* *

Mr. President, the gentleman says, if I understood him, that these
fugitives might be turned over to the authorities of the State from
whence they came. That would be a very poor remedy for a free man in
humble circumstances who was taken under the provisions of this bill in
a summary way, to be carried--where? Where he came from? There is no law
that requires that he should be carried there. Sir, if he is a free man
he may be carried into the market-place anywhere in a slave State; and
what chance has he, a poor, ignorant individual, and a stranger,
of asserting any rights there, even if there were no prejudices or
partialities against him? That would be mere mockery of justice and
nothing else, and the Senator well knows it. Sir, I know that from the
stringent, summary provisions of this bill, free men have been kidnapped
and carried into captivity and sold into everlasting slavery. Will any
man who has a regard to the sovereign rights of the State rise here and
complain that a State shall not make a law to protect her own people
against kidnapping and violent seizures from abroad? Of all men, I
believe those who have made most of these complaints should be the
last to rise and deny the power of a sovereign State to protect her own
citizens against any Federal legislation whatever. These liberty bills,
in my judgment, have been passed, not with a view of degrading the
South, but with an honest purpose of guarding the rights of their own
citizens from unlawful seizures and abductions. I was exceedingly glad
to hear that the Senators on the other side had arisen in their places
and had said that the repeal of those laws would not relieve the case
from the difficulties under which they now labor.

* * * * *

Gentlemen, it will be very well for us all to take a view of all the
phases of this controversy before we come to such conclusions as seem to
have been arrived at in some quarters. I make the assertion here that I
do not believe, in the history of the world, there ever was a nation or
a people where a law repugnant to the general feeling was ever executed
with the same faithfulness as has been your most savage and atrocious
fugitive bill in the North. You yourselves can scarcely point out any
case that has come before any northern tribunal in which the law has not
been enforced to the very letter. You ought to know these facts, and you
do know them. You all know that when a law is p