The Fugitive Slave Law

From the New York Tribune.

The Fugitive Slave Law. 

The great battle of this generation, between Freedom and Slavery, has been fought, and won by those who from 1816 to 1850 resolutely upheld, during all the fierce conflicts of those years, the Wilmot Proviso.  The contest on the Proviso secured our Mexican Territories to Freedom.  In this great result we behold its glorious reward.  We may, therefore, in the main, be content with the fruits of that contest.  Had it not been for the agitation upon the subject of Slavery, and the powerful demonstration of the Free States, slaves would now be washing the golden sands of California, and barren New Mexico herself would be bowing in still more hopeless sterility before the withering tread of African servitude.  But, thank to the indomitable spirit of freedom in the North, the future millions who are to inhabit the vast valleys of the Gila, the Colorado, the San Joaquin, and Sacramento, have the unspeakable boon of liberty for their inheritance.  This is the animating spectacle presented to our gaze as we survey the field, whereon have fought for years the champions of Free Soil.  In this rich harvest true friends of liberty everywhere share, and may rejoice in its abundance.  They may well regard it with a proud satisfaction, and repose in tranquility over what is thus achieved for the cause of Humanity.

But the offensive [illegible] of the agitation from which all this has resulted, is now held to the nostrils of the successful party in the contest, in the form of the Fugitive Slave Law.  As in the dispensation of Providence, unmixed good is seldom the lot even of those upon whom earthly blessings are most abundantly showered, so we should not wonder that the share of good which ahs fallen to the adversaries of Slavery, in this contest, should be dashed with an unwelcome admixture.  But it would be the height of ingratitude, as well as of stolidity, to fail to recognize and enjoy what we have of good in our existing circumstances, because all is not good.  The Devil was in Paradise.

We are not of those who are cut to the quick by the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law.—It is wicked enough no doubt.  But we precipitate ourselves into no tumult of passionate objurgation over its natural operation of successfully returning a slave to his servitude.  We rejoice in the escape of a human being from Slavery.  We lament his seizure and return to bondage.  But we preserve the expression of our profoundest emotions upon the subject of Slavery, for the seasons of our contemplation of the monster iniquity, as its gigantic proportions raise to view in the shape of the three millions of our fellow countrymen, who daily rise in the morning and lie down at night under the lash of the task-master.  It is painful to behold a single individual in Slavery; but a thousand times more bitter, infinitely more poignant to the reflective mind, is the though of that stupendous aggregate of wrong suffered by the millions who hopelessly toil in the cotton fields and rice swamps of the South.

In the triumphant march of the cause of freedom finally marked by the signal events alluded to we find the liveliest satisfaction.  That cause had suffered no serious interruption in its career though assailed at every step by open foes and treacherous friends.  Its course has been steadily forward, its conquests unequivocal and glorious.  The operation of the Fugitive Slave law is but the picking off of here and there a straggler by the enemy.  But while even this loss is to be deplored, we can hardly regard it otherwise than as an inevitable evil.  The very act of moving squadrons through an enemy’s country involves the necessity of loss.  The most fortunate and successful battalions do not come out of a contest unscathed.—Let us count our gains, and consider, but not magnify, our losses.

The violent agitations of the time upon the Law will cease, and comparative tranquility be restored, while the rich blessings secured by the friends of Freedom, in the late contest with Slavery, will glow with an ever increasing magnitude.

The Law of 1850 must turn out to be an inoperative enactment.  Indeed, it is practically nullified already, when costs, as in the case of Sims, five thousand dollars to catch and return a single runaway.  But if it is to be anything but a self-nullifying act, lying dead on the Statute Books, its repeal, or essential modification, is inevitable.  Its one hideous feature, giving to a creature of the Government called a “Commissioner,” the authority to consign a Freeman to Slavery is too intolerable to be borne in any long course of practical enforcement.  The Trial by Jury, in every case involving Personal Liberty is too precious to be surrendered at the desire or the dictate of any Administration, or any section of the confederacy; and the demand of such trial in the case of alleged fugitives, is, moreover, too reasonable to be refused by any Congress which shall approach this subject in a spirit of just regard, we will not say to the fundamental rights, of the citizen, but to his well-established and indubitable constitutional priveleges.

Thus it is we entertain no doubt that the question of resistance to this law, now so rife, and so distressing to all manner of cattle that feed at the trough of trade and the Treasury, so alarming to aldermanic sensibilities and quitted velvet patriotism in general, and the cause of so many lugubrious jeremiads and inane platitudes from gentlemen in high stations and in low, who think their political or pecuniary fortunes depend upon sustaining it in all its parts and to the fullest extent; will, after merging in more substantial issues, soon fade entirely from sight.

In Mr. Clary’s elaborate treatment of the subjects embraced by the “Omnibus,” he entered into this question of trial by jury, and true to his own instincts, and alive to what he felt to be the reasonable demand of every clear-seeing man jealous of liberty, he acknowledged that the claim of a trial by jury for every person arrested was most reasonable.  And with his accustomed adroitness he proposed to grant so much to the advocates of freedom.  But he insisted that the trial should be in the State from which the fugitive was alleged to have fled, and not in the state in which he was arrested.  To this extent, Mr. Clay to be consistent with himself, must even now be willing to go.  It may be that he has seen enough to convince him that it would be best now to yield to a demand for such a modification of the law as would secure such a trial at the point of arrest.

Impressed with these views and sentiments, we are content patiently to await the course of events.  We confide in the claims of truth, justice and propriety, which, sooner or later make their own way in the world, and triumph over all obstacles great and small.  Before those claims names are nothing—men are nothing.—Where Mr. Clary is, or where Mr. Webster is, on great questions involving the constitutional rights of the citizens, or the fundamental rights of man, is a matter than concerns them and their reputation far more than the cause itself, or anything or anybody else.  It is not within human power, at this day, long to successfully resist the right and maintain the wrong.  As well as might a man attempt to gather the rushing waters of a river as it pours its flood through its, deepest channels, as under[illegible] to attest and confine the great currents of events whose springs are in the human heart and whose streams forever swell the tide of human progress.  Blind partnership, interested advocacy, selfish and rotten support of public measures, mark this age as they have all ages.  For them we of course have no respect, and we entertain no fear that they can sensibly defer the house of jubilee, which assuredly awaits the oppressed of all nations.  Truth is mighty and will prevail.