t
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 the House of
Representatives. Nobody then had invented pretexts to show that the
Constitution did not mean a negro slave. It was clear; it was plain. Not
only the federal courts, but all the local courts in