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Show 336 LIDERTY AND SLAVERY. " Massachusetts," continues Mr. Sumner, " while exhibiting peculiar sensitiveness at any responsibility for slavery, seemed to view it with unconcern." If Massachusetts had only believed that the clause was intended to confer on Congress the power to pass a Fugitive Slave Law, into what flames of indignation would her sensitiveness have burst! So Mr. Sumn.;r would have us to believe. But let us listcu, for a moment, to the sober voice of history. It was only about four years after the government went into operation that Congress actually exercised the power in question, and passed a Fugitive Slave Law. Where was Massachusetts then?· Did she burst into flames of indignation? ITer only voice, in reply, was as distinctly and as emphatically pronounced in favor of that law as was the voice of Virginia itself. With a single exception, her whole delegation in Congress,* with Fisher Ames at their head, voted for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793! Not a whisper of disapprobation was heard fi·om their constituents. As Mr. Sumner himself says, the passage of that act "drew little attention." Hence he would have us to believe that Massa- * One member seems to ha.vo been nbscnt from ~he llouso. TilE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW. 337 chusctts w·ould have been stirred from her depths if the convention had conferred surh a power upon Congress, and yet that she was not moved at all when Congress proceeded, as he maintains, to u.surp and exercise that power! This is not all. Every member from the free States, with the exception of five, recorded bi• vote in favor of the same law. • In the Senate, as we have already said, it was passed by resolution, and not by a recorded vote. No one, in either branch of Congress, uttered a syllable against the constitutionality of the law, though many of the most distinguished members of the very convention which framed the Constitution itself were there. Not to mention others, there were James Madison, and Roger Sherman, and Elbridge Gerry, and Rufus lliog, and Caleb Stroog, and Robert Morris, and Oliver Elsworth ; and yet from not one of these illustrious fmmers of the Constitution was a syllable uttered against the constitutionality of the law in question. Nay, the law was supported aud enacted by themselves. What, then, in the face of these indubitable facts, becomes of all Mr. Sumner's far-fetched arguments from "the lite- * Annab of Congrc8s; 2d Congress. li91-1708, p. 861. w 29 |