. But at two of the Southern ports where her vessels entered, the
colored seamen were seized by the local police and confined in houses of
detention until the vessels to which they belonged were ready to depart,
when they were released and allowed to join the vessels. This was a most
outrageous proceeding, outrageous to the colored men who were thus
deprived of their liberty, outrageous also to the owners of the vessels
who were deprived of the service of their employes. Of what avail was
the constitutional guaranty that "the citizens of each State shall be
entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several
States", many men began to question? The South was evidently disposed to
support only that portion of the national compact which sustained the
slave system, all the rest upon occasion it trampled on and nullified.
This lesson was enforced anew upon Massachusetts by the affair of her
colored seamen. Unable to obtain redress of the wrong done her citizens,
the State appointed agents to go to Charleston and New Orleans and test
the constitutionality of the State laws under which the local
authorities had acted. But South Carolina and Louisiana, especially the
former, to whom Samuel Hoar was accredited, evinced themselves quite
equal to the exigency to which the presence of the Massachusetts agents
gave rise. To cut a long story short, these gentlemen, honored citizens
of a sister State, and covered with the aegis of the Constitution, found
that they could make no success of the business which they had in hand,
found indeed that as soon as that business was made public that they
stood in imminent peril of their lives. Whereupon, wisely conceiving
discretion to be the better part of valor, they beat a hasty retreat
back to their native air. The Massachusetts agents were driven out of
Charleston and New Orleans. Where was the sacred and glorious union
between Massachusetts and South Carolina and Louisiana that such things
were possible--were constantly occurring? The circumstance made a strong
impression on the State whose rights were thus grossly violated. It
helped to convert Massachusetts to its later opposition to slavery, and
to make its public sentiment more tolerant of the Garrisonian opposition
to the covenant with death and the agreement with hell. To the agitation
growing out of the scheme for the annexation of Texas must, however, be
ascribed the premium among all the anti-Union working facts