The main and primary object of the constitution was to protect natural rights; but the object of the Fugitive Slave clause was to protect a legal right in conflict with natural right.

All judges of an honorable name, all courts in all civilized communities, have recognized a broad distinction in the principles of interpreting law.

They have held that provisions against life and liberty should be strictly construed, while those in favor of life and liberty should be liberally construed,--the one so construed as to inflict as little of pain and privation as possible…

These have become maxims, or axioms, of legal interpretation; and in their long and unbroken recognition, it is not too strong an expression to say, they impetrate and command a strict construction of that clause in the constitution under…

And the same legal maxims, in regard to all subjects touching life and liberty, bind Congress in legislating under the constitution, as bind the judicial tribunals in administering the law.

Yet the Fugitive Slave law contains provisions which there can be no pretence nor shadow of a pretence that the constitution requires.

It must mean state, and can mean nothing else; for the laws of language admit no other construction.

The expression, “No person held in one state, escaping into another TERRITORY,” would be not merely ungrammatical and un-English, but nonsensical.

Yet the sixth section of the act provides not only for the case of slaves escaping from one state into another state, but for their escape from a state into a territory, and for an escape from a territory into a state, and for an escape…

Four classes of cases are provided for by the law, while but one of them finds any warrant in the constitution.

Now let any one take a map of the United States, and see over what a vast area the law extends, over which the provision in the constitution does not extend.

The region is continental over which the law unconstitutionally extends, and this corresponds with the vast inhumanity of the principle which so extends it.

Mark another particular in which the provisions of the law go beyond the requirements of the constitution.

Then, why should government interpose in this case to bear costs and risks, unless slavery is so meritorious an institution as to deserve the benefactions as well as the benedictions of freemen?

There is no clause, or phrase, or word in that instrument which favors the idea that the Northern States should bear the expense, as well as the disgrace, of thus remanding our fellow-men into bondage.

If the claimant of James Hamlet could be supplied with a force, at the government’s expense, to carry him into slavery, why should not the expense of coming back into a land of freedom be reimbursed by the government to Adam Gibson, after…

Now, he who has power to take and authenticate evidence, which it is predetermined shall be “conclusive” in the case, has power to decide the case.

Contrary to this, however, the supreme court has said, “Congress cannot vest any portion of the judicial power of the United States except in courts ordained and established by itself.”--Martin vs.

Yet, though it is expressly declared that Congress cannot vest any part of the judicial power of the United States in a state court, the state courts are empowered by this law to take and certify evidence, which is made “conclusive” in the…

They possess, as fully as you or I, those prerogatives of freedom without which life ceases to be a blessing.

Their freedom is guarantied to them by the constitution of the United States, and by the constitutions and laws of the states respectively in which they dwell.

In some of the states, as in Massachusetts for instance, the law knows no iota of distinction, in any respect, between a black man and a white man; between one of European and one of African descent.

It is the noble privilege of a Massachusetts man to say, that, as all men are equal before the divine law, so are all men equal within our borders, before the human law.

Now, after this debased class has been created by a wicked system of human laws, and after it is mingled with the free class, another law steps in and decrees that the former shall be remanded to their bondage.

An awful decree! second in terribleness only to that which shall divide between the blessed and the accursed before the judgment-seat of God.