Fugitive Slave Bill

Wash. Southern Press.

 

Thus far, every arrest of a fugitive slave since the passage of the present law has been peaccably effected. No forcible resistance has in a single case been interposed - certainly no effectual resistance. The law in each instance has quietly taken its course, and, where the alleged fugitive has been legally proved the property of the claimant, he has been delivered up to him. If but few slaves have been restored under the law, it is because few owners have found out the residences of their fugitive slaves and asserted and established their right in them according to the provision of  the law. 

 

To be sure, some of the fugitive slaves and other blacks  in the Northern States have held meetings and voted to oppose with deadly weapons the execution of the law, and some white fanatics have also held meetings and undertaken to encourage the negroes in their threatened resistance and even promised them aid, but no such meeting of white persons has been attended by a tenth part of the community to which it was held. Throughout the non-slaveholding States, the chief, the most respectable, and influential organs of public feeling and sentiment call for a peaceable execution of the law as long, at least, as it remains upon the statute book, and, as we have said above, it has been peaceably executed in every case up to this time.

 

Nevertheless, in the paragraphs quoted above from the Washington Southern Press, the editor of that paper asserts that the fugitive slave bill "is already practically nullified." He talks about the small number of fugitives already recovered, and, pointing to the manifestations of resistance, warns the people of the South that it is as much as their lives are worth to attempt the recapture of another. He would absolutely have the people of the South, whose chivalry is his favorite theme, stand appalled by the resolutions of the miserable meetings of negroes and fanatics in the North - appalled from the legal assertion of their right to their own property. Though, thus far, not a hair of a slaveholder's head has been touched, and, though the law has been executed without let or hindrance, and though the judges have shown a determination to enforce it, if necessary, by military power, yet this Washington organ of Southern ultraism tells the men of the South that it is certain death for them to go North in pursuit of their slaves, and advises them to regard the law as practically nullified, and proceed to take the remedy into their own hands - his favorite remedy for this and everything else being disunion.

 

Our advice to the owners of fugitive slaves is, to go and get them if they want them. We have no idea that their lives will be at all in danger. We believe that both their lives and their rights will be secure. We would not have them frightened by the clamor, however, furious, of a few black and white fanatics. We believe that the editor of the Southern Press never attaches much Importance to any clamors that come from the North, except when he thinks he can use them to promote the cause of disunion in the South. To promote that cause, he would, in a solemn voice, call upon the whole Southern chivalry to stand aghast at every word spoken by a Northern white man or negro, as if it were the voice of doom.