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Show 324 LIBERTY AND SLAVERY. is the historical argument of Mr. Sumner. Let us see what it is worth. Elbridge Gerry hac! said: "We ought to be careful NOT to give any sanction to slavery ;"-language repeatedly quoted, and underscored as above, by Mr. Sumner. It is absurd, Le concludes, to suppose that a man who could use such language had the least intention to confer a power on Congress to support slavery by tbc passage of a Fugitive Slave Law. This is one branch of his historical argument. It may appear perfectly conclusive to Mr. Sumner, and "entirely impregnable" to Mr. Chase; but, after all, it is not quite so invulnerable as they imagine. :Mr. Sumner stopped his historical researches at a most convenient point for his argument. If he had only read a little further, he would have discovered that this same identical Elbridge Gerry was in the Congress of 1793, and VOTED FOR the Fugitive Slave Law then passed! It fares no better with the historical argument to prove the opinion or intention of Roger Sherman. He had declared, it is true, that he was opposed to any clause in the Constitution "acknowledging men to be property." But we should not, with Mr. Sumner, infer from this Til~ FUGITIVE SLAVH LAW. 325 that he never intended that Congress should possess a power to legislate in reference to slavery. For, unfortunately for such a conclusion, however confidently it may be drawn, or however dogmatically asserted, Roger Sherman himself was in the Senate of 1793, and was actually on the committee which reported the Fugitive Slave Law of that session! Thus, although the premiss of Mr. Sumner's argument is a historical fact, yet its conclusion comes directly into conflict with another historical fact! We cannot, in the same way, refute the argument from the language of Gouverneur Morris, who said "that he never would concur in upholding domestic slavery," because he was not in the Congt·ess of 1793. But Robert Morris was there, and, although he helped to frame the Constitution in 1787, he uttered not a syllable against the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law. Indeed, this law passed the Senate by resolution simply, the yeas and nays not having been called for! The words of Mr. Madison, who "thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man," are four or five times quoted in Mr. Sumner's speech. 28 |
