Mr. Wade.  Mr. President, I do not intend to misrepresent anything.  I understood those gentlemen to suppose that they had not been injured by them.  I understood the Senator from Virginia to believe that they were enacted in a spirit of hostility to the institutions of the South, and to object to them not because the acts themselves had done them any hurt, but because they were really a stamp of degradation upon Southern men, or something like that—­I do not quote his words.  The other Senators that referred to it probably intended to be understood in the same way; but they did acquit these laws of having done them injury to their knowledge or belief.

I do not believe that these laws were, as the Senator supposed, enacted with a view to exasperate the South, or to put them in a position of degradation.  Why, sir, these laws against kidnapping are as old as the common law itself, as that Senator well knows.  To take a freeman and forcibly carry him out of the jurisdiction of the State, has ever been, by all civilized countries, adjudged to be a great crime; and in most of them, wherever I have understood anything about it, they have penal laws to punish such an offence.  I believe the State of Virginia has one to-day as stringent in all its provisions as almost any other of which you complain.  I have not looked over the statute-books of the South; but I do not doubt that there will be found this species of legislation upon all your statute-books.

Here let me say, because the subject occurs to me right here, the Senator from Virginia seemed not so much to point out any specific acts that Northern people had done injurious to your property as, what he took to be a dishonor and a degradation.  I think I feel as sensitive upon that subject as any other man.  If I know myself, I am the last man that would be the advocate of any law or any act that would humiliate or dishonor any section of this country, or any individual in it; and, on the other hand, let me tell these gentlemen I am exceedingly sensitive upon that same point, whatever they may think about it.  I would rather sustain an injury than an insult or dishonor; and I would be as unwilling to inflict it upon others as I would be to submit to it myself.  I never will do either the one or the other if I know it.

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I know that charges have been made and rung in our ears, and reiterated over and over again, that we have been unfaithful in the execution of your fugitive bill.  Sir, that law is exceedingly odious to any free people.  It deprives us of all the old guarantees of liberty that the Anglo-Saxon race everywhere have considered sacred—­more sacred than anything else.

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