Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 | Page 7

disappointed, first in the candidate selected, and next in the result of the election. The party has been beaten to death, and it died unhonored and unwept. Let the Fugitive Slave Law be its epitaph. Truly the Whig politicians were "snared in the work of their own hands."
Certain fashionable Divines deemed it expedient to second the efforts of the politicians in catching slaves, by talking from their pulpits about Hebrew slavery, and the reverence due to the "powers that be ordained of God." Yet the injunctions of the fugitive law were so obviously at variance with the "HIGHER LAW" of justice and mercy which these gentlemen were required by their Divine Master to inculcate, that "cotton divinity" fell into disrepute, nor could the plaudits of politicians and union committees save its clerical professors from forfeiting the esteem and confidence of multitudes of Christian people.
But Whig politicians and cotton Divines are not the only friends of the fugitive law to whom it has made most ungrateful returns. The Democratic leaders, bidding against the Whigs for the Presidency, were most vociferous in expressions of the delight they took in the human chase. Democratic candidates for the Presidency, to the goodly number of NINE, gave public attestations under their signs manual, of their approbation of a law outraging the principles of Democracy, as well as of common justice and humanity. Each and all of these men were rejected, and the slaveholders selected an individual whom they were well assured would be their obsequious tool, but who had offered no bribe for their votes.
But did the slaveholders themselves gain more by this law than their northern auxiliaries? They, indeed, hailed its passage as a mighty triumph. The nation had given them a law, drafted by themselves, laying down the rules of the hunt, as best suited their pleasure and interest. Wealthy and influential gentlemen in our commercial cities, out of compliment to southern electors, became amateur huntsmen, and in New York and Boston the chase was pursued with all the zeal and apparent delight that could have been expected in Guinea or Virginia. Slave-catching was the test, at once, of patriotism and gentility, while sympathy for the wretched fugitive was the mark of vulgar fanaticism. The north was humbled in the dust, by the action of her own recreant sons. Every "good citizen" found himself, for the first time in the history of mankind, a slave-catcher by law. Every official, appointed by a slave-catching judge, was invested with the authority of a High Sheriff, being empowered to call out the posse comitatus, and compel the neighbors to join in a slave chase. Well, indeed, might the slaveholders rejoice and make merry;--well, indeed, in the insolence of triumph, might they command the people of the north to hold their tongues about "the peculiar institution," under pain of their sore displeasure.
But amid this slavery jubilee, a woman's heart was swelling and heaving with indignant sorrow at the outrages offered to God and man by the fugitive law. Her pent up emotions struggled for utterance, and at last, as if moved by some mighty inspiration, and in all the fervor of Christian love, she put forth a book which arrested the attention of the WORLD. A miracle of authorship, this book attained, within twelve months, a circulation without a parallel in the history of printing. In that brief space, about two millions of volumes proclaimed, in the languages of civilization, the wrongs of the slave and the atrocities of the AMERICAN FUGITIVE LAW. The gaze of mankind is now turned upon the slaveholders and their northern auxiliaries, both clerical and lay. The subjects of European despotisms console themselves with the grateful conviction, that however harsh may be their own governments, they make no approach to the baseness or to the cruelty and tyranny of the "peculiar institution" of the Model Republic.[4]
One slaveholder, together with the cotton men of the north, fretted and vexed by their sudden and unenviable notoriety, foolishly attempted to obviate the impressions made by the book, by denouncing it as a lying fiction. Nay, one of the most affecting illustrations of pure and undefiled Christianity that ever proceeded from an uninspired pen, was gravely declared, by an organ of cotton divinity, to be an ANTI-CHRISTIAN book.[5] Truly, indeed, the wisdom of man is foolishness with God. "He disappointeth the devices of the crafty."
Branded with falsehood and impiety, the author was happily put on her trial before the civilized world. She collected, arranged, and gave to the press, a mass of unimpeachable documents, consisting of laws, judicial decisions, trials, confessions of slaveholders, advertisements from southern papers, and testimonies of eye-witnesses. The proof was conclusive and overwhelming that the picture she had drawn of American slavery was unfaithful, only because the coloring was faint, and wanted