slavery has demanded that laws should be passed, and of such a character, as have left the free citizen of the North without protection for his own liberty.  The question, whether a man seized in a free State as a slave, is a slave or not, the law of Congress does not allow a jury to determine:  but refers it to the decision of a Judge of a United States’ Court, or even of the humblest State magistrate, it may be, upon the testimony or affidavit of the party most deeply interested to support the claim.  By virtue of this law, freemen have been seized and dragged into perpetual slavery—­and should I be seized by a slave-hunter in any part of the country where I am not personally known, neither the Constitution nor laws of the United States would shield me from the same destiny.

These, sir, are the specific parts of the Constitution of the United States, which in my opinion are essentially vicious, hostile at once to the liberty and to the morals of the nation.  And these are the principal reasons of my refusal any longer to acknowledge my allegiance to it, and of my determination to revoke my oath to support it.  I cannot, in order to keep the law of man, break the law of God, or solemnly call him to witness my promise that I will break it.

It is true that the Constitution provides for its own amendment, and that by this process, all the guarantees of Slavery may be expunged.  But it will be time enough to swear to support it when this is done.  It cannot be right to do so, until these amendments are made.

It is also true that the framers of the Constitution did studiously keep the words “Slave” and “Slavery” from its face.  But to do our constitutional fathers justice, while they forebore—­from very shame—­to give the word “Slavery” a place in the Constitution, they did not forbear—­again to do them justice—­to give place in it to the thing.  They were careful to wrap up the idea, and the substance of Slavery, in the clause for the surrender of the fugitive, though they sacrificed justice in doing so.

There is abundant evidence that this clause touching “persons held to service or labor,” not only operates practically, under the judicial construction, for the protection of the slave interest; but that it was intended so to operate by the framers of the Constitution.  The highest judicial authorities—­Chief Justice Shaw, of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in the Latimer case, and Mr. Justice Story, in the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Prigg vs. The State of Pennsylvania,—­tell us, I know not on what evidence, that without this “compromise,” this security for Southern slaveholders, “the Union could not have been formed.”  And there is still higher evidence, not only that the framers of the Constitution meant by this clause to protect slavery, but that they did this, knowing that slavery was wrong.  Mr. Madison[95] informs us that the clause in question, as it came