Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/82

70 that equity is least sure even for the free whites themselves. One end of the slave’s chain is round the master’s neck. "Justice," says a proverb, "has feet of wool but iron hands." The slave-driver's whip and the bowie-knife of the American have a near relation. Some of the Southern States have enacted remarkable laws to this effect: That when any free negro or person of colour arrives in any vessel at a Southern port, he shall be shut up in prison until the departure of the vessel, the owner of the vessel paying the costs. By this law the free citizens of the free States are continually imprisoned in South Carolina and Louisiana. This is not only a violation of the constitution of the United States, but it is contrary to the common customs of Christian nations; a law without a parallel in their codes; a result which Gouverneur Morris did not anticipate in 1787, when he made his satirical calculation of the value of the Union to the North. The iniquity of the code of the slave States has passed into some enactments of the general government of the Union. In 1793, a law was made by Congress to this effect: A fugitive slave escaping into a free State—and consequently any man claimed to be such — may be seized by the master or his agent, and carried back to slavery without the intervention of a trial by jury to determine whether the man is a slave—simply by a trial before "any judge of the circuit or district courts of the United States residing or being within the State, or before any magistrate of the county, city, or town corporate where such seizure or arrest shall be made." The proof required that the man is a slave is by "oral testimony or affidavit" of the parties interested in the man's capture. This is a departure from the customs of your fathers; a departure which the common law of England would not justify at any time since the Norman conquest. The trial by jury has been regarded the great safeguard of personal freedom; even in the dark ages of English law it was the right of every man, of every fugitive slave, when his person was in peril. Had a slave escaped with his children, and remained some time a freeman—statu liber; did the master find the children and not the father, he could not hold them till he caught the father, and by a jury-trial proved his claim. In the United States the laws do not favour