under the act, with power to summon a posse comitatus for the enforcement of its provisions, and commanded all good citizens to assist in its prompt and efficient execution wherever their services were required as part of the posse comitatus. Without going into the details of that act, it is sufficient to say that Congress omitted from it nothing which the utmost ingenuity could suggest as essential to the successful enforcement of the master's claim to recover his fugitive slave. And this court, in Ableman v. Booth, 21 How. 506, adjudged it to be 'in all of its provisions fully authorized by the Constitution of the United States.'"
However diversified may have been the gifts and endowments of the framers of the "Civil-Rights Bill," the spirit of prophecy would certainly appear not to have been included among the number; for if it had been, their prescience would surely have foreseen, and, since "forewarned is forearmed," carefully provided,that its salutary provisions should not be frittered away, or lost, amidst the contradictory elements of the human mind or the wandering mazes of subtle constitutional disputation. Undoubtedly these statesmen believed that an embodiment and unification of the principles of the common law, by a declaratory statute of the United States,—the Civil-Rights Bill,—would be a great and substantial security against the infringement of its general rules, in the mixed and altered condition which the introduction of seven millions of citizens, formerly slaves, had necessarily created in American civil life. Mr. Sumner thought the Civil Rights Bill "invincible, impassive to the blows of fate, and proof against the machinations of men." Neither he nor his associates, the illustrious friends of the Civil-Rights Bill, any more dreamed that civil rights would be defeated in the Supreme Court, than the Child of the Revolution, whose footsteps, like theirs, "had an audible echo through the world," could have augured the burning of Moscow.
