I aver, that before any moral tribunal, where right and wrong are weighed in the balances of the sanctuary, there is not a felony described in the whole statute book that is more felonious than such a law.

Now, this principle applies with tenfold force to legislators,--withholding and repelling them from passing any law which may involve the innocent in the fate of the guilty, or the free in the bondage of the enslaved.

I do not recollect the instance of a single northern man or northern press, utterly false to freedom, and venal as so many of them have been, that has expressed entire satisfaction with the law.

They look outside of it for pretexts to hide its inherent baseness; but not one of them, so far as I know, has had the effrontery to justify it on its intrinsic merits.

The Fugitive Slave law was passed, and thereby the rights of freemen, the property of men in themselves, all the household sanctities, all the domestic endearments of half a million of men, were put in peril.

And these interests were given away by men who did not own them, and therefore had no right to transfer them.

The whites, north and south, played a game, and made the black people their stakes.

Who authorized the law-makers to derive a benefit to themselves from doing this infinite wrong to others?

Who gave them the terrible prerogative of making others suffer for their pleasure.

I say it with reverence, but I still say it with emphasis, that we cannot conceive of God himself as having power to inflict vicarious suffering without the free consent of the sufferer!

Yet the atrocities of this law are defended by those who made it, on the ground that they and other white men have secured benefits to themselves by sacrificing the liberty, happiness and peace of half a million of their fellow-beings of a…

Cause and counsellor are alike; for the defence is as profligate as the act it defends.

I say, sir, it is the population of African descent in the free states which is specially put in peril by this law.

The name of every man who had voted for it, or who should defend it, would be entered upon that apostate list at whose head stands the name of Judas.

Christian and Infidel, Jew and Gentile, would execrate it alike.

Why, then, if they would do this to avert such peril from themselves and their families, do they not do it when their sable brethren are in jeopardy?

From selfish considerations, from the love of wealth, or the love of power, they have discarded that heaven-descended maxim, “Whatever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye the same unto them.

And it is this very class of men who have thus abjured the precepts of Jesus Christ, who have trampled upon the divine doctrines of liberty and love, that now so clamorously summon us to an obedience to law.

In answer to this call, let me say, that true obedience to law is necessarily accompanied and preceded by a reverence for those great principles of justice and humanity without which all law is despotism.

How can a man pretend to any honest regard for the principle of obedience to law when he is willing, as in the case of this fugitive act, to transcend our constitutional law, and to invade the divine law?

It is but an appeal to the lower rule of action to justify a violation of the higher.

Under the pretext of rendering unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s it denies to God the things that are God’s.

It bestows its greatest homage upon those laws that embrace and confer the most of human welfare; for, were all the laws of a community, or the great majority of them, unrighteous, then disloyalty to law would be the virtue.

Can the class of men who demand our allegiance to the Fugitive Slave law stand this test?

Are the men in New York, in Philadelphia, and Boston, who are most vehement in support of the Fugitive Slave law, signalized for their regard to the statutes against usury?