Page:Journal of Georgia Secession Convention.djvu/119

 Rh twenty years, the non-slaveholding State, generally, have wholly refused to deliver up to us persons charged with crimes affecting slave property; our confederates, with punic faith, shield and give sanctuary to all criminals, who seek to deprive us of this property, or who use it to destroy us. This clause of the constitution has no other sanction than their good faith; that is withheld from us; we are remediless in the Union; out of it, we are remitted to the laws of nations.

A similar provision of the Constitution requires them to surrender fugitives from labor. This provision and the one last referred to, were our main inducements for confederating with the Northern States; without them, it is historically true, that we would have rejected the Constitution. In the fourth year of the Republic, Congress passed a law to give full vigor and efficiency to this important provision. This act depended to a considerable degree upon the local magistrates of the several States for its efficiency; the non-slaveholding States generally repealed all laws intended to aid the execution of that act, and imposed penalties upon those citizens whose loyalty to the Constitution, and their oaths, might induce them to discharge their duty. Congress then passed the act of 1850, providing for the complete execution of this duty by Federal Officers. This law which their own bad faith rendered absolutely indispensable for the protection of constitutional rights, was instantly met with ferocious revilings, and all conceivable modes of hostility. The Supreme Court unanimously, and their own local Courts, with equal unanimity, (with the single and temporary exception of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin,) sustained its constitutionality in all of its provisions. Yet it stands to-day a dead letter, for all practicable purposes, in every non-slaveholding State in the Union. We have their covenants, we have their oaths, to keep and observe it, but the unfortunate claimant, even accompanied by a Federal Officer, with the mandate of the highest judicial authority in his hands, is everywhere met, with fraud, with force, and with legislative enactments, to elude, to resist and defeat him; claimants are murdered with impunity; Officers of the law are beaten by frantic mobs, instigated by inflammatory appeals from persons holding the highest public