What! Massachusetts And
Connecticut Carry Out The Fugitive Slave Law?
Ohio carry out the
Fugitive Slave Law after the "Dred Scott" decision and all its
consequences?
Mr. Crittenden might as well have asked Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and Ohio to introduce slavery within their own
lands. The Fugitive Slave Law was then, as it is now, the law of
the land; it was the law of the United States as voted by Congress,
and passed by the President, and acted on by the supreme judge of
the United States Court. But it was a law to which no free State
had submitted itself, or would submit itself. "What!" the English
reader will say, "sundry States in the Union refuse to obey the
laws of the Union - refuse to submit to the constitutional action of
their own Congress?" Yes. Such has been the position of this
country! To such a dead lock has it been brought by the attempted
but impossible amalgamation of North and South. Mr. Crittenden's
compromise was moonshine. It was utterly out of the question that
the free States should bind themselves to the rendition of escaped
slaves, or that Mr. Lincoln, who had just been brought in by their
voices, should agree to any compromise which should attempt so to
bind them. Lord Palmerston might as well attempt to reenact the
Corn Laws.
Then comes the question whether Mr. Lincoln or his government could
have prevented the war after he had entered upon his office in
March, 1861? I do not suppose that any one thinks that he could
have avoided secession and avoided the war also; that by any
ordinary effort of government he could have secured the adhesion of
the Gulf States to the Union after the first shot had been fired at
Fort Sumter. The general opinion in England is, I take it, this -
that secession then was manifestly necessary, and that all the
blood-shed and money-shed, and all this destruction of commerce and
of agriculture might have been prevented by a graceful adhesion to
an indisputable fact. But there are some facts, even some
indisputable facts, to which a graceful adherence is not possible.
Could King Bomba have welcomed Garibaldi to Naples? Can the Pope
shake hands with Victor Emmanuel? Could the English have
surrendered to their rebel colonists peaceable possession of the
colonies? The indisputability of a fact is not very easily settled
while the circumstances are in course of action by which the fact
is to be decided. The men of the Northern States have not believed
in the necessity of secession, but have believed it to be their
duty to enforce the adherence of these States to the Union. The
American governments have been much given to compromises, but had
Mr. Lincoln attempted any compromise by which any one Southern
State could have been let out of the Union, he would have been
impeached. In all probability the whole Constitution would have
gone to ruin, and the Presidency would have been at an end.
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