Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 | Page 7

TREASON, to be expiated
on the gallows; and the rioters at Christiana were prosecuted for HIGH
TREASON, in pursuance of orders forwarded from Washington. This
wretched sycophancy won no favor from the slaveholders, and the
result of the abominable and absurd prosecution only brought on the
authors and advocates of the law fresh obloquy. When men obtain
some rich and splendid prize, by their wrong-doing, many admire their
boldness and dexterity, but foolish, profitless wickedness ensures only
contempt. The northern Whigs, in doing obeisance to the slave power,
sinned against their oft-repeated and solemn professions and pledges.
They sinned in the expectation of thereby electing a President, and
enjoying the patronage he would dispense. Most bitterly were these
men 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