The Southern Grievance
New-York Daily
Tribune, November 28, 1860
Whoever wades through the columns of Southern diatribes
against the North which we daily publish, and the still denser columns thereof
furnished by some of our cotemporaries, must perceive that the master grievance
therein heaped upon us is our deficient alacrity in catching and returning
runaway slaves. Of course, the especial target of malediction is Northern
legislation against kidnapping; but that is merely a casual exhibition, under
the spur of the Fugitive Slave act and of the Nebraska bill, of the invincible
Northern repugnance to playing the part of bloodhound on the track of a frightened
and flying woman, who, having had three or four of her children torn from
her and sold to Mississippi or Texas, is flying to save the last of her brood
from a fate more abhorred than death. We repeat that the gravamen of the offense
is Northern repugnance to slave-catching, the particular manifestation given
to that repugnance being accidental and inconsequent. The vital, honest, naked
truth is, that the mass of the people of the Free States never did heartily
cooperate in negro-catching, and never will. Had they been inclined to do
so, the original Fugitive law of 1793 would have answered every purpose; since
they were not and are not, the act of 1850, savage as it is, amounts practically
to very little. Of the fugitive slaves who manage to cross Mason and Dixon’s
line, nine-tenths get safely to Canada if they really try, as they always
did and always will. All the State anti-kidnapping laws have not added a dozen
to the number who have thus made good their flights; and if they were all
repealed to-morrow, the South would not be profited one stiver. If a fugitive
chooses to hang about our cities from month to month, his master, if he earnestly
tries, can often hear of him and recover him; but if he makes a straight pull
for Canada, he is almost certain to get away; because nearly or quite all
of us are anxious that he should. Now and then some poor tool of a Rynders
or De Angelis will embark heartily in the work of slave-catching for the sake
of the money to be made by it; but there is no man reared in a Free State
and gaining his livelihood by any form of honest industry, who does not feel
an intense loathing of the whole business of slave-catching, and say of it,
with Hazael, “Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?”
The very dry goods jobber who declaims against Personal Liberty acts would
loathe himself if he were to join in hunting a fugitive, and would feel a
sense of relief and gladness if that fugitive were to get safely off to Canada.
Southern politicians do not comprehend this—at least,
they persist in talking as though they did not. They recognize no difference
between hunting a fugacious negro and hunting a strayed or stolen horse, and
fancy that all repugnance to slave-catching is impelled by hatred or envy
of the South, or some moral obliquity, when in fact it springs directly from
reverence to that Divine law, alike of Nature and of Revelation, which says,
“Remember those in bonds as bound with them;” (St. Paul.) “Break
every yoke, and let the oppressed go free;” (Isaiah.) “Thou shalt
not deliver unto his master the servant who has escaped from his master unto
thee; he shall dwell with thee; even among you, in that place which he shall
choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best; thou shalt not oppress
him;” (Deut. xxiii. 15, 16.)
Hence we say to those intent on daubing the cracks in the
Union with the untempered mortar of a new Compromise, You must not ignore
Human Nature. You must pay some respect to the law of gravitation, moral as
well as physical. All the Personal Liberty acts may be repealed forthwith—that
is a small matter—and you may make ever so solemn a new bargain for
the capture and restoration of fugitive slaves; but the up-shot will be that
not one in ten will be caught, and after a few years, not one in a hundred.
Hence will result reproaches and criminations, charges of broken compacts
and bad faith; and the South will be more excited and alienated because of
the bargain of Northern politicians to do what in the nature of things is
impossible.
If any new compact were now to be made, we should prefer
one that stipulated the payment annually of a gross sum by the Free States
to the Slave in lieu of all obligations to return fugitive negroes. Let it
be agreed that there shall be no more slave-hunting on free soil, and we will
gladly consent to a payment by the Free States for the exemption of four times
the cash value of the slaves annually recovered. But all stipulations for
greater alacrity and efficiency in slave-hunting on the part of the Free States
will prove an illusion and a sham, and so tend to greater exasperation and
alienation, rather than to union and harmony. Hence we are opposed [to] any
such undertakings.
