The River Falls journal. (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1857-1861, 1857-07-01
The Fugitive Slave Law.

The Boston Traveler, after speaking OF
the difficulties in Ohio, arisign from an
attempt to capture fugitive slaves, COM
ments upon the fugitive slave law in the
following sensible manner.
But the Ohio outrage, perpetrated IN
the name ofthe nation, is far more odlous,
because Of the end proposed, than it is be-
cause Of the means adopted to secure that
end. To arrest and carry off men who
have only obeyed the precepts Of Chris
tianity, who have merely assisted the
weary and tho oppressed, is something SO
monstrous that it needs nothing illegal in
the mode of execution to excite the ut
most adherence in the mind of every man
whether he live in the South or in the
North. There are thousands of men who
support the fugitive slave law, who would
no more take part in enforcing its provis-
ions than they would in committing high
way robbery, or rape, or any other OF
those crimes to which an especial degree
of infamy is attached. The human
heart, unless hardened by the basest form
of the sentiment of selfshness, reyolts at
the thought of Furnishing men for doing
that which heather philosophy and divine
revelation say that they should do, not
for reward, but simply as duty, end even
when stripes, Imprisonment, and death
may be the consequence Of that duty's
performance. Of what avail can be the pro-
visions of any statue against the immuta-
BILE DEGREES of God, written on the heart
of man, ages upon ages before that stat
ute was enacted, and to be modified or re-
pealed only with the utter extinction OF
the race!
The government of the nation must
abandon all idea of enforcing the fugitive
slave law. At times. an unhappy slave
may be sent back into slavery, amid the
excavations of the people; but where it
is attempted to punish men who have
aided fugitive to escape into monarch
icaly governed country, failure must be
the consequence, unless the people are lost
to all sense of humanity. To punish
man, or a woman, for having aided and
comforted slave on his weary journey to
the frigid North, where the banner of
England is to afford him protection, what
would it be but to initiate the conduct OF
James the Second and his bloody judges,
when they caused Elizabeth Gaunt to be
consumed at the stake, for having aided
a refugee from what the government called
Justice Such things cannot be permit
ted in this nineteenth century. If the
government shall persist in its apparent
course, it can do so only at the cost of
civil war. The name of the fugitive slave
law is not one with which government can
conjure. 1t is not potent enough to stitie
the teachings of the better nature Of man,
to act with success against the religious
element, or to cause men to crawl in the
dust five are to be ''subdued," it must
be at a price which ought to frighten
every one at its mere contemplation
Some allowance must be made for the
of humanity, even by the
slaveholding ohgarchy, or the history Of
this country will have to be read as con-
tanning ''the frightfullest birth of time."-
For what could be more frightful than
the overthrow of free institutions on a
whole continent, in order that slavery
might be upheld in all its ilnperfectens,
and its reign be even without questions!