THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the said compact, the States who are parties thereto have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties appertaining to them.” When in the early thirties, the State of South Carolina ran this “compact theory” of the Federal Constitution to its logical consequence, attempting an actual nullification within its borders of the Federal revenue laws, almost the whole North united in condemning the attempt as something akin to treason, although the Democratic party on the whole would consider the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions as justified in principle. But when twenty years later the Federal law concerning the capture and rendition of fugitive slaves outraged the anti-slavery sentiment of the North, the same “compact theory” of the Federal Government was resorted to by a large number of people, among them not a few public men of high standing and of conservative antecedents, to thwart the execution of the fugitive slave law. Not only was that law denounced as unconstitutional and void in numberless mass-meetings, but one Northern legislature after another, among them that of Wisconsin, passed so-called “personal liberty bills,” setting the provisions of the fugitive slave law for the capture of alleged fugitives practically at naught—that is, substantially nullifying it. The North was thus fast becoming the “nullifying” section of the country.
Such was the temper of public sentiment at the North when the Glover case occurred in Wisconsin and the legal proceedings called forth by it took place. Anti-slavery meetings as well as the anti-slavery press, East and West, praised the action of the Supreme Court and the Legislature of Wisconsin to the skies and expressed the fervent hope, that whatever
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