story or romance. To mix with them on
terms of social or religious fellowship, is to indicate a low state of
virtue; but to think of administering a free government by their
co-operation, is nothing short of insanity.
Article 4, Section 2, declares,--"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."
Here is a third clause, which, like the other two, makes no mention of
slavery or slaves, in express terms; and yet, like them, was
intelligently framed and mutually understood by the parties to the
ratification, and intended both to protect the slave system and to
restore runaway slaves. It alone makes slavery a national institution,
a national crime, and all the people who are not enslaved, the
body-guard over those whose liberties have been cloven down. This
agreement, too, has been fulfilled to the letter by the North.
Under the Mosaic dispensation it was imperatively commanded,--"Thou
shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from
his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in
that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh
him best: thou shalt not oppress him." The warning which the prophet
Isaiah gave to oppressing Moab was of a similar kind: "Take counsel,
execute judgment; make thy shadow as the night in the midst of the
noon-day; hide the outcasts; bewray not him that wandereth. Let mine
outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them from the face
of the spoiler." The prophet Obadiah brings the following charge
against treacherous Edom, which is precisely applicable to this guilty
nation:--"For thy violence against thy brother Jacob, shame shall come
over thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever. In the day that thou
stoodst on the other side, in the day that the strangers carried away
captive his forces, and foreigners entered into his gates, and cast
lots upon Jerusalem, _even thou wast as one of them_. But thou
shouldst not have looked on the day of thy brother, in the day that he
became a stranger; neither shouldst thou have rejoiced over the
children of Judah, in the day of their destruction; neither shouldst
thou have spoken proudly in the day of distress; neither shouldst thou
have _stood in the c
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