Fugitive Slaves Part 16

In answer to Mr. King, Mr. Hubbard denied that the Const.i.tution provided for the enactment of a law by Congress, and in any case, the treason of slavery had already absolved the people from any such obligation. It surely must be competent for this Congress to repeal any act which a previous Congress had enacted. For yet another reason the law should be repealed. Negro soldiers must be enlisted: "You cannot draft black men into the field, while your marshals are chasing women and children in the woods of Ohio with a view to render them back into bondage. The moral sense of the nation, ay, of the world, would revolt at it."[372] Again, this would make a conflict in our laws, said Mr. Morris. A colored man might enlist in our army, then, under the Fugitive Slave Law, "he might be seized and remanded to slavery; and as a further consequence, dealt with as a deserter from his post of duty."[373] It was also urged that unless slavery was to survive the war, the two acts were useless and obsolete statutes, which ought to be wiped out of existence. No one who believes that slavery is dead would desire to keep such a guaranty of the inst.i.tution.[374] Mr. Hubbard then demanded the yeas and nays on the pa.s.sage of the bill. It was declared in the affirmative, yeas 82, nays 57, and thus the repeal was successfully carried in the House.[375]

=-- 103. Repeal bills in the Senate.=--Mr. Sumner had already reported a repeal bill from the Committee on Slavery and Freedom in the Senate, February 29, 1864.[376] The progress of the bill was so delayed by the opposition, that Mr. Sumner at last gave notice that he should take every proper occasion to call up the bill, and press its consideration.[377]

In the debate several speeches were made against the measure, while Mr.

Sumner defended it. To the antislavery party the act was const.i.tutionally[378] and morally wrong, so against public sentiment that it could seldom be enforced, and the question of its repeal was as plain as a "diagram," "the multiplication table," or "the ten commandments."[379] They desired to strike slavery wherever they could hit it, and to "purify the statute-book, so that there should be nothing in it out of which this wrong can derive any support." It should be repealed for the sake of our cause in foreign lands.[380] "Since the outbreak of the Rebellion this statute has been constantly adduced by our enemies abroad as showing that we are little better than Jefferson Davis and his slave-monger crew; for slavery never shows itself worse than in the slave-hunter. It is a burden for our cause which it ought not to be obliged to bear."

To retain the law of 1793, framed by the founders of the Republic, and repeal the act of 1850 with its manifest injustice, was suggested as a desirable compromise. Mr. Sherman, therefore, offered an amendment to this effect, and it was accepted.[381] The friends of the measure then felt that the bill as it stood was of little value to the antislavery cause. Mr. Brown maintained that it was really a proposition to reinstate slavery in its fastness in the Const.i.tution. "The civilized world, when it beholds the spectacle of the American Senate going back for three quarters of a century to resurrect a statute of slave-catching, and pa.s.s it anew with their indors.e.m.e.nt, will credit very little all your talk about freedom. The act will give the lie to all argument."[382]

Before further action was taken on Mr. Sherman's bill, the repeal bill from the House came before the Senate, and was reported from the committee, June 15, 1864. It was discussed for several days, but no new arguments were offered, and, June 23, 1864, the bill pa.s.sed the Senate by a vote of 27 to 12.[383] On the 25th of June it received President Lincoln's signature, and the Fugitive Slave Laws were swept from the statute-book of the United States.[384]

[Sidenote: Repeal of the Acts.]

=-- 104. The repeal act and the thirteenth amendment.=--The act was a simple one; it runs as follows:--

"Chap. CLXVI. An Act to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen hundred and fifty, and all Acts and parts of Acts for the rendition of Fugitive Slaves.

"_Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress a.s.sembled_, That sections three and four of an act ent.i.tled 'An act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters,' pa.s.sed February twelve, seventeen hundred and ninety-three, and an act ent.i.tled 'An act to amend, and supplementary to, the act ent.i.tled An act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters, pa.s.sed February twelve, seventeen hundred and ninety-three,' pa.s.sed September, eighteen hundred and fifty, be and the same are hereby repealed.

"Approved, June 28, 1864."

The whole structure of statutes, decisions, and judicial machinery which had been erected to compel by national authority the people of free States to share in the responsibility for slavery, was at last overthrown. But the const.i.tutional obligation remained; so long as a slave anywhere existed, the neighboring States were bound to pursue him, if he ran away, and might by statute provide for his return. The final step was therefore to complete the work of legal emanc.i.p.ation by the thirteenth amendment to the Const.i.tution. On January 31, 1865, Congress voted to submit the following article to the States for their approval and ratification: "Art. XIII. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction." On December 18, 1865, the Secretary of State proclaimed that the amendment had been approved by twenty-seven of the thirty-six States, and was consequently adopted.

=-- 105. Educating effect of the controversy.=--The first act of 1793 was imperfect. It did not provide a national machinery whereby its provisions could be executed, and many of the States by means of the personal liberty laws refused to lend their officers and jails for the work. All efforts to amend the law were unsuccessful until the great compromise of 1850 gave opportunity to pa.s.s a second act.

This new measure remedied certain defects in the first statute, and was therefore more satisfactory to the slave-owners. As soon as it began to be executed, however, its provisions were found to be so severe that the trials and rescues it occasioned served only to educate the people to the evils of slavery by bringing its effects close to them. Thus, far from compelling the North to acquiesce in the system, it greatly increased the number of Abolitionists. The arraying of the North and South against each other in the Civil War intensified public sentiment upon the question, and led more and more to a loose execution of the law. It was found impracticable to return slaves to disloyal masters, and a law to prevent any such return was the next step toward the doing away of the whole system. Next came the question of the duty and power of the general government, within its exclusive jurisdiction: in 1862 all responsibility was disavowed. By this time the force of the law extended only to the loyal slave States, and the force of public opinion in 1864 withdrew the last statutory safeguard of slavery under the Const.i.tution. A change in the text of the Const.i.tution finally took away the force of the clause on which the return of fugitives was based.

We can see, at this distance, how clearly slavery was doomed to destruction, from the time the two sections first made it an issue in 1820; but there was no relation arising out of slavery except the territorial question which did so much as the fugitive slave controversy to hasten the downfall of the system. The contrast between the free principles of democratic government and human bondage was forced upon the attention of the North by the pursuit of fugitives in their midst. Yet without national machinery for the recapture of runaways the inst.i.tution could not have long been maintained. There is no evidence that the North was profoundly stirred by the horrors of slavery before 1850; it was only when the North was called upon, in the Territories, and through the Fugitive Slave Law, to give positive aid to the system that the antislavery movement grew strong. Fugitive slaves and fugitive slave laws helped to destroy slavery.

[Footnote 302: Ableman v. Booth, 3 Wis., 1.]

[Footnote 303: Globe, 1860-61, p. 356, App. 197.]

[Footnote 304: Globe, 1860-61, (Baker) 228, (Burnham) 970.]

[Footnote 305: Senate Journal, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., p. 18. Appendix C, No.

1.]

[Footnote 306: House Journal, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., p. 60; Congr. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 77. Appendix C, Nos. 2-12. For a list of proposed const.i.tutional amendments bearing on fugitive slaves, I am indebted to Mr. H. V. Ames, of the Harvard Graduate School, who has kindly furnished me transcripts from his material for a forthcoming monograph on proposed amendments to the Const.i.tution.]

[Footnote 307: Cong. Globe, 3 Cong. 2 Sess., 114. Appendix C, Nos.

2-12.]

[Footnote 308: House Journal, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 70; Cong. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 79. Appendix C, No. 10.]

[Footnote 309: House Journal, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 67; Cong. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 77. Appendix C, No. 3.]

[Footnote 310: House Journal, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 70; Cong. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 78. Appendix C, No. 11.]

[Footnote 311: Cong. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 1328.]

[Footnote 312: Appendix C, No. 25.]

[Footnote 313: Liberator, Nov. 1, 1861; Edw. L. Pierce, in Atlantic Monthly, November, 1861.]

[Footnote 314: Cong. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 1076.]

[Footnote 315: Cong. Globe, 36 Cong. 2 Sess., 1077.]

[Footnote 316: Cong. Globe, 37 Cong. 1 Sess., 218. Appendix C, Nos. 30, 31.]

[Footnote 317: Cong. Globe, 37 Cong. 1 Sess., 219.]

[Footnote 318: Cong. Globe, 37 Cong. 1 Sess., 412.]

[Footnote 319: House Journal, 37 Cong. 1 Sess., 197; Cong. Globe, 409, 410. Appendix C, No. 31.]

[Footnote 320: Senate Journal, 37 Cong. 1 Sess., 178; Cong. Globe, 434.

Appendix C, No. 31.]

[Footnote 321: Cong. Globe, 37 Cong. 1 Sess., 454. Appendix C, No. 31.]

[Footnote 322: Appendix C, Nos. 37, 40, 44.]

[Footnote 323: Appendix C, No. 52.]

[Footnote 324: Appendix C, No. 59. Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, and reported by them, April 16, 1862. Appendix C, No. 67.]

[Footnote 325: Cong. Globe, 37 Cong. 2 Sess., 944.]

[Footnote 326: Cong. Globe, 37 Cong. 2 Sess., 946.]

[Footnote 327: Appendix C, No. 71.]

[Footnote 328: Appendix C, No. 72.]

[Footnote 329: Appendix C, No. 73. Previous bills introduced by Mr.

Eliot had been unfavorably reported on by the Judiciary Committee.

Appendix C, No. 69.]

[Footnote 330: Appendix C, No. 75.]

[Footnote 331: Appendix C, No. 78.]

[Footnote 332: Appendix C, No. 78.]