THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
bored in the Northern States or escaped across them to Canada. But this was not because the law was not stringent and severe enough; it was because, in the very nature of things, no law for the capture and rendition of human beings fleeing from slavery, ever so stringent and severe, could have been effectively enforced. On the contrary, the more stringent and severe, the more provokingly it would offend the moral sympathies of human nature, and the more surely and generally it would be disobeyed and thwarted.
If the compromise of 1850 were to be a real measure of conciliation, nothing could, therefore, have been more ill-advised than to embody in it a law apt to bring the odium of slavery in its most repulsive aspects to the very door of every Northern household. According to that law, the right of a claimant to an alleged fugitive slave, or rather the right of a human being to his or her freedom, was not to be determined by the ordinary course of law, a trial by jury, but by a summary process presided over by a United States Commissioner—a process in which the testimony of the alleged fugitive slave was not to be admitted as evidence, and the presumption was held to be all in favor of the claim of the slave-hunter. It made punishable not only by fine, but also by imprisonment, the harboring or concealing of a fugitive slave. It “commanded” every citizen, whenever called upon by the proper officer, actively to aid in the capture of a fugitive slave. It thus imposed upon him the duty of becoming a slave-catcher and, as the saying was at the time, to do for the slave-holder what the slave-holder would have been too proud to do for himself. It is no wonder that, when Charles Sumner, upon the question put to him in the Senate, whether he would obey the fugitive slave law, replied: “Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?” the winged word reverberated throughout the
[ 109 ]
