“ [329] therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”That is as much a part of the Constitution as any other, and as equally binding and obligatory as any other on all men, public or private. And who denies this? None but the abolitionists of the North. And, pray, what is it they will not deny? They have but the one idea, and it would seem that these fanatics at the North and the secessionists at the South are putting their heads together to defeat the good designs of honest and patriotic men. They act to the same end and the same object, and the Constitution has to take the fire from both sides. I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat, that if the Northern States refuse, wilfully and deliberately, to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provides no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to observe the compact A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side.
I say to you, gentlemen, as I said on the shores of Lake Erie and in the city of Boston, and as I may say again in that city, or elsewhere in the North, that you of the South have as much right to receive your fugitive slaves as the North has to any of its rights and privileges of navigation and commerce.
I am as ready to fight and to fall for the constitutional rights of Virginia as I am for those of Massachusetts.
Now if Daniel Webster, whose greatness of mind and nobility of soul are better and more impressively and significantly expressed by the isolated name ‘Daniel Webster,’ than they would be by the use of any or all the adjectives of our language defining those virtues, and whose patriotism was as broad as the land; who loved the Union for its constitutional ties and guaranties, and who hated slavery in every form, and was willing to use all lawful means for its abolition—if he, with his universally known character and convictions, was ready to fight and to fall for the constitutional rights of the South, where was the wrong or even the slightest mistake on the part of the Southern man who had been reared in the education that the institutions of the South were sound in law and in morals?
He told us we had the constitutional right to the property. That if the North disregarded the contract in any one particular we were released from all obligation to observe the rest.
Trying the principles of the ‘originally small party’ of Mr. Chase, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward by the plain and incontrovertible
