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country. Do you ask me to support a government that will tax my property: that will plunder me; that will
demand my blood, and will not protect me? I would rather see the population of my native State laid six feet
beneath her sod than they should support for one hour such a government. Protection is the price of obedience
everywhere, in all countries. It is the only thing that makes government respectable. Deny it and you can not
have free subjects or citizens; you may have slaves.
We demand, in the next place, "that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State, and
fleeing to another, shall be delivered up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other
property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee shall be the test of criminality." That is
another one of the demands of an extremist and a rebel.
But the nonslaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts, have steadily refused, if the criminal
only stole a negro and that negro was a slave, to deliver him up. It was refused twice on the requisition of my
own State as long as twenty-two years ago. It was refused by Kent and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and
representing, I believe, each of the then federal parties. We appealed then to fraternity, but we submitted; and
this constitutional right has been practically a dead letter from that day to this. The next case came up between
us and the State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the governor of that State;
and he refused it. Why? He said it was not against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he
would not comply with the demand. He made a similar refusal to Virginia. Yet these are our confederates;
these are our sister States! There is the bargain; there is the compact. You have sworn to it. Both these
governors swore to it. The senator from New York swore to it. The governor of Ohio swore to it when he was
inaugurated. You can not bind them by oaths. Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect to whip
freemen into loving such brethren! They will have a good time in doing it!
It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried out. The Constitution says slaves are
property; the Supreme Court says so; the Constitution says so. The theft of slaves is a crime; they are a
subject-matter of felonious asportation. By the text and letter of the Constitution you agreed to give them up.
You have sworn to do it, and you have broken your oaths. Of course, those who have done so look out for
pretexts. Nobody expected them to do otherwise. I do not think I ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked,
who could not invent some pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings, hire an Old
Bailey lawyer to invent some for him. Yet this requirement of the Constitution is another one of the extreme
demands of an extremist and a rebel.
The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850, without being entitled either to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other similar obstructions
of legislation, in the State to which he may flee. Here is the Constitution:
"1_2_4">APPENDIX D. SPEECHES FOR STUDY AND PRACTISE 227
The Art of Public Speaking
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws
thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law
or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor,
but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such
service or labor may be due."
This language is plain, and everybody understood it the same way for the first forty years of your government.
In 1793, in Washington's time, an act was passed to carry out this provision. It was adopted unanimously in
the Senate of the United States, and nearly so in the House of Representatives. Nobody then had invented
pretexts to show that the Constitution did not mean a negro slave. It was clear; it was plain. Not only the
federal courts, but all the local courts in all the States, decided that this was a constitutional obligation. How is
it now? The North sought to evade it; following the instincts of their natural character, they commenced with
the fraudulent fiction that fugitives were entitled to habeas corpus, entitled to trial by jury in the State to
which they fled. They pretended to believe that our fugitive slaves were entitled to more rights than their
white citizens; perhaps they were right, they know one another better than I do. You may charge a white man
with treason, or felony, or other crime, and you do not require any trial by jury before he is given up; there is
nothing to determine but that he is legally charged with a crime and that he fled, and then he is to be delivered
up upon demand. White people are delivered up every day in this way; but not slaves. Slaves, black people,
you say, are entitled to trial by jury; and in this way schemes have been invented to defeat your plain
constitutional obligations.
Senators, the Constitution is a compact. It contains all our obligations and the duties of the federal
government. I am content and have ever been content to sustain it. While I doubt its perfection, while I do not
believe it was a good compact, and while I never saw the day that I would have voted for it as a proposition de
novo, yet I am bound to it by oath and by that common prudence which would induce men to abide by
established forms rather than to rush into unknown dangers. I have given to it, and intend to give to it,
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