthis Constitution, may
be proceeded upon, as though no change had taken place."

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 49
The pmnt the defendant's counsel would raise, is this ; admitting that
the new Constitution has abolished the old slave laws, root and branch, as
being " repugnant" to the new Constitution ; stUl under tiie name of
" claims and rights of individuals" whicii " should continue," the rights of
master and slave are both preserved in the 1st section of the 10th Article
ofthe new Constitution under the head of " tights preserved," as defend
ant's counsel contend. The counsel further contend for defendants, that it is
gooa law without such saving clause in the Constitution ; and that all rights
are preserved, notwithstandmg a constitution, hostile to them on its face, has
abolished the laws which created tiie rights, in so many words, totidem verbis.
Said Mr. S., I deny these propositions in toto, as applied to a case of
.slavery. Reserved rights ! said Mr. S. , they would be reserved wrongs ! and
upon that principle a State could not abolish slavery, as for instance, sup
pose Soutli Carolina raakes a new Constitution, and abolishes slavery,
and with, or without a reservation of the rights of the citizens ; according
to the arguraent we hear, the rights of tiie master are aU taken up and
preserved in the new Constitution, to the services of the slaves ; the rights
of sale of labor, or sale of the slaves, or tiieir offspring, are the same as
before. They alter this Constitution again, and re-assert, ten years after
wards, that slavery shall never exist in South CaroUna ; but the planter
smiles at the imbecility of the Convention, and says, although they have
for the second time abolished slavery by the Constitution, and all laws
which maintain it, yet according to the arguments of the defendant's
counsel, in New Jersey, my rights are all preserved to the slaves, and
that is all I ask ; and furthermore, says he, it is curious to see how the
body of this glorious institution of slavery survives its own decapitation
They cannot, says he, abolish slavery, even in a Constitution raade on
purpose, but the Divine rights of slavery will survive, arid ride careering
over all human attempts at their annihilation ; and what, says the South
Carolina planter, is the peculiar beauty of this projiosition, is, that bythe uni
versal admission of aU jurists, slavery can only exist by positive law, for its
support ; but, says he, I have now discovered how it may exist without posi
tive law for its support, but in deadly opposition to the most stringent
organic Constitutional Law, for its entire abolition and express destruction.
Once in a nation, and adopted by law, no form oflaw can banish it, as it lives
under the name of a " right preserved ;" yes, it lives and flourishes with
an endless life. It is the real " live-for-ever." Yes, if this argument is
sound, the most monstrous -wrong in the universe, for whose destruction
a new Constitution was expressly made, flourishes and prevails ; yes,
lo ! the melancholy spectacle is presented to the astonished world, that
although the laws sustaining slavery are aU abolished, yet slavery has a
more solemn and formidable protection, as a reserved right, than it ever
had before, and that too in the bosom of its own executioner. The coun
sel, I have no doubt, hopes the shrewdness of this argument wiU be its
apology for want of solidity. The master never had a single just right to
the slave, and the Constitution no more preserves any for him, than it does
the turnpike for highwaymen, the treasure in my house for a thief, or
the thoughtless young heir, for a prey to black-legs and sharpers.
Mr. S. said, after this view of this question had been taken, he should
consider the concession virtually made, that slavery was repugnant to the
new Constitution; that the Massachusetts decision ended this cause, if
good authority But slavery had been spoken of by the defendant's coun
sel with great respect. Said Mr. S., I regard it as the curse of the Nation.
Vir<rinia at the time of the first census, in 1790, had more than double
thelnhabitants of the State of New York : now it is sadly reversed. New
York has about double that of Virginia. Virginia, with nearly double the
territory of New York, and more good land than New York, situated in the
most benignant climate, to be found under the bright Heavens, penetrated
4

50 SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY.
with large bays, and beautiful, noble, and navigable rivers, stretching to the
metropolis of our land, washed by the Ohio ; no land whose mountains are
raore ready to burst with their mineral wepJth than her's ; whose lead, iron,
coal, and copper, lie hoarded m those beautiful mountains, in value beyond
the computations of numbers, or the dreams of avarice. But that wealth
shaU never be explored, raised, or enjoyed by the palsied arm of slavery.
No, it is reserved for the vigor of the freeman's strength; not dishonored
by the blight of unpaid labor : those treasiues wUl only corae at the call
of honored and free labor.
Look at hundreds of thousands of acres of fair and valuable land in
Western Virginia, which would make beautiful farms, when free labor
shall be honored, now sold at six cents, ten cents, and twenty-five cents
au acre. Look at hundreds of old farms within forty and fifty miles
of Washington, to be sold from $4 to f 10 per acre, with their dilapi
dated buildings, covered with mortgages and trust deeds ; the same
iand, slavery abolished, and freemen to cultivate, would be worth from
$30 to $80 per acre. Look at whole regions and portions of counties
abandoned, as commons, in old Eastern Virginia, where you may ride for
hours, without raeeting an inhabitant in the lower counties of this State, —
land yet beautiful, if its powers of fecundity were truly developed by free
raen, once the seats of joyful hospitality ofthe last century, now as sUent
as the ruins of Palrayra and Babylon. The young growth of tiraber com
ing up, the wild animals resuming theif ancient dorainion, the traveller
frora the old world, as he measured his lonely steps over these forsaken
abodes of men, would inquire what desolating wars have consuriied the
sons and daughters of this fair land ? in what Chronicles shall it be found,
or what more than Egyptian plague has been and bereaved these uncul
tivated lands of their proprietors, and has left the fox to corae in at the
window, and the owl to hoot at noon, and appointed the stork, the raven,
the corraorant and bittern, to perforra the hospitalities of these dilapidat
ed homes of departed men ? Alas ! the curse of the slave's foot-print has
been here, unrewarded toil has been liere, inalienable rights have been
cloven down here, man has ranked with the ox, in the market, here; mar
riage-rights were trodden under foot here ; the father who begot, and the
mother who bore the son and the daughter, had no rights in their chUd
ren here ; men had no right to cultivate their immortal minds here; justice
and mercy had no abode here ; free labor was dishonored here; the lash,
the fetter and the chain, ruled here; and at last, hunger expelled the op
pressor from his home here.
Said Mr. S., the splendid and princely plantation of George Washing
ton, the Father of his country, presents in forty-five years one of the most
melancholy and reraarkable instances of that ceaseless vigilance of Pro-
\idence which pursues injustice with unerring certainty, from year to
year, and at last overtakes and awards the punishment affixed to funda
mental violations of the great rights, which the Father of all has in the
welfare of his abused chUdren.
Thousands of acres, and money in va.st amount, united in the ofiicial
station of President, this plantation lying within some ten or twelve
miles from the three beautiful cities of Georgetown, Washington and
Alexandria, partly surrounded by the majestic Potomac I'iver, bearmg
on its comraerclal bosom ships frora the ends of the world, freighted
with every huraan want, this plantation was ready to ship at its own
door, every redundancy it bore at remunerating prices. The ambition of
General Washington during the last years of his retirement was to raake
this favored place, with his hundred slaves, his abounding wealth, the
great pattern plantation of this eontment. Having done rauch to see his
high purpose accomplished, in December, 1799, he died, having emanci
pated his slaves by his will. Jndge Bushrod Washington, his nephew.

SLAVERY IN NEW JERSEY. 51
with a large family of slaves, with a salary of $4500 frora the United
States as Judge for life, succeeded his Ulustrious uncle; and in 1819 or
thereabouts, made a large sale of some thirty to fifty slaves, being near
one-half. The nation was incensed at the act ; his public apology was,
that he was corapelled to sell part to support the rest, and thus the pro
cess ol anthropophagi, or raan eating man, indirectiy coraraenced ; the cul
tivation was miserable and the bushes enijroached ; sotae fields by 1828
or 1829 at the time ofthe Judge's death began to be given up. John A.
Washington, the nephew of the Judge, succeeds, the woods stiU gained,
field after field, under slave and raaster's cultivation, went back to pri
meval forest. And about 1839 or '40 Colonel Washington died, and in
the montii of April or May, 1842, the widow and her children were like
Adam and Eve from Paradise driven out. " Great Burnam Wood had
come to Dunsinane" as in Macbetii ; the door was locked, the gate was
shut, slavery's curse and the wilderness had expelled them from this
ancient home of America's great man. This is slavery, sooner or later,
everywhere ; the curse of Heaven is upon it.
Mr. S. said, it would be a fraud on the people of New Jersey, so to
construe their new Constitution, as the defendant's counsel had contended.
There was not one in fifteen of the seventy-thousand who voted for
its adoption, who would not glory and feel elevated by the act. To see
these poor bondmen and their chUdren free, must be matter of joy to all.
The argument they would not be so well off, is too stale to be used ui
1845 in New Jersey. For if the argument proves anything it proves too
much, and that it woidd be better for the great mass of raankind to be
slaves, and that it is a desirable institution. On that point I have no
raore to say except that tiiose who believe such doctrines caji easily put
themselves aud families in possession of its blessings, as several of the
slave States are so kmd as not to refuse to those of Anglo-Saxon descent
the peculiar privileges of that pleasant-spoken institution.
To illustrate one of the abhorrent features of the institution in the slave
States, Mr- Stewart, adverting to one of the positions of the opposite
counsel, supposed the following case. An old man, said he, whom we
will call Tiiikem, Uved in Trenton, once upon a time, and not being long for
this world, called his ten sons around him and told them. My sons, I have
but littie to give you of worldly property, and, therefore, in order to start the
five oldest of you comfortably m this life, I give each of them one of
their five younger brothers, to be his property,— in other words, his slave
for life, and his posterity after him. And you, the five youngest of my
sons must be the slaves of your elder brothers. I do this in conformity
with' the usage of the citizens of a large number of the States of this
Union ' But the eldest son says, " Father, what are the rights and prero
gatives which we shall, in that case, possess over our our slave brothers ?"
" " Oh " said the old man, " you will reduce them to chattels, or cattie,--
living, breathing property ,-that is aU. It is perfectiy legal, and you will
be protected in the enjoyment of your property; you are no longer to
regard them as sentient beings ; you are to deprive them of all education
except the cart- whip instiuotion ; you are to make them know and feet
that their every moment is to be regulated by your wish and will, and
that thev are subject to be sold, and worked, husband apart from wife,
and wffe from 1 usba.id ; and their children from both. So, now, my
sons take your slaves, and begone!" Now (continued Mr. Stewart),
the story of tWs horribi; deed reached the ears ofthe citizens of Trenton.
and the sanctums of its editors. Aburstof indignation is the consequence.
Everybodrand eW press exclaims " monster - monster; monster I"
^vlth one voice. It is taken up by the people, and the press of Phila-
delDhia and New York, and language grows weak, and imagination
weLv in searching for fitting epithets in which to condemn the foul and

52 8LAVEEY IN NEW JERSEY.
damning act of this heartiess old ¦wllain, Tinkem of Trenton I • Men come
from a prodigious distance to get a sight of so iriuch moral deformity,
existing in a single man. The pMenologists come to examine his cranio-
logical developments, wondering what inanner of man-raonster he can
be ; and the whole nation rings with the story, and but one opinion is
expressed, everywhere, in public and in private, — and that of horror
and astonishment. But, your «honors, pause in your honest outburst of
indignation. Old Tinkem stands excused, in view of the fact that not a
week comes and goes in the regions of the sunny soutii, that does not
furnish a parallel to his conduct. A .slaveholding father there gives the
chUdren of his own body, by his bond- woraan, to be slaves for life, to
his children by his free-woman, — I raean, his wife ! It is done in twelve
States out of the seven and twenty of which this Union is coraposed,
whenever the father wishes to endow his heir out of his possessions.
And this I hold to be slavery in the length and breadth of its flagitiousness ;
it is yet but one phase of its abounding villany. The picture is startling,
frightful, revolting ; but it is neither overdrawn, nor too highly colored.
Mr. S. replied to several subordinate points raade, and authorities
cited by the counsel of the defendants, which it is not supposed would
materially improve the report of the arguraent. What is further said is
a part of a report raade of what Mr. S. said, by Mr. Otis, reporter of the
New York Evening Express, and what followed Ma. Stewart's close is
the report of Mr. Otis also.
Mr. Stewart drew his remarks to a close by appealing to the Court
very earnestiy as to the high and soleran dflty left to them to perform.
It is yours, may it please your honors (he said), to put the last, the finish
ing stroke upon slavery, in one of the noblest old States of this glorious
confederation. It is an honor which you should covet. Let no man
take it from you. Leave it not to other hands to finish so noble a
work. What would the world say, to see a case like this, argued as it
has been before this Court for two days, with the fuU light of this blessed
and glorious Constitution shedding its rays upon it, turned off and decided
against liberty, upon the worse than doubtful authority of a few extinct
and exploded statutes, which stand repealed in your code by the voice
of the people speaking through a Convention of their choice, — the acts
of which they have also confirmed by their solemn votes ? May it please
your honors, I cannot believe that such will be your decision. I have
too much faith in ray kind for this. I feel that New Jersey will hold up
the hands of this Court in coming to the support of freedom and of free
uistitutions hi her borders.
Never can the act be regretted. Conscience will approve it. Time
wUl approve it. Death-bed reflection wUl approve it. Eternity and
heaven wUl approve it. It has been long, too long postponed. But it is
not too late to come up, manlike, statesmanlike, patriotlike, godlike, and
declare that it is indeed true, iu the language of your now organic law,
that within all your pleasant borders, at least, aU mankind are, by nature,
entitied to perfect freedom in the possession of life, liberty, and the pur
suit of happiness !
After Mr. Stewart resumed his seat, there was a pause of some dura
tion. The scene was quite irapressive. The auditory was numerous
and highly respectable, and such was the impressiveness with wjiich the
closuig appeal of the advocate for freedom was delivered, that no one
seemed to lUie to be the first to break the speU his eloquence had cast
upon the assembly. At length, the Bench arose, the Chief Justice adjourned
the Court untU to-morrow morning, and the hearing of the cases which
have occupied our attention for these two days past was terminated.
The decisions therein wUl probably be given some time durmg the next
term of the Court.

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