Facts for the People of the Free States
American Tract Society & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
9781465657954
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Hon. J. R. Giddings, in a speech in the House of Representatives, at Washington, Feb. 18, 1846, said—“In regard to arresting slaves, we [of the free States] owe no duties to the master; on the contrary, all our sympathies, our feelings, and our moral duties, beyond what I have stated, are with the slave. We will neither arrest him for the master, nor will we assist the master in making such arrest. I am aware that the third clause of the second section of the first article of the Constitution was once believed, by some, to impose upon the people of these free States the duty of arresting fugitive slaves. But it is now judicially settled that no such obligation rests upon us. Indeed a proposition to impose upon us such a duty, at the time of framing the Constitution, was rejected, without a division, by the Convention. We, therefore, leave the master to arrest the slave if he can; and we leave the slave to defend himself against the master if he can. We do not interfere between them. The slave possesses as perfect a right to defend his person and his liberty against the master as any citizen of our State. Our laws protect him against every other person, except the master or his agent, but they leave him to protect himself against them. If he, while defending himself, slays the master, our laws do not interfere to punish him in any way, further than they would any other person who should slay a man in actual self-defence. The laws of the slave State cannot reach him, nor is there any law, of God or man, that condemns him. On the contrary, our reason, our judgment, our humanity approves the act; and we admire the courage and firmness with which he defends the ”inalienable rights with which the God of Nature has endowed him.“ We regard him as a hero worthy of imitation; and we place his name in the same category with that of Madison Washington, who, on board the Creole, boldly maintained his God-given rights, against those inhuman pirates who were carrying him and his fellow-servants to a worse than savage slave-market.”
