Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/555

535 INTERSTATE CRIME AND EXTRADITION. 535 "Any agent so appointed who shall receive the fugitive into his custody shall be empowered to transport him to the State or Territory from which he has fled." During the agitated period preceding the Rebellion, when the Slavery controversy was acute, conflicts arose between the governors of demanding States and the governors of States of refuge of fugitives, as to whether an act should be recognized as a ground of rendition which constituted a crime in the State in which it was performed, and from which its performer had fled, but did not constitute a crime in the State in which he had taken asylum. This was entirely natural, considering not only the intense feeling and political partisanship generated by any case touching slave property, but also that the conception of inde- pendent sovereignty of the several States quite generally prevailed. The most famous of such gubernatorial collisions was between Governor Seward of New York and Governor Gilmer of Virginia. The controversy illustrated Seward's aggressiveness of tempera- ment because his contention was really obiter. An agent from Virginia appeared at Albany with a requisition for two negroes charged with stealing a slave. They were at the time in custody in New York. Seward deferred his formal answers to the requisi- tion until his return from a short absence from the capital. There- after the prisoners were discharged on habeas corpus on the ground that ** neither of them had committed an offence against the laws of Virginia." However, Seward in a letter to the Governor of Virginia " embarked in a discussion of the proper construction of the constitutional provision for the surrender of fugitives from justice, insisting that it applied only to offences recognized as crimes by the jurisprudence of all civilized nations, or to acts made criminal by the laws both of the State demanding and of that assenting to the surrender, and did not apply to acts which any one State chose to make highly penal, but which had no criminal significance in another, such as assisting in the escape of a slave, — an act inspired by the spirit of humanity and of the Christian religion." ^ Seward's argument is to be classed with many other strained constitutional constructions under the exi- gency of the "Irrepressible conflict." Happily the flagrant sole- cism of slavery in a nominally free government no longer exists to excuse or even demand causistical interpretation. The words
 * Life of Seward, American Statesmen Series, by T. K. Lathrop, page 40.