[189] chains. The article requiring this act of the Free States was forced on them by the circumstances of the times, and submitted to as a hard necessity. It did not enter into the essence of the instrument; whilst the security of freedom was its great, living. all-pervading idea. We see the tendency of slavery to warp the Constitution to its purposes, in the law for restoring the flying bondman. Under this, not a few, having not only the same natural but legal rights with ourselves, have been subjected to the lash of the overseer. But a higher law than the Constitution protests against the act of Congress on this point. According to the law of nature, no greater crime against a human being can be committed than to make him a slave ...... To condemn a man to perpetual slavery is as solemn a sentence as to condemn him to death. Before being thus doomed, he has a right to all the means of defence which are granted to a man who is tried for his life. All the rules, forms, solemnities, by which innocence is secured from being confounded with guilt, he has a right to demand. In the present case, the principle is eminently applicable, that many guilty should escape, rather than that one innocent man should suffer; because the guilt of running away from an “ owner” is of too faint a color to be seen by some of the best eyes, whilst that of enslaving the free is of the darkest hue.Dr. Channing would have all the forms and solemnities of justice, usual in cases where life hangs on the issue, rigidly observed, when a slave case is to be determined. Your Judge of Probate arrests a man at night; no one knows of it; at the earliest hour in the morning that a court ever sits, he opens his court; this poor, trembling, friendless victim, who hardly dared to look up and meet his eye, is brought before him, and he proceeds to try him. Strangers come in and say, he is too stupefied to be tried. Still the judge goes on, and they sit awhile, their blood boiling within them, till they feel compelled to rise, and solemnly protest against this insult to all the forms of
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