The decision of the commissioner is to be final and conclusive, and the subject-matter of the decision is liberty and property.

The case cannot be reheard or reëxamined by any judge, or by any court, of any state, or of the United States.

From that moment, if the law has any validity, the defendant is the slave of the plaintiff, by force of a “judicial” decision.

If he chooses to exercise his authority in such a way, he can order his victim to carry him home on his back, and make him bear the loathsome burden of his person as well as of his will.

Now, to say that the power which effects these results is not a judicial power, is to do violence to language, and to commit a fraud upon the inherent nature of ideas.

In no case known to the common law, or indeed to any other law, is a plaintiff invested with full rights, except after final judgment.

If, then, this power is a “judicial power,” the constitution peremptorily forbids that it should be vested any where but in a “court,” whose “judges” are nominated, confirmed, sworn, hold office, are paid, and are removable, according to…

By the first article, all legislative power “shall be vested in a Congress.” By the second article, the “executive power shall be vested in a President.” And by the third article, “the judicial power shall be vested” in the courts.

It is clear that the judicial department is authorized to exercise jurisdiction to the full extent of the constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States, whenever any question respecting them shall assume such a form that the…

Now, a free citizen of Massachusetts may enter the port of Charleston as a mariner, be seized, imprisoned, and then sold into slavery for non-payment of jail fees.

And who will be bold enough to say that a trial and judgment by him, delivering up the respondent to bondage, would not be the exercise of “judicial power” in a controversy between “a state and a citizen of another state”?

We have seen that a decision of the commissioner adverse to the respondent delivers him over into absolute, unconditional slavery.

That is, the claimant may select, from among an indefinite number of irresponsible magistrates, the one whose ignorance or whose turpitude may promise the best chances of success.

Such want of equity between the parties stamps this law as infamous,--for inequity is iniquity.

In regard to slaves, the constitution says,--“No person HELD to service,” &c.; but in regard to criminals, its language is, “A person CHARGED,” &c.

Now, who can avoid perceiving the difference between the legal force of the words “held” and “charged”?

It is not enough that a man be charged to be held to service.

He must be proved to be held, or he remains free; the court must know that he is so held before they are authorized to surrender him.

And how, under our constitution, can the court know such facts as convert a presumptive freeman into a slave without a trial by jury?

Had the constitution said a fugitive guilty of murder, &c., shall be delivered up, could a man be delivered up until proved guilty of murder?

Yet the word guilty is no stronger in reference to a fugitive from justice than is the word held in reference to a fugitive from service.

All the time and all the way, he has the solemn pledge of the government, that if not found guilty on the prosecution then pending, he shall be discharged.

If he be not a slave, then he is delivered into the hands of a man-stealer.

The shield of the law is not continued over him; nay, the Fugitive Slave act expressly provides that, whatever his rights may be, yet, while in transitu, the law shall not recognize them.

The very return brings the Fugitive Slave act before the court; and if the act is before the court, then, surely, the question is also before the court, whether it is constitutional or not.