Page:Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Georgia 1849.djvu/39

36 been foreseen, in a political party, which obtaining power, first, seeks to abuse it. The constitution which declares, that "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due," is wholly disregarded, and several States have passed laws virtually nullifying it. The slave-holder can no longer look to the Constitution as the charter of his rights; his slave is abducted, or feloniously stolen, and cuiried to a, non-slaveholding State; he parsues it with the consciousness of an honest man, holds up the evidence of his title in one hand, and the constitution in the other; he pleads for justice and his constitutional right; the Judge that tries his case is sworn to support the Constitution of the United States—but that Judge, with the smile of the hypocrite and the curse of perjury in his throat, solemnly adjudges that property cannot exist in the slave, and the owner is insultingly turned from the bar of justice amidst the derision and scoffing of the multitude, and your constitution lies prostrate under the iron heel of a corrupt judiciary. This is an epitome of the wrongs perpetrated upon us.—Is it true or false? Have not several of the Northern State's passed laws prohibiting our citizens from reclaiming their fugitive slaves? Have they not, time and again, refused to deliver, on the demand of the Executive authority of the Southern States, fugitives from, justice charged with negro stealing? These are stubborn facts, that should come home to all. Robbed of your slave property, without the power of redress, opposed by brute force in asserting your rights, your criminal laws violated, your sovereignty outraged, your peace and quiet disturbed, your good name defamed, and lastly you are told, by way of giving point and anguish to the feeling of wrongs already inflicted, that you are not to participate, on equal terms, with the other States of the Union, in the common property of all. Is it, Representatives, lor this, that our fathers struggled in deadly conflict? Was it for such an Union as this, that the sages and patriots, many of whom breasted the storm of the Revolution, formed the constitutional compact? Was it designed that the States should not have the power of deciding each for itself, what would or should not be property—nor was it intended that any party or faction in this country, whether Free-soil, or known by any other name, might violate the most vital provision of the constitution, so far as the South is concerned, with impunity? Feeling, as I do, the incalculable value of the Union in that purity of equality handed down to us by the great