Chapter 6

Your law, Sir, degrades the national character abroad; its excessive servility to Southern dictation excites the contempt of the slaveholders for the easy, selfish virtue of their Northern auxiliaries, while its outrages upon religion, justice, humanity, and the dearest principles of personal freedom, under pretence of preserving the Union, weaken the attachment of conscientious men for a confederacy which requires such horrible sacrifices for its continuance. All these evils might have been easily avoided by a law satisfying every requirement of the Constitution, and yet treating the alleged fugitive as a MAN, and granting him the same protection as is accorded to an alleged murderer. God gave you, Sir, an opportunity for which you ought to have been grateful, of illustrating your Puritan descent by standing forth before the nation as an advocate of justice and freedom, and of the rights of the poor and oppressed. Through a blind devotion to a political leader, you rejected the palm which Providence tendered to your acceptance, and have indelibly associated your name with cruelty and injustice. Had you retired from the notice of the public, as you did from the suffrages of the electors, you had acted wisely. In an evil hour for yourself, you stood forth as the champion of the Fugitive Slave Law. Its enemies rejoice in your rashness, for your feeble apology has rendered its deformities more prominent, and, by failing to vindicate, you have virtually confessed its abominations. May you live, Sir, to deplore the grievous error you have committed, and, by your future efforts in behalf of human freedom and happiness, atone for the wound they have received at your hands.

HANCOCK.

February, 1851.