l that my father was a
Revolutionary soldier; that he served under Lafayette, and fought
through the whole war, and that he fought for my freedom as much as for
his own; and he would sneer at me, and clutch me with his bloody
fingers, and say he has a _right_ to make me a slave! and when I appeal
to Congress, they say he has a right to make me a slave, and when I
appeal to your Honor, _your Honor_ says he has a right to make me a
slave. And if any man, white or black, seeks an investigation of that
claim, he makes himself amenable to the pains and penalties of the
Fugitive Slave Act, for BLACK MEN HAVE NO RIGHTS WHICH WHITE MEN ARE
BOUND TO RESPECT. (Great applause.) I, going to Wellington with the full
knowledge of all this, knew that if that man was taken to Columbus he
was hopelessly gone, no matter whether he had ever been in slavery
before or not. I knew that I was in the same situation myself, and that
by the decision of your Honor, if any man whatever were to claim me as
his slave and seize me, and my brother, being a lawyer, should seek to
get out a writ of _habeas corpus_ to expose the falsity of the claim, he
would be thrust into prison under one provision of the Fugitive Slave
Law, for interfering with the man claiming to be in pursuit of a
fugitive, and I, by the perjury of a solitary wretch, would by another
of its provisions be helplessly doomed to lifelong bondage, without the
possibility of escape.

Some may say that there is no danger of free persons being seized and
carried off as slaves. No one need labor under such a delusion. Sir,
_four_ of the eight persons who were first carried back under the act of
1850 were afterwards proved to be _free men_. They were free persons,
but wholly at the mercy of the oath of one man. And but last Sabbath
afternoon a letter came to me from a gentleman in St. Louis informing me
that a young lady, who was formerly under my instructions at Columbus, a
free person, is now lying in jail at that place, claimed as the slave of
some wretch who never saw her before, and waiting for testimony of
relatives at Columbus to establish her freedom. I could stand here by
the hour and relate such instances. In the very nature of the case, they
must be constantly occurring. A letter was not long since found upon the
person of a counterfeiter, when arrested, addressed to him by some
Southern gentleman, in which the writer says:

"Go among the niggers, find out their marks and scars; m