t the people of the
Southern States are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave law,--that
is a right fixed in the Constitution. But it cannot be made available to
them without Congressional legislation. In the Judge's language, it is a
"barren right," which needs legislation before it can become efficient
and valuable to the persons to whom it is guaranteed. And as the right is
constitutional, I agree that the legislation shall be granted to it, and
that not that we like the institution of slavery. We profess to have no
taste for running and catching niggers, at least, I profess no taste for
that job at all. Why then do I yield support to a Fugitive Slave law?
Because I do not understand that the Constitution, which guarantees that
right, can be supported without it. And if I believed that the right to
hold a slave in a Territory was equally fixed in the Constitution with the
right to reclaim fugitives, I should be bound to give it the legislation
necessary to support it. I say that no man can deny his obligation to give
the necessary legislation to support slavery in a Territory, who believes
it is a constitutional right to have it there. No man can, who does not
give the Abolitionists an argument to deny the obligation enjoined by
the Constitution to enact a Fugitive State law. Try it now. It is the
strongest Abolition argument ever made. I say if that Dred Scott decision
is correct, then the right to hold slaves in a Territory is equally a
constitutional right with the right of a slaveholder to have his runaway
returned. No one can show the distinction between them. The one is
express, so that we cannot deny it. The other is construed to be in the
Constitution, so that he who believes the decision to be correct believes
in the right. And the man who argues that by unfriendly legislation,
in spite of that constitutional right, slavery may be driven from the
Territories, cannot avoid furnishing an argument by which Abolitionists
may deny the obligation to return fugitives, and claim the power to pass
laws unfriendly to the right of the slaveholder to reclaim his fugitive. I
do not know how such an arguement may strike a popular assembly like this,
but I defy anybody to go before a body of men whose minds are educated
to estimating evidence and reasoning, and show that there is an iota of
difference between the constitutional right to reclaim a fugitive and the
constitutional right to hold a slave, in a Territory, prov