s of self-interest were softened by their
surroundings; which shows, like many another chapter in history, that in
the mighty impulses which guide the destinies of nations, the heart is
above the head. The advocates of slavery felt insecure because they knew
that even if legally right they were divinely and humanly wrong. They
were not satisfied to have the Free States acquiescent and even
submissive; they were determined, in their fever of unrest, to drive
freedom to the wall, and to make the people of the North slave-catchers,
if they would not consent to be slave-owners.

The South had the Constitution on its side, and the Fugitive Slave Law
could be met only by obedience or nullification. The Northern people
simply decided to nullify the law. They did not meet in State
conventions--like South Carolina in 1832--and declare the law void and of
no effect. They were too sensible for that; but they would not obey the
law. It was nullified in various ways. In Rhode Island, for instance, it
was made a crime for an officer of the State to arrest a fugitive slave;
in Ohio the ordinary statute against kidnappers was used to punish
Federal officers and others attempting to carry slaves back into bondage,
and in New York and other States mob law interfered to rescue and
liberate the victims. The Fugitive Slave Law roused the spirit of
freedom, and Northern defiance of the law inflamed the slaveholders. The
Kansas-Nebraska bill, menacing the free States with a slave barrier West
as well as South, and stretching to the Pacific as well as the Gulf, made
civil war almost inevitable. Compromise became cowardice, and everyone
who was not for freedom was against it. The Supreme Court of the United
States supported the contentions of the slaveholders, but in vain for
their cause. That higher tribunal--the conscience of a free and
intelligent people--arraigned slavery as a crime against God and man, the
Constitution and the Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding. When
Chief Justice Taney held that Dred Scott was not a citizen of Missouri,
but a thing, and could be carried by his master from one State to
another, like a dog or a watch, and still be a slave, the Chief Justice
only immortalized his own infamy; he did not immortalize slavery. Still
greater was the shock when in defiance of the Constitution and the laws
the foreign slave trade was resumed, and negroes imported from Africa to
the South. It is only just to state that, ac