Mr. President, the gentleman says, if I understood him, that these fugitives might be turned over to the authorities of the State from whence they came.  That would be a very poor remedy for a free man in humble circumstances who was taken under the provisions of this bill in a summary way, to be carried—­where?  Where he came from?  There is no law that requires that he should be carried there.  Sir, if he is a free man he may be carried into the market-place anywhere in a slave State; and what chance has he, a poor, ignorant individual, and a stranger, of asserting any rights there, even if there were no prejudices or partialities against him?  That would be mere mockery of justice and nothing else, and the Senator well knows it.  Sir, I know that from the stringent, summary provisions of this bill, free men have been kidnapped and carried into captivity and sold into everlasting slavery.  Will any man who has a regard to the sovereign rights of the State rise here and complain that a State shall not make a law to protect her own people against kidnapping and violent seizures from abroad?  Of all men, I believe those who have made most of these complaints should be the last to rise and deny the power of a sovereign State to protect her own citizens against any Federal legislation whatever.  These liberty bills, in my judgment, have been passed, not with a view of degrading the South, but with an honest purpose of guarding the rights of their own citizens from unlawful seizures and abductions.  I was exceedingly glad to hear that the Senators on the other side had arisen in their places and had said that the repeal of those laws would not relieve the case from the difficulties under which they now labor.

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Gentlemen, it will be very well for us all to take a view of all the phases of this controversy before we come to such conclusions as seem to have been arrived at in some quarters.  I make the assertion here that I do not believe, in the history of the world, there ever was a nation or a people where a law repugnant to the general feeling was ever executed with the same faithfulness as has been your most savage and atrocious fugitive bill in the North.  You yourselves can scarcely point out any case that has come before any northern tribunal in which the law has not been enforced to the very letter.  You ought to know these facts, and you do know them.  You all know that when a law is passed anywhere to bind any people, who feel, in conscience, or for any other reason, opposed to its execution, it is not in human nature to enforce it with the same certainty as a law that meets with the approbation of the great mass of the citizens.  Every rational man understands this, and every candid man will admit it.  Therefore it is that I do not violently impeach you for your unfaithfulness in the execution of many of your laws.  You have in South Carolina a law by which you take free citizens of Massachusetts or any other maritime State, who