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permanent and voidable only by the act and will of the master. Fugitive slaves could not secure any right by flight or escape into another State. It was not until 1842 that the Supreme Court passed upon the constitutionality of the fugitive-slave law, the case of Prigg, a fugitive negro reaching the Court from Pennsylvania, that year. Mr. Justice Story in delivering the opinion of the Court sustained the law but laid down the principle that the rendition of the fugitive rested wholly upon the United States; in other words, if the runaway slave was to be recovered, State officials could not be compelled to aid in recovering him. The decision was of the highest importance and value to the abolitionists. It relieved the free States of a grievous and often revolting burden. Immediately the effect was seen in the enactment of personal liberty laws by Massachusetts and Vermont, in 1843; by Pennsylvania in 1847; by Rhode Island in 1848, and new or revised laws by Vermont, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, in 1854; by Maine, Massachusetts and Michigan in 1855; by Wisconsin and Kansas in 1858; by Ohio in 1859 and by Pennsylvania in 1860. These laws put the fugitive upon the same legal plane as the citizen of the State; directed that counsel should be assigned him and gave him all the means of self-defense allowed citizens. The penalties of aiding in the rendition of fugitives unlawfully arrested were made

severe.

Of the constitutional right of the free States to enact any such laws there was in strictness none. Every State North was constitutionally bound to aid in executing the Constitution of the United States and the laws of Congress made in accordance therewith: but the fugitive-slave act was hateful and increasingly hateful to a growing number of people at the North. Thus to violate the Constitution and the fugitive-slave act of 1793 by the passage and execution of these personal liberty bills was in essence a nullification of the Constitution-to the extent that these laws impeded the execution of the Federal fugitive-slave act. The actual

number of fugitive slaves reported for 1860, by the census, was 803, or one out of every 5,000 slaves, or one-fiftieth of one per cent of the slave population; the number in 1850 was 1,011, or one in each 3,165 held in bondage, and the decrease was reported as rapid in the border States. This was a

small number of actual escapes upon which to formulate and base a hopeless antagonism between North and South, but probably no other element in anti-slavery agitation was sharper or more exasperating to the South.

The abolition sentiment in the North grew. In the presidential election of 1844, the Liberty party, having nominated Birney again, and with him, as vice-president, Thomas Morris, of Pennsylvania, polled a vote of 62,300. In its platform, which was elaborate, the party placed itself on moral grounds in its hostility to slavery; affirmed that its principles were national and those of all pro-slavery parties sectional; that the faith of the States and of the Nation had been pledged by the Declaration of Independence and its principles to abolish slavery; that Congress by the Ordinance of 1787 had acted on that principle; that all acts and laws extending slavery over new Territories or upon the coast waters of the United States violated the principles of the Union; that slavery, as defined by slaveholding jurists. was "against natural rights and strictly local;" that the General government had no power under the Constitution to establish or to continue slavery anywhere; that the provisions of the Constitution which conferred extraordinary political powers on the owners of slaves and thereby constituted the 250,000 slaveholders in the slave States a privileged aristocracy, and the provisions of the fugitive-slave laws "anti-republican in character, dangerous to the liberties of the people and ought to be abrogated." The decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Prigg was such a construction of the fugitive-slave law as to "nullify the habeas corpus acts of all the States and take away the whole legal security of personal freedom, and ought to lead to the immediate repeal of that act." The party demanded "freedom

of speech, freedom of the press and of the right of petition" and also the immediate emancipation of the slaves.

The notable character of the party's platform in 1844 was the direct issue which it raised of the unconstitutionality of slavery as well as its immorality. This was a new phase of the contest; it signified that some sixty-two thousand men in the United States, representing a population of perhaps 400,000 souls, were intent on identifying their moral convictions with a political creed; thus anti-slavery was learning from pro-slavery how to strengthen its power: for at the South morality and politics were united in defense of slavery.

In 1848, the Free Soil party nominated Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, on "a national platform of freedom in opposition to a sectional platform of slavery." Slavery, so the platform ran, existed in the States by virtue of State laws which the Federal government could neither repeal nor modify. "We therefore propose no interference by Congress with slavery within the limits of any State. Congress has no more power to make a slave than to make a king. The Federal government should relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence or continuance of slavery wherever the government possessed constitutional power to legislate on the subject, and it was thus responsible for its existence." The true and only safe means of preventing the extension of slavery into territory now free is to prohibit its extension in all such territory by act of Congress: no more slave States and no more slave territory.

This, it will be remembered, was uttered in 1848, at the time when the extension of slavery over the area acquired from Mexico was the issue. California and New Mexico, so the Free Soilers demanded, should be free. The motto of the party was, "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men." The vote of the Free Soil party in the election of 1848 was 291,263, sufficient, had the party been in sympathy with the Whigs, to have swelled Taylor and Fillmore's popular vote to more than 1,600,000: but the Whigs were not a free soil party. As Lincoln said a few years later

of some hundred thousand clear Republican votes cast in Illinois, "The pile is worth keeping together," so of the free soil vote in the United States in 1848: but a free soil vote for Martin Van Buren seemed an anomaly to many Americans; as president, Van Buren had not inclined to anti-slavery.

In 1852, the Free Soil party declared in its platform, on which it nominated John P. Hale, of New Hampshire, for president, and George W. Julian, of Indiana, for vice-president, that the Federal government was one of limited powers derived solely from the Constitution and could not establish slavery, or create slave States or Territories; that slavery was a sin and a crime; that the Fugitive Slave Act, which formed part of the Compromise of 1850, was repugnant to the Constitution, to the principles of the common law, to the sentiments of the civilized world and should be repealed; that so too was the entire Compromise of 1850, in so far as it favored slavery. Slavery was sectional, freedom, national. The vote of the party was 156,149.

Before the next presidential election occurred the initial struggle over Kansas, the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the repeal, thereby, of the Compromise of 1820 and that of 1850. The Republican party was founded, nominating John C. Frémont, of California, and William L. Dayton, of New Jersey, as its candidates for president and vice-president, in the Philadelphia convention of June, 1856. The young party denied "the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery, in any Territory of the United States while the present Constitution shall be maintained. That the Constitution confers upon Congress sovereign power over the Territories of the United States for their government, and that in the exercise of this power it is both the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery." The party attacked the whole attitude of Pierce's administration toward the people of Kansas and demanded the admission of the State with a free constitution.

In June, 1856, the Democratic party, in convention at Cincinnati, nominated James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, for president, and John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky, for vicepresident. The issue before the country was now clearly defined, as indicated by the platform of the party:

"We reiterate with renewed energy of purpose, the wellconsidered declarations of former Conventions upon the sectional issue of domestic slavery and concerning the reserved rights of the States:

"(1) That Congress has no power under the Constitution to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States, and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything pertaining to their own affairs not prohibited by the Constitution; that all efforts of the Abolitionists, or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with the questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.

"(2) That the foregoing proposition covers, and was intended to embrace, the whole subject of slavery agitation in Congress; and therefore, the Democratic party of the Union, standing on this national platform, will abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the Compromise measures, settled by the Congress of 1850: 'the act for reclaiming fugitives from service or labor' included; which act, being designed to carry out an express provision of the Constitution, cannot, with fidelity thereto, be repealed or so changed as to destroy or impair its efficiency.

"(3) That the Democratic party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made.

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