Government is very imperfectly defined by the Constitution; and it will be found, upon examination, that in that instrument the only grant of power concerning them is conveyed in the phrase, "Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory and other property belonging to the United States." Certainly this phraseology is very loose, if it designed to include in the grant the whole power of legislation over persons, as well as things. ... The lives and persons of our citizens, with the vast variety of objects connected with them, cannot be controlled by an authority which is merely called into existence for the purpose of making rules and regulations for the disposition and management of property.... If the relation of master and servant may be regulated or annihilated . . . so may the relation of husband and wife, of parent and child, and of any other condition which our institutions and the habits of our society recognize. . . .

Such, it appears to me, would be the construction put upon this provision of the Constitution, were this question now first presented for consideration. . . . Certain it is that the principle of interference should not be carried beyond the necessary implication, which produces it. It should be limited to the creation of proper governments for new countries, acquired or settled, and to the necessary provisions for their eventual admission to the Union; leaving, in the mean time, to the people inhabiting them, to regulate their internal concerns in their own way. They are just as capable of doing so as the people of the States; and they can do so, at any rate, as soon as their political independence is recognized by their admission into the Union. During this temporary condition [as territories], it is hardly expedient to call into exercise a doubtful and invidious authority [of prohibiting slavery] which questions the intelligence of a respectable portion of our citizens . . . an authority which would give Congress a despotic power, uncontrolled by the Constitution, over most important sections of our common country. . . .

slaves

When the authors of the "Georgia platform" concluded 84. Fugitive with timid confidence that "upon the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law by the proper authorities" would

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depend "the preservation of our much-loved Union" (see No. 81, p. 353), they put their finger on the critical point in the compromise measures.1 The number of fugitives from Southern plantations was inconsiderable, but the spread of a sentiment of sympathy for them through the North, and of a disposition to repeal or evade the law compelling their return, stirred a spirit of reproachful indignation on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. The temper of the South is well reflected in the following report of a committee of the legislature of Virginia in 1849:

... Look at the actual state of things in the sixtieth year of the Constitution! It is simply and undeniably this: That the South is wholly without the benefit of that solemn constitutional guaranty which was so sacredly pledged to it at the formation of this Union.... No citizen of the South can pass the frontier of a non-slaveholding State and there exercise his undoubted constitutional right of seizing his fugitive slave, with a view to take him before a judicial officer and there prove his right of ownership, without imminent danger of being prosecuted criminally as a kidnapper, or being sued in a civil action for false

1 In the very month in which the Georgia platform was adopted (December, 1850), Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, before a large audience at Rochester, New York, said: "Most of those who are present will have observed that leading men in this country have been putting forth their skill to secure quiet to the nation. A system of measures to promote this object was adopted a few months ago in Congress. The result of those measures is known. Instead of quiet, they have produced alarm; instead of peace, they have brought us war; and so it must ever be. While this nation is guilty of the enslavement of 3,000,000 innocent men and women, it is as idle to think of having a sound and lasting peace, as it is to think there is no God to take cognizance of the affairs of men." - Frederick Douglass, Lectures on American Slavery (a pamphlet, p. 16, Buffalo, 1851).

2 "The number of fugitives who escaped into the free States annually did not exceed one thousand. The number of arrests of fugitives, of which an account was had, from the passage of the 1850 law to the middle of 1856 was only two hundred." — J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, Vol. II, p. 76.

imprisonment imprisoned himself for want of bail, and subjected in his defence to an expense exceeding the whole value of the property claimed, or finally of being mobbed or being put to death in a street fight by insane fanatics or brutal ruffians. In short, the condition of things is, that at this day very few of the owners of fugitive slaves have the hardihood to pass the frontier of a non-slaveholding state and exercise their undoubted, adjudicated constitutional right of seizing the fugitive. In such a conjuncture as this, the committee would be false to their duty— they would be false to their country, if they did not give utterance to their deliberate conviction, that the continuance of this state of things cannot be, and ought not to be much longer endured by the South - be the consequences what they may. In such a diseased state of opinion as prevails in the nonslaveholding states on the subject of Southern slavery, it may well be imagined what the character of their local legislation must be. Yet it is deemed by the committee their duty to present before the country the actual state of that legislation, that the people of this commonwealth and of the entire South may see how rapid and complete has been its transition from a fraternal interest in our welfare to a rank and embittered hostility to our institutions. [Then follows a review of the Personal Liberty Acts passed from 1843 to 1848 by the states of Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.]

But this disgusting and revolting exhibition of faithless and unconstitutional legislation must now be brought to a close. It may be sufficient to remark that the same embittered feeling against the rights of the slaveholder, with more or less of intensity, now marks, almost without exception, the legislation of every non-slaveholding state of this Union. So far therefore as our rights depend upon the aid and coöperation of state officers and state legislation, we are wholly without remedy or relief.

Kidnapers of slaves drove a lucrative trade in some parts of the South. The following account of the chase. and capture of a slave stealer is from the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer of January 22, 1851:

OVERHAULED: Those absconding negroes, accompanied by a white man (referred to in this paper of the 2a inst.) were overhauled by their owners, Messrs. Calhoun and Storey, after a hot and spirited chase through Alabama, Tenn., & Ky. The white fellow proved to be a young man named Howard from N. Carolina, who had been working in our town during some portion of the past year at the carpenter's trade. At Decatur, Alabama, he sold one of the boys, pocketed the money and provided himself with a pass to join him and the other boy at Tuscumbia. Learning, however, in the mean time that he was being hotly pursued,1 Howard abandoned the boy and made tracks for his own safety in the direction of Illinois, through Tenn. & Ky. By the aid of the Telegraph, the progress of the villain was cut short off at Smithland, Ky., near the mouth of the Cumberland, within a few hundred yards of the State of Ill. He is now in jail, subject to the requisition of the Executive of this State all done too, without the owners of the negroes ever seeing the scoundrel, or being within hundreds of miles of him. We wish the young man a speedy retreat within our penitentiary, and plenty of good hard work, and hard usage for his pains of endeavoring to defraud honest men out of their property. The owners returned to this place, with their negroes on Tuesday last.

One slave of exceptional intellectual powers, in whose veins ran white blood, escaped from his master at Baltimore, in September, 1838. This man was Frederick

1 How hot the pursuit of an absconding negro might be is illustrated by the following advertisement from a Louisiana newspaper, November 26, 1847: "The subscriber, living on Carroway Lake, on Hoe's Bayou, in Carrol Parish, sixteen miles on the road leading from Bayou Mason to Lake Providence, is ready with a pack of dogs to hunt runaway negroes at any time. These dogs are well trained and known throughout the Parish. Letters addressed to me at Providence will secure immediate attention. My terms are five dollars per day for hunting the trails, whether the negro is caught or not. When a twelve hours' trail is shown, and the negro not taken, no charge is made. For taking a negro $25.00, and no charge made for hunting. James H. Hall." - Quoted by McMaster, History of the People of the United States, Vol. VII, p. 242, note.

Douglass (1817-1895), abolitionist, orator, newspaper editor, Republican politician, European traveler, and lifelong champion of the rights of the colored man in all parts of the world. Douglass gives the following account of his escape from slavery:

My means of escape were provided for me by the very men who were making laws to hold and bind me more securely in slavery. It was the custom in the State of Maryland to require of the free colored people to have what were called free papers." This instrument they were required to renew very often, and by charging a fee for this writing, considerable sums from time to time were collected by the State. In these papers the name, age, color, height and form of the free man were described, together with any scars or other marks upon his person which could assist in his identification. This device of slaveholding ingenuity, like other devices of wickedness, in some measure defeated itself since more than one man could be found to answer the same general description. Hence many slaves could escape by personating the owner of one set of papers; and this was often done as follows: A slave nearly or sufficiently answering the description set forth in the papers, would borrow or hire them until he could by their means escape to a free state, and then, by mail or otherwise, return them to the owner. The operation was a hazardous one for the lender as well as the borrower. A failure on the part of the fugitive to send back the papers would imperil his benefactor, and the discovery of the papers in the possession of the wrong man would imperil both. the fugitive and his friend. It was therefore an act of supreme trust on the part of a freeman of color thus to put in jeopardy his own liberty that another might be free. . . .

...

I had one friend a sailor who owned a sailor's protection . . . describing his person and certifying to the fact that he was a free American sailor. . . . The protection did not, when in my hands, describe its bearer very accurately. Indeed, it called for a man much darker than myself, and close examination of it would have caused my arrest at the start. In order to