for this process, through official corruption and individual perjury.
By this Act, the claimant is permitted to _select_ a justice of the
peace, before whom he may bring or send his alleged slave, and even
to prove his property by _affidavit_. Indeed, in almost every State
in the Union, a slaveholder may recover at law a human being as his
beast of burden with far less ceremony than he could his pig from
the possession of his neighbor. In only three States is a man,
claimed as a slave, entitled to a trial by jury. At the last session
of the New York Legislature a bill allowing a jury trial in such
cases was passed by the lower House, but rejected by a _democratic_
vote in the Senate, democracy in that State, being avowedly only
_skin_ deep, all its principles of liberty, equality, and human rights
depending on complexion.

Considering the wonderful ease and expedition with which fugitives
may be recovered by law, it would be very strange if mistakes did not
sometimes occur. _How_ often they occur cannot, of course, be known,
and it is only when a claim is _defeated_, that we are made sensible
of the exceedingly precarious tenure by which a poor friendless
negro at the north holds his personal liberty. A few years since, a
girl of the name of Mary Gilmore was arrested in Philadelphia, as a
fugitive slave from Maryland. Testimony was not wanting in support
of the claim; yet it was most conclusively proved that she was the
daughter of poor _Irish_ parents--having not a drop of negro blood
in her veins--that the father had absconded, and that the mother had
died a drunkard in the Philadelphia hospital, and that the infant
had been kindly received and _brought up in a colored family_. Hence
the attempt to make a slave of her. In the spring of 1839, a colored
man was arrested in Philadelphia, on a charge of having absconded
from his owner _twenty-three_ years before. This man had a wife and
family depending upon him, and a home where he enjoyed their society;
and yet, unless he could find witnesses who could prove his freedom
for more than this number of years, he was to be torn from his wife,
his children, his home, and doomed for the remainder of his days to
toil under the lash. _Four_ witnesses for the claimant swore to his
identity, although they had not seen him before for twenty-three years!
By a most extraordinary coincidence, a New England Captain, with
whom this negro had sailed _twenty-nine_ years before, in a slo