By Jury and Habeas Corpus to save the citizen harmless against all assault is among their duties and rights.

To his State the citizen, when oppressed, may appeal; nor should he find that appeal denied.

But this Act despoils him of rights, and despoils his State of all power to protect him.

It subjects him to the wretched chance of false oaths, forged papers, and facile commissioners, and takes from him every safeguard.

Now, if the slaveholder has a right to be secure at home in the enjoyment of Slavery, so also has the freeman of the North--and every person there is presumed to be a freeman--an equal right to be secure at home in the enjoyment of Freedom.

The same principle of State Eights by which Slavery is protected in the Slave States throws an impenetrable shield over Freedom in the Free States.

And here, let me say, is the only security for Slavery in the Slave States, as for Freedom in the Free States.

In the present fatal overthrow of State Rights you teach a lesson which may return to plague the teacher.

Compelling the National Government to stretch its Briarean arms into the Free States for the sake of Slavery, you show openly how it may stretch these same hundred giant arms into the Slave States for the sake of Freedom.

The true principles of our Political System, the history of the National Convention, the natural interpretation of the Constitution, all teach that this Act is a usurpation by Congress of powers that do not belong to it, and an infraction…

It is a sword, whose handle is at the National Capital, and whose point is everywhere in the States.

A weapon so terrible to Personal Liberty the Nation has no power to grasp.

Admitting, for the moment, that Congress is intrusted with power over this subject, which truth disowns, still the Act is again radically unconstitutional from its denial of Trial by Jury in a question of Personal Liberty and a suit at…

Since on the one side there is a claim of property, and on the other of liberty, both property and liberty are involved in the issue.

To me, Sir, regarding this matter in the light of the Common Law and in the blaze of free institutions, it has always seemed impossible to arrive at any other conclusion.

If the language of the Constitution were open to doubt, which it is not, still all the presumptions of law, all the leanings to Freedom, all the suggestions of justice, plead angel-tongued for this right.

But if it may, so overwhelming is the claim of justice, it MUST.

These proceedings determine on the one side the question of Property, and on the other the sacred question of Personal Liberty in its most transcendent form,--Liberty not merely for a day or a year, but for life, and the Liberty of…

This would give a judge the sole power of deciding the right of property the master claims in his slave, instead of trying that right by a jury, as prescribed by the Constitution.

By these successive steps, sustained by judgments of the highest tribunal, it appears, as in a diagram, that the right of Trial by Jury is secured to the fugitive from service.

This conclusion needs no additional authority; but it receives curious illustration from the ancient records of the Common Law, so familiar and dear to the framers of the Constitution.

Thus by this law we learn the nature of Trial by Jury, which, though secured, is not described by the Constitution; also what are Attainder, Habeas Corpus, and Impeachment, all technical terms of the Constitution, borrowed from the Common…

Now, on principle and authority, a claim for the delivery of a fugitive slave is a suit at Common Law, and is embraced naturally and necessarily in this class of judicial proceedings.

By these various proceedings, all ending in Trial by Jury, Personal Liberty was guarded, even in the unrefined and barbarous days of the early Common Law.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.