, "I must leave. I
understand the whole project. It is a scheme of the slaveholders to get
rid of their free negroes. I will have nothing to do with it."

And how, Sir, as a member of Congress, have _you_ fulfilled this
agreement to have nothing to do with slavery? Not only have you required
"good citizens," when commanded, to hunt and catch slaves, but you have
even fixed a money value on every slave. If a master fails to recover
his fugitive slave through the agency, "direct or indirect," of any
citizen, you give him an action for damages. In all other cases of
trespass, the damages sustained by the plaintiff are assessed by a jury
according to the evidence. You kindly save the master the trouble of
proving the value of his lost property, and give him out of the pockets
of the defendant $1,000, no matter whether the slave was sick or well,
young or old. If a woman escapes with a child at the breast, the master
is to have $2,000! Recollect, Sir, this is for _damages_ to the
slaveholder; the trespasser is to pay to the government, which was to
have nothing to do with slavery, another thousand dollars, and to be
incarcerated six months. Either, Sir, you have wholly mistaken the
nature of the "agreement," or the slaveholders, through the aid of their
Northern auxiliaries, have, in defiance of the agreement, rendered the
Federal government a mighty engine in protecting, extending, and
perpetuating the stupendous iniquity of human bondage.

Your first excuse for voting for the recent slave-catching law, after
relying on your "constitutional obligation," is, that it is
"_practically more favorable to the fugitive than the law of 1793_"!!!
The Southern lawyers, then, who drafted the bill, were a set of
blunderers, and your constituents are blockheads for blaming you for
legislating against human rights, when, in fact, you were loosening the
bonds of the oppressed, and facilitating escape from the prison-house.
Your assertion may well excite astonishment at the South as well as the
North, till your _proof_ is known, and then, indeed, astonishment will
be exchanged for ridicule. You tell us, "the _evidence_ of such an
assertion may be found in the fact, that by the old law every magistrate
in Massachusetts, amounting to several hundreds, and so in the other
States, were authorized and required to cause the arrest of any
fugitive, examine into his case, and deliver him to the claimant, if he
was proved to be a slave; while unde