THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
North. Indeed, it was the prevailing moral sentiment among Northern people, not that it would be sinful to violate that law, but rather that it would be sinful to obey it. And nothing can be more futile, unstatesmanlike, as well as inhuman, under a popular government, than the enactment of laws that are offensive to a moral sense springing from an intuitive conception of justice and the natural sympathies of the human heart. It may therefore well be said that the fugitive slave law did more than anything else to keep the anti-slavery sentiment alive at a period when the widespread lassitude from past excitements co-operated with the materialistic tendency of prosperous times to put it asleep and to make the slavery question a “dead issue” in politics. And when the Kansas-Nebraska bill had, in spite of the prosperity of the times, shaken the public conscience out of its lethargy, the various attempts to enforce the fugitive slave law did more than anything else to influence the righteous wrath of freemen against the institution of slavery. It exemplified more drastically and provokingly than anything else its aggressively tyrannical tendencies.
Indeed, it had the effect of making the impulsive anti-slavery sentiment seek refuge in the extreme States' rights doctrine which was first elaborately formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the famous “Virginia and Kentucky resolutions,” and became subsequently, under Calhoun's leadership, the fundamental article of the political faith of the Slave States. According to it, the Federal Union and the Constitution were the product of a compact of which the several States were the original parties. The Federal Government created by that compact, could, therefore, in the nature of things not be the only and final judge of the extent of its own powers, but (in the language of the Virginia resolutions) “in case of a
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