country prevented, for a time, the establishment and enforcement of any
decisive policy. By the Constitution and laws, slavery and property in
slaves were recognized, and the surrender and rendition of fugitives
from service to their owners was commanded; but in a majority of the
seceding States the usurping governments and the rebel slave-owners were
in open insurrection, resisting the Federal authority, defying it and
making war upon it. Still there were many citizens in those States who
were opposed to secession, loyal to the Federal Government, and earnest
friends of the Union, who owned slaves. What policy could the
Administration adopt in regard to these two classes of citizens in the
same State? The fugitive slave law was not and could not be enforced in
States where there was organized rebellion. Should fugitive slaves be
returned to both, or either, or neither of the owners in insurrectionary
States? There were moreover five or six border States, where slavery
existed, which did not secede. The governments and a majority of the
people of those States were patriotic supporters of the Union, but there
was a large minority in each of them who were violent enemies of the
Government and of the Union. Many of them were serving in the rebel
armies. For a time there was no alternative but to return slaves to
their owners who resided in border States which had neither seceded nor
resisted the Government. The Administration was not authorized to
discriminate, for instance, between slave-owners on the eastern shore of
the Potomac in the lower counties of Maryland and those on the western
shore in Virginia. There were, however, no secessionists, through the
whole South, more malignantly hostile to the Federal Union than a large
portion of the slave-owners in the southern counties of Maryland; but
the State not having seceded, and there being no organized resistance to
the Government, masters who justified secession continued to reclaim
their slaves, while on the opposite side of the river, in Virginia,
slave-owners who claimed to be loyal or neutral, could not reclaim or
obtain a restoration of their escaped servants. The Executive was
compelled to act in each of these cases, and its policy, the dictate of
necessity in the peculiar war that existed, was denounced by each of the
disagreeing factions. Affairs were in this unsettled and broken
condition when Congress convened at its second session in December,
1861. The action