darkness, the thick darkness around us, we will cling to the single, simple sublime issue the Constitution, and the Union of which it is the bond; the old Union. God bless the old Union, and the wrath of the Lamb of God shrivel to their very sockets the arms lifted to destroy it; not in vengeance, but in mercy to them and to all mankind."

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW-ITS REPEAL-RIGHT OF ASYLUM.

On the 13th of June, 1864, this bill furnished the last opportunity of arraigning the Republicans for their violations of law; but as the discussion has lost its interest, that portion of the speech is omitted. It was mostly an argument ad hominem against the members from Wisconsin and Ohio, who sustained the infraction of the fugitive slave law. Something of a colloquy occurred between Messrs. BALDWIN, of Massachusetts, and BLAINE, of Maine, and the Speaker, as to the execution of the law in time of war and on black soldiers. The occasion was seized by Mr. Cox to vindicate the right of asylum, outraged in the case of Arguelles.

ARGUELLES' CASE.

Mr. Cox said: I cannot understand why these gentlemen would destroy the only method of carrying out this extradition system of our Constitution; and yet the other day, when a Spanish subject was arrested by our authorities, and taken from our shores which he sought as an asylum, these gentlemen sustained such extraordinary action., Against the Constitution, without law, without treaty, without evidence, without jury trial, without warrant, without information, by executive power, usurping the treaty power, usurping the law-making power, usurping the power of the judiciary, this Administration delivered to Spain a white refugee; and this Congress, with cringing obsequiousness, bowed before executive dictation, and by their legislative action said, "All right, Mr. President, you can seize a white man and take him from the country in defiance of the great right of asylum; but when a black man, escaping from one State to another, and whom we are commanded by the Constitution to deliver up, and under the sanction of our oath to make laws for such delivery, we break down the constitutional clause and the laws sanctioned by the judiciary in order to create in the North an asylum for the blacks of the South." When a white man from another nation is torn away, and the practice and usage of all free and civilized nations is outraged, gentlemen on that side stifle proper resolutions of condemnation.

Mr. MORRIS, of New York. The gentleman will allow me to ask him a question for information. In the case referred to by the gentleman from Ohio, was the man charged with crime or was he not?

Mr. Cox. I say to my friend from New York that that white man was charged with a crime in newspapers, by clamor, but not legally. There was no charge, no warrant, no information, and no trial. I defy gentlemen to give me a resolution of inquiry, to ascertain whether the Executive or the Secretary of State had any thing in writing but the request

of the Spanish minister upon which to base the arrest and extradition of this Spaniard, seeking an asylum in this country. Upon the request of Señor Tassara, the Spanish minister, Mr. Seward issued his rescript, and the man was taken from the privacy of his own room, without the knowledge of his wife, who was in the next chamber. He was hurried on board a steamer, was hurried off to Havana, and is there held as a criminal to be tried. And yet gentlemen upon the other side dare not condemn that. Why? Because it was alleged that he was engaged in some way in the slave trade. Well, some one with less sense than sensibility may cry out, "Oh! you are the defender of the slave trade and slave traders." There is only one answer to this: the monosyllabic answer, "Pshaw." I defend no crime when I defend the right of asylum; nor do I defend slavery, when I oppose the repeal of a constitutional law for the rendition of slaves.

It has been said that this Spanish subject, Colonel Arguelles, was engaged in the slave trade, and hence an enemy of the human race. The truth is that he was not engaged in that trade. Slaves had been landed in the district of Colon, in Cuba, under his jurisdiction, and those slaves, as it was alleged, he had sold after they were landed and confiscated, and having made money out of the transaction in violation of his duty he had fled to this country. There was no proof of all this. It was the only allegation, however, and it may be true. Suppose it were. The charge is simply that of a breach of the municipal law of Spain. He is not, then, in the legal sense, as Mr. Seward asserted, an enemy of the human race. He was not a pirate in any legal or moral sense, but a criminal under the laws of Spain. He could only be delivered to Spain under a treaty or a statute, and neither existed between this country and Spain. Yet gentlemen who are becoming so careful about the personal liberty of black men as to refuse to render them up in pursuance of the Constitution, sustain the extradition of a white man without evidence, law, treaty, or constitutional authority. If there were a treaty between Spain and the United States similar to this authority in our Constitution with regard to the rendition of black fugitives, no indignation would ever have been hurled by a hospitable people, proud of their system of asylum under our once free Government, against its present perfidious administrators. Upon the same principle, or want of principle, by which the Executive gave up this Spaniard, they would have surrendered Thomas Francis Meagher, a criminal convicted by the judicial tyranny of England, Professor Agassiz, the savant, whom the world delights to honor, and every other man of great or little note who comes here from abroad.

We have had many humiliations since the present Administration came into power. We have bowed humbly before the throne of the French usurper, at the beck of an arrogant foreign minister, and allowed an Austrian prince and an imperial dupe to bear a crown from Europe to our continent, and sway a sceptre over a democratic republic with which we were in friendly alliance. We have had domestic humiliations by the forcible abduction, imprisonment, and exile of our citizens without law or trial. We have had our very thoughts pinioned, our presses manacled, and our writs of right and liberty annulled. For all these we place our hands upon our mouths in shame; but for this last humiliation, by which

America is no longer the home of the oppressed or the refuge of the foreigner, by which we are made the hissing and byword of the nations, we cast our mouths in the dust in abjectest degradation. We are put to cruel shame before all civilized nations, nay, before even half-civilized nations.

Turkey once protected the Hungarian patriot, Kossuth; Switzerland protects all political refugees in the midst of Europe, and stands there in her Republican simplicity and faith as firm as her everlasting mountains against the oppressions around her. We protected the half-made citizen Koszta in an Asiatic harbor, and rescued him from an Austrian ship; but this was when we had a Democrat to represent us in our foreign affairs like William L. Marcy. But while this national Congress stops in the midst of a great civil war to sow new dissensions in our midst by unwise legislation like this for black fugitives, it has shown its servile timidity before the usurpations of our Executive, and has allowed the lettre de cachet of the French monarch to be reissued under the great seal of the United States, without a murmur of dissent or denunciation. We are disgraced before the world by the violation of the great feature of our system of polity. What new humiliation is in store for us?

I hope, Mr. Speaker, that I am not travelling out of the range of proper discussion by referring to this matter of the extradition of a foreigner with out treaty or law. I have considered it fully. I hope before Congress adjourns that the Committee on the Judiciary will report a bill for the purpose of punishing such officers as dare lay their hands upon refugees who are here from countries with which we have no treaty, and in cases where there is no law for their delivery. Such refugees have the right to shoot down the officers who thus arrest them, and be entirely innocent of crime. Refugees under such circumstances would have the right to sue Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Seward, or the marshal of New York, for false imprisonment, because of the absence of all law and all treaty in relation to that subject.

What inference do I draw from this? That in my opinion, as to all matters of rendition, whether of fugitives from service or justice, or of political refugees, there is always some law required to carry out in good faith the treaty or agreement upon those subjects. Hence, as between these United States, we had placed here in this second section of the fourth article of the Constitution, that any person charged with treason, felony, or other crime, fleeing from one State to another, should be delivered up, and Congress passed a law to carry that out. For the purpose of delivering up persons accused of crime in one State and fleeing to another, papers are prepared, a prima facie case is made out, and a quasi trial is had. These are indispensable to executive action among our States. So in regard to fugitives from labor, the same preliminaries are required. Proof, a hearing before the commissioner, and warrants for the delivery of the fugitive to the claimant-these prerequisites are a part of a system as to all renditions.

It is laid down in every authority on international law, and by statesmen who have had instances before them in this country in the various cases growing out of the treaties with Great Britain, France, and other countries, that there can be no rendition of any one from one State to

L

another, except in pursuance of some treaty or law specially made to effectuate the object.

Indeed, in this very case of Arguelles, when our consul at Havana was informed of the flight of Arguelles to New York, with a view to his reclamation, the consul at once said that, in the absence of a treaty, no reclamation could be had; that if it were had it would be an 66 exceptional neasure." In this view he is confirmed by Judge Story in his Conflict of Laws; by the practice of this Government in a case as early as 1792, when Mr. Jefferson urged a treaty with Spain; in another case under the Jay treaty in 1799; in another case under Washington's administration in 1797, for the rendition to Spain of certain criminals from Florida, then a Spanish province; in another case in 1821, when William Wirt, as Attorney-General, held that the Executive had no power to arrest a refugee, except for the violation of our own laws; in another case in 1831, of a Portuguese pirate, wherein Attorney-General Taney decided the same principle; and in various other cases up to the time of our civil war, when, in a case of demand by Mr. Seward for rebels held by Spain, the Spanish Minister of State himself, Miraflores, insisted on a treaty of extradition as a prerequisite to the delivery. It makes my American blood tingle to read the eloquent vindication of this great right from the lips of the Minister of Spain. I insert it here as the better sentiment of what is left of the free white men of America:

"The right to give asylum to political refugees is in such manner rooted in the habits, In such sort interwoven with the ideas of tolerance of the present century, and has such frequent, generous, and beneficent applications in the extraordinary and ensanguined political contests of the times we live in, that there is no nation in the world which dares to deny this right, and, moreover, not any one that can renounce its exercise. And if the Government of Washington wishes to acquire a perfect and positive right to the delivery of those guilty of ordinary crimes, it will be accomplished by means of a treaty of extradition, to the conclusion of which the Spanish Government would not oppose itself, as it has not refused to conclude such with other States."

I need not call the roll of English judges or statesmen who have spoken to the same effect with legal learning and indignant eloquence. The Creole case gave rise to these discussions in the English Parliament. The great names of Aberdeen, Denman, Campbell, Brougham, and others. might be cited, to show that the sanctity of asylum can only be invaded in pursuance of treaty or of statute.

Yet, in defiance of all precedent, practice, and authority, this House proposes not to repeal the constitutional clause requiring fugitives from labor to be delivered up, but, preserving that clause, to nullify it altogether by repealing the law by which alone the clause can be executed.

On the charitable assumption that gentlemen on the other side intend to execute the Constitution, I say that it is indispensable that some law should exist to carry it out. As in the case of a treaty, as in the Arguelles case, so in the case of a fugitive slave there must be some law to carry out the treaty or clause of rendition. To repeal the law made for that purpose, is a cowardly blow at the Constitution itself. It is a breach of faith, a breach of treaty; and between independent nations would be a casus belli. Between States banded like ours under a Constitution, it is a flagrant violation of a sacred compact.

JUDICIAL DECISIONS AS TO FUGITIVES.

Mr. Cox then showed by ample quotations that the Republicans held, in the matter of rendition of fugitives from labor, that the Federal Government was a usurper of State rights, and " denied that the decisions of a usurping party in favor of the validity of its own assumptions can settle any thing;" or, as Attorney-General Wolcott argued (9 Ohio Reports, 114), that " as to these powers, the States stand to each other and to the Federal Government as absolutely foreign nations."

He then concluded by addressing the Republican side of the House: You are against the rendition of the black man in pursuance of the Constitution; and you give up a white man who has sought an asylum on our shores without the form or substance of law or treaty, and in "positive defiance" of the law of nations and the Constitution. Your Executive is a usurper of the powers wisely distributed to the other departments of the Government. Here you sit to-day striving to strike down the only mode whereby one peculiar clause of the Constitution can be carried out, and propose no mode as a substitute either by State or Federal action. You will not allow an individaal to take his slave by the sanction of the Constitution alone; you will pass no law to help him. You will not allow him to go into a free State and have his right there by jury trial, because you cannot try the claimant's right to a slave by a jury in a free State. You will not allow the law of 1793, which George Washington assisted in making; yet you strike down all the great rights of personal freedom for the white man fixed by the fathers of the country in our fundamental law, because you are demoniacally bent upon riving this Union in twain, and separating its parts forever. Your ideas are not those of the higher, but of the lower law. They do not come from the sources of law and light and love above. They sunder all the ties of allegiance and all the sanctions of faith. You are destructionists; you would tear down all that is valuable and sacred in the past and build up nothing in their place. You are revolutionists. You were trying for years by wrongful interference and force to nullify the very law which you now seek to expunge by repeal. You diligently sought to embroil the States in collision with the Federal Government, and have succeeded in bringing with your advent into power the consequences we predicted, a relentless and bloody war. I charge it upon every man of you on the other side of the House who took any part in these seditious infractions of the Constitution, who counselled individual and State resistance and fomented sectional strife, that you are in part responsible before God and the country for our present calamities. The enormous burdens of taxation, the widow's tears, the orphan's curse, the wail of the bereaved, and the future destitution and consumiug desolation of this land, all cry aloud against you as the authors of this worst evil which ever befell a suffering people!