NOTES
opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.” Now, every sense of the man rebelled at the official attitude of his country with regard to human slavery.
Page 67, note 1. But the judge, as in duty bound, explained to the Jury that this law had been regularly enacted by Congress, approved by the President, and held to be valid by the Supreme Court; hence, that all citizens were in practice legally bound to obey it. He admitted that even a Republic might pass a wicked law. “If a statute is passed which any citizen, examining his duty by the best light which God has given him, . . . believes to be wicked, and which, acting under the law of God, he thinks he ought to disobey, unquestionably he ought to disobey that statute, because he ought to ‘obey God rather than man.’ . . . But, gentlemen, a man whose private conscience leads him to disobey a law recognized by the community must take the consequences of that disobedience. It is a matter solely between him and his Maker. . . . It will not do for the public authorities to recognize his private opinion as a justification of his acts.”
Emerson said, in public, at this period: “The Union is at an end so soon as an immoral law is enacted, and he who writes a crime into the statute-book digs under the foundations of the Capitol, to plant there a powder magazine, and lays a train.”
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