But the nonslaveholding States, treacherous to their oaths and compacts, have steadily refused, if the criminal only stole a negro and that negro was a slave, to deliver him up.  It was refused twice on the requisition of my own State as long as twenty-two years ago.  It was refused by Kent and by Fairfield, governors of Maine, and representing, I believe, each of the then federal parties.  We appealed then to fraternity, but we submitted; and this constitutional right has been practically a dead letter from that day to this.  The next case came up between us and the State of New York, when the present senior senator [Mr. Seward] was the governor of that State; and he refused it.  Why?  He said it was not against the laws of New York to steal a negro, and therefore he would not comply with the demand.  He made a similar refusal to Virginia.  Yet these are our confederates; these are our sister States!  There is the bargain; there is the compact.  You have sworn to it.  Both these governors swore to it.  The senator from New York swore to it.  The governor of Ohio swore to it when he was inaugurated.  You can not bind them by oaths.  Yet they talk to us of treason; and I suppose they expect to whip freemen into loving such brethren!  They will have a good time in doing it!

It is natural we should want this provision of the Constitution carried out.  The Constitution says slaves are property; the Supreme Court says so; the Constitution says so.  The theft of slaves is a crime; they are a subject-matter of felonious asportation.  By the text and letter of the Constitution you agreed to give them up.  You have sworn to do it, and you have broken your oaths.  Of course, those who have done so look out for pretexts.  Nobody expected them to do otherwise.  I do not think I ever saw a perjurer, however bald and naked, who could not invent some pretext to palliate his crime, or who could not, for fifteen shillings, hire an Old Bailey lawyer to invent some for him.  Yet this requirement of the Constitution is another one of the extreme demands of an extremist and a rebel.

The next stipulation is that fugitive slaves shall be surrendered under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, without being entitled either to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other similar obstructions of legislation, in the State to which he may flee.  Here is the Constitution: 

“No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

This language is plain, and everybody understood it the same way for the first forty years of your government.  In 1793, in Washington’s time, an act was passed to carry out this provision.  It was adopted unanimously in the Senate of the United States, and nearly so in