ery of a certain person proved to him to be
charged with felony. If the officer arrests the wrong person, he does it
at his peril, and a writ of _habeas corpus_ would immediately release
the person wrongfully arrested. Again, it is most fraudulently
maintained, that, if the wrong person is by the commissioner adjudged a
slave, he may sue for his freedom in a Southern court! Should he do so,
the exhibition of the commissioner's certificate is by law declared to
be conclusive _upon all tribunals_. But even supposing that a Southern
court, in defiance of law, should go behind the certificate, how is a
free colored person from the North, working under the lash on a
Mississippi plantation, to prove his freedom? How is he to fee a lawyer?
How is he to get into court? If once there, where are his witnesses?
They are his friends and acquaintances of his own color residing in the
North. How are they to be summoned to Mississippi? Should they venture
to enter the State, they would be imprisoned, and perhaps sold into
slavery; or even if permitted to enter the court-room, their testimony
would by law be excluded, against the claims of a white man. How
despicably profligate, then, is the assumption of the advocates of your
law, that any injustice committed under it would be repaired by Southern
courts!

It was not enough, it seems, that the wretched defendant in this
momentous issue should be subjected to the jurisdiction of a judge
unknown to the Constitution, holding his office by a prohibited tenure,
incapable of being impeached, and bribed to decide in favor of the
plaintiff by the promise of double fees, but the very trial allowed him
must be a burlesque on all the forms and principles of juridical
justice. The plaintiff, without notice to the defendant, prepares
himself for trial, and when his affidavits or witnesses are all ready,
he seizes the unsuspecting victim in the street, and puts him
_instanter_ on his defence. Had the wretched man been accused of some
atrocious crime, he might have demanded bail, and would have been
permitted to go at large to seek for counsel, to look for witnesses, and
to prepare for trial at some future day, of which he would have due
notice. But no such privilege is allowed a man who is accused of _owing
service_. One of your commissioners has already decided that the law
does not permit him to bail the prisoner. The slave power rides in
triumph over all the barriers erected by the wisdom of age