First, by article three, section one, it is declared that “the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

And yet a commissioner, dressed in the smallest and briefest authority, is put forward to determine this great case under the Constitution, and his judgment is declared final, and even without appeal.

Thus much a court may authorize; but a court cannot delegate to a commissioner the power of trying a cause, whether “a suit at Common Law,” or “a case arising under the Constitution”; nor can Congress authorize a court to delegate this…

The whole pretension is a discredit to the jurisprudence of the country.

He has been firm when others have hesitated, and from an early day saw the secret of this war, and, I may add, the secret of victory also.

The offensive Act, defying the whole Law of Evidence, authorizes a judgment which despoils a man of his liberty on ex parte testimony, by affidavit, without the sanction of cross-examination.

It practically denies the writ of Habeas Corpus, ever known as the palladium of the citizen.

Perhaps the sorrows and funerals of this war are so many warnings to do justice.

But this Act is to be seen not merely in its open defiance of the Constitution, and of all legislative decencies; it must be considered, also, in two other aspects: first, in its consequences; and, secondly, in the character of its authors.

The time has come, at last, when each of these may be exposed.

Since the first authorization of the slave-trade, nothing so terrible had fallen upon this unhappy people, whether we contemplate its cruelty to individuals or the wide-spread proscription which it launched against all whose skins were not…

The Jews expelled from Spain by merciless decree, the Huguenots driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, our own Puritan fathers compelled to exile for religious Freedom,--all these receive a gushing sympathy, and we…

But an American Congress, in this age of Christian light, not in the fanaticism of religion, but in the fanaticism of Slavery, did a deed that finds companionship only with these enormities of the past.

The Fugitive Slave Act carried distress and terror to every person with African blood in the Free States.

The very rumor that a slave-hunter was in town so shook the nerves of a sensitive freeman on whom was the ban of color, that he died.

To large numbers the Act was a decree of instant expulsion from the Republic, under penalty of Slavery to them and their posterity forever.

Everywhere it is an extension of Slavery, with all the wrong, violence, and brutality which are the natural outgrowth of Slavery.

In all questions of statesmanship, which will soon supersede military questions, he has already given assurance of practical wisdom.

The Free States became little better than a huge outlying plantation quivering under the lash of the overseer; or rather, they were a diversified hunting-ground for the flying bondmen, resounding always with the “halloo” of the huntsman.

Not an instance occurred which did not shock the conscience of the country and sting it with anger.

But every case pleaded with an eloquence of its own, until, at last, occurred one of those tragedies darkening the heavens and crying out with a voice that will be heard.

It was the voice of a mother standing over her murdered child.

Unwilling to behold her offspring returned to the shambles of the South, this unhappy person, described in the testimony as “a womanly, amiable, affectionate mother,” determined to save them in the only way within her power.

I have done the best I could; I would have done more and better for the rest; I knew it was better for them to go home to God than back to Slavery.” But she was restrained in her purpose.

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