The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1883-02-17
Slavery and the Constitution

[From Judge Tourgee's Slot Plowshares.''l
The South demanded that the institution
| most favored by the Constitution, and espec-
tally nourished and protected by the laws of
the States in which it had taken root, should
also be protected in the Territories of the
United States not yet organized under mu-
nicipal forms or erected into self-governing
States. They claimed that the Government
which allowed the citizen to hold a certain
species of property under the laws of certain
States of the Union, was bound to protect
HIN IN the enjoyment VI urrau properly upon
its unassigned domain, of which he and his
fellow slaye-owners were joint proprielors
in common with the non-slave- holding cti-
zens of the Northern States.
1t is not enough to say that this claim was
a specious one Not only has it never been
fairly answered, but it is not susceptible of
logical refutation if its premises are granted
The argument against the right of slavery to
exist, TO be defended and to extend itself,
was always incomplete and unsatisfactory
when it was based upon the written words
of the Constitution. To hold that instru-
ment sacred above all things else, and yet
deny the slave-owner's right to his human
chattel was impossible. Many a lover of
liberty and righteousness tried to do it and
failed. To doubt the one was sacrilegious.
To admit the other seemed little less than
sin. The Constitution was admittedly in
spifed. TO question that was treason. A
curse too fearful to be uttered rested upon
anyone who should query its lightest word.
All that it contained was not only just and
true, but there was nothing of government
tai justice and truth that it did not contain,
if not in the full ear of explicit declaration
at least in the fecund germ of necessary i'm
plication. Tried by the declaration on which
it rested, there could be no slave beneath its
&gs. But the s'person held to labor or SER
vice in one State, under the laws thereof,
escaping into another could be nothing
but the slave fleeing from bondage toward
the hope of freedom. Men gravely argued
that this might mean apprentices. The
bubble was never worthy even of the con-
tempt poured upon it, though it found favor
with minds that nothing but the despera-
ton of dilemma could have induced to har-
Dor it. In very truth the argument was all
with the STAKEHOLDER when it was once ad-
mitted that the Constitution was infallible
Standing upou the ''person held to service
or labor clause, slavery was impregnable.
Right or wrong, the Constitution covered it
by unavoidable implication. Grounded upon
that who should assail it? Had not the
blood of the fathers sanctified its provisions?
Did not Washington commend it to our
jealous care? Had not every patriot whose
memory we cherished regarded it as the tai
isman of our liberty-the sacred scroll on
which our destiny depended?
But for this single clause in the Constitu-
ton, slavery would have withered before the
glare of conscience long before even the time
of which we write. The bulwark of the
Constitution was its moral as well as its le- |
gal cover from assault. A thousand quirks |
and bubbles were devised to avoid the po- |
tency of this claim, which had the merit, |
unusual among political dogmas, of never |
being tinctured with doubt in the minds of |
those who put it forward. As to his moral |
right to buy and sell and hold human beings |
as slaves, the Southern man might doubt |
many of them did. AS to his legal right |
there was never any question. The Northern |
mind conceived innumerable pleas against |
it, chiefly based upon specious use of the |
word ''man," meaning in one part of the ar |
gument slave and in another premise |
free man. The impetuous logic of the South |
was right when it termed them all make |
shifts and evasions. If the Constitution |
meant anything it guaranteed in the most |
emphatic manner not only the right to hold |
slaves, but to hunt them. If it gave that |
privilege in one State it was right of prop |
erty, which the citizen was entitled to carry /
with him and exercise in the National do |
main. This was not contemplated by the |
trainers of that instrument, because they |
we're affected by human conditions and could |
not foresee the future. 1t followed, howev- |
er, as certainly and indefeasibly as the right |
of the merchant to offer his wares, of the |
tradesman to exercise his calling, or of the |
farmer to till the soil-admitting always |
that the Const tuition is the complete COM |
pendulum of political truth. These bubbles |
served only as excuses for feeble brains and |
tinlid consciences. There were those who |
did not stop to speculate on the absurdity of |
picketing State lines against runaway ap- |
prentices, or who easily overlooked the fact |
that Benjamin Franklin, himself an abscond- |
ing apprentice, signed the instrument. There |
were others who, hating between their rev. |
erence for the sacred charter and the die |
tates of conscience, needed only formal |
bubble to satisfy them that their conVic- |
tions of right did not contravene the letter |
or the spirit of the Constitution. From first |
to last the Constitution was the Gibraltar of |
slavery, and the reverence felt for that in |
strument was the last stronghold, which its |
opponents were never able to storm until its |
advocates had thrown down its walls upon |
themselves.