Mr. Hale in the Senate and Mr. Julian in the House, the Free Soil candidates for President and Vice-President two years thereafter, gave expression to this sentiment and purpose. Toward the close of the conflict, Mr. Hale, alluding to the fact that there had never been a Congress in which the influence of slavery had been more potent, said: "Gentlemen flatter themselves that they have done a great deal for the peace of the country. Everybody is pleased but a few wild fanatics. Let not gentlemen deceive themselves. The pen of inspiration teaches us that there was a time when a set of men cried, 'Peace, peace, when there was no peace.' Let me tell you, there is no peace to them who think they have successfully dug the grave in which the hopes, the rights, and the interests of freedom are buried. No, sir; that peace will be short, and that rejoicing will most assuredly be turned into mourning." On the eve of the adjournment, Mr. Julian spoke at length and with much force of thought and strength of expression on the "healing measures of the present session," and gave his reasons for opposing them. Of the Texas boundary bill he said: "It is neither more nor less than the extension of slavery by an act of Congress." Alluding to the threat of war as the probable consequence of not voting for the measure, he replied: "I stand opposed to the war spirit and the war mania; and yet there are things more to be dreaded than war, the betrayal of sacred trusts, shrinking from just responsibility, a pusillanimous surrender of rights, the extension. of slavery by the Federal government, — and, more specific, it is less to be deplored than the dastardly and craven spirit which would prompt the representatives of twenty millions of people to cower and turn pale at the bandit treaty of slaveholders, and give them millions of acres and millions of gold as a peace-offering to the vandal spirit of slaveholding aggression." He declared, in reply to the charge that the "Wilmot proviso was conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity," that it was rather conceived in the brains of such patriots as Henry Vane and Algernon Sydney, and brought forth in the glorious fruits of the Revolution of 1776. "If I thought," he said, "with some, that, for other reasons, slav ery could not gain a foothold in our Territories, I would still insist on the proviso as a wholesome and needful reassertion, in the present crisis, of the principles on which our government was founded." He paid special attention to the Fugitive Slave Act, and seldom has that abhorrent law been more fitly characterized. Comparing it with the act of 1793 he said: "A tissue of more heartless and cold-blooded enactments never disgraced a civilized people, throwing around the slaveholder every protection, as if the institution had the stamp of divinity, while it so hedges about the way of the poor fugitive with nets and snares as to leave him utterly without hope. And "these," he said, "are the fruits of this unparalleled and protracted struggle, brought forth after a congressional incubation of nine months. These are the healing measures which are to dry up the gaping wounds' that have threatened to bleed the nation to death. On the contrary, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act will open a fresh wound in the North, and it will continue to bleed as long as the law stands unrepealed." CHAPTER XXV. FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT IN THE COUNTRY. General consternation. First case. meetings. Wilson at Lowell. -- Meetings of colored people. - Public Adams at Boston. Sumner in Faneuil Hall.Burlingame at Northampton. - Meetings of religious bodies. - Utter Furness, Stone, Beecher, Cheever. -Aid and protection ances of clergymen. extended. The act defended.. · Concerted measures for its vindication and support. Mr. Webster. Mr. Clay. Berrien. Buchanan, Clayton, Benton, and Union-saving meetings. - Castle Garden and Faneuil Hall. — Cler. - ical defences. Dewey, Taylor, Spencer. - The President indorses the Fugitive Debate in Congress. — Speeches of Giddings, THE passage of the Fugitive Slave Act was the signal for a general commotion throughout the land. It involved both a wrong and a peril that menaced, if they did not actually reach, every individual in the Republic. Its uplifted hand was directed first against the fugitives, of whom it was estimated that there were more than twenty thousand in the free States. Nor was the full force of the blow expended on them alone; for beside them there were large numbers of free persons with whom these fugitives had intermarried, and to whom they were joined in the various relations of social and religious life. Its arbitrary and summary provisions, in the hands of base and unscrupulous men, impelled by greed of gain and love of revenge, struck terror upon the whole colored population and their sympathizing friends. These were base and brutal men at hand, willing to become agents of slaveholders in both following those recently escaped and in ferreting out those who had for a longer time eluded the search of the pursuer. Nor were they slow to act. Only eight days after the passage of the law, one of these agents appeared in New York, armed with the power of attor ney from Mary Brown of Baltimore, and a certified copy of the act itself, cut from a common newspaper, in search of James Hamlet, a husband and father, a member of the Methodist Church, and resident in the city some three years. He was seized while at work, hurried into a retired room, tried in hot haste, delivered to the agent, handcuffed, forced into a carriage, and taken by the son of the marshal to Baltimore and lodged in the prison of the notorious Hope H. Slatter; his wife and children being denied the poor satisfaction of bidding him farewell. A few days afterward another similar scene was enacted in Philadelphia. The colored people were greatly alarmed. Nor did they fail to give expression to their feelings, and to call upon God and their friends for relief. Soon after these occurrences a large meeting was held by them in New York, and an earnest appeal was made to their fellow-citizens to take immediate measures to secure the repeal of the fearful statute. Early in October a meeting of the colored people of Boston was held in Belknap Street church. An address, in the name of fugitive slaves, to the clergy of Massachusetts, was adopted, urging them, by every motive of patriotism, humanity, and religion to "lift up their voices like a trumpet against the Fugitive Slave Bill." "Thus will you exalt," said the address, "the Christian religion, oppose the mightiest obstacle that stands in the way of human redemption, exert such a moral influence as shall break the rod of the oppressor, secure for yourselves the blessings of those who are ready to perish, and hear the thrilling declaration in the great Day of Judgment: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me.'" Appeals like these could not fail to evoke responses, and they came with a strength and heartiness which gave promise of larger results than were actually realized. 6 Only eight days after the signature of the bill a call was issued for a public meeting in Syracuse, New York, and on the 4th of October the City Hall was crowded with an excited and indignant multitude. Both political parties were represented in the meeting and on its list of officers. Its president gave the key-note of the proceedings of this and a subsequent meeting when he said: "The colored man must be protected; he must be secure among us, come what will of political or ganizations." A series of thirteen resolutions was adopted, and a vigilance committee of thirteen persons was appointed to see that no person should be deprived of liberty" without due process of law." In the resolutions and speeches the unconstitutionality, the "diabolical spirit," and the "cruel ingenuity" of the law were denounced in the strongest terms. Charles B. Sedgwick, afterward member of Congress, proclaimed his purpose to resist it; and he called on all who heard him to resist to the utmost of their power. Mr. Raymond, a Baptist clergyman, asked: "Shall a live man ever be taken out of our city by force of this law?" "No! no!" was the unanimous response. "I will take the hunted man to my own house," he said, " and he shall not be torn away and I be left alive." Judge Nye of Madison County, afterward Senator in Congress, said: "I am an officer of the law. I am not sure that I am not one of those officers who are clothed with anomalous and terrible powers by this bill of abominations. If I am, I will tell my constituency that I will trample that law in the dust; and they must find another man, if there be one, who will degrade himself to do this dirty work." Such were the utterances of those two crowded meetings, and such the sentiments and feelings of Central New York under the pressure of that iniquitous statute. an on 4 At an immense Free Soil meeting, held in Lowell on the of October, over which William S. Robinson presided, a resolution introduced by Chauncy L. Knapp was unanimously and enthusiastically adopted, inviting back residents of that city who had fled to Canada for protection. Mr. Wilson, of Natick, said it was a burning shame that colored men were flying from families, homes, and country to find refuge among strangers beneath the flag of England. He commended the action of the meeting in inviting back their citizens who were wandering houseless and homeless. He would say to the colored men of Massachusetts: "Be calm, cautious, firm, and determined. The man-hunters are in the land. Your house, however humble, is your castle. You have a moral and a |