The Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Prigg vs. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 16th Peters' Rep., wherein Judge Story, in delivering the opinion of the court, says:

"It is historically well known that the clause in the Constitution of the United States, relating to persons owing service and labor in one State escaping into other States, was to secure to the citizens of the slaveholding States the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves, as property, in every State in the Union into which they might escape from the State where they were held in servitude. The full recognition of this right and title was indispensable to the security of this species of property in all the slaveholding States; and, indeed, was so vital to the preservation of their domestic interests and institutions, that it cannot be doubted that it is constituted a fundamental article, without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed. Its true design was to guard against the doctrines and principles prevailing in the non-slaveholding States, by preventing them from intermeddling with, or obstructing, or abolishing the rights of the owners of slaves.

"The clause in the Constitution of the United States, relating to fugitives from labor, manifestly contemplates the existence of a positive, unqualified right on the part of the owner of the slave, which no State law or regulation can in any way qualify, regulate, control, or restrain.

"The owner of a fugitive slave has the same right to seize, and to take him in a State to which he has escaped or fled that he had in the State from which he escaped; and it is well known that this right to seize or recapture is universally acknowledged in all the slaveholding States. The court have not the slightest hesitation in holding, that under and in virtue of the Constitution, the owner of the

slave is clothed with authority in every State of the Union to seize and recapture his slave, wherever he can do it without any breach of the peace, or illegal violence.

"The right to seize and retake fugitive slaves, and the duty to deliver them up, in whatever State of the Union they may be found, is, under the Constitution, recognized as an absolute positive right and duty, pervading the whole Union with an equal and supreme force; uncontrolled and uncontrollable by State sovereignty or State legislation. The right and duty are co-extensive and uniform in remedy and operation throughout the whole Union. The owner has the same security, and the same remedial justice, and the same exemption from State regulations and control, through however many States he may pass with the fugitive slave in his possession, in transitu, to his domicile."

Here the Supreme Court emphatically declare that this clause in the Constitution manifestly contemplates the existence of a positive, unqualified right on the part of the owner of a slave, which no State law or regulation can control, and without which the Union could not have been formed, and, further, that the right to seize and retake fugitive slaves, in whatever State of the Union they may be found, is an absolute, positive right. But we are not left simply with this constitutional provision, for Congress, in 1793, passed an act designed to put the provision into practical operation, the last two sections of which are as follows:

"SEC. 3. And be it also enacted, That when a person held to labor in any of the United States, or in either of the territories on the northwest, or south of the river Ohio, under the laws thereof, shall escape into any other of the said States or territories, the person to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney is hereby empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take

him or her before any judge of the circuit or district courts of the United States, residing or being within the State, or before any magistrate of a county, city, or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit taken before and certified by a magistrate of any such State or territory, that the person so seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the State or territory from which she or he fled, owe service or labor to the person claiming him or her, it shall be the duty of the judge or magistrate to give a certificate thereof to such claimant, his agent or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor to the State or territory from which he or she fled.

"SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct and hinder such claimant, his agent or attorney, in so seizing or arresting such fugitive from labor, or shall rescue such fugitive from such claimant, his agent or attorney, when so arrested, pursuant to the authority herein given or declared, or shall harbor or conceal such person after notice that he or she was a fugitive from labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of the said offenses, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars. Which penalty may be recovered by and for the benefit of such claimant, by action of debt, in any court proper to try the same; saving, moreover, to the person claiming such labor or service, his right of action for or on account of the said injuries or either of them."

CHAPTER XIV.

INAUGURAL ADDRESSES OF WASHINGTON, ADAMS, JEFFERSON, AND MADISON; AND THE FAREWELL ADDRESSES OF WASHINGTON AND JACKSON.

THE oath of office having, on Thursday, April 30, 1789, been administered by the Chancellor of the State of New York, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, to George Washington; President of the United States, he then made the following Inaugural Address:

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate, and

of the House of Representatives :

Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the fourteenth day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years; a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary, as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health, to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one, who, inheriting inferior

endowments from nature, and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions, all I dare aver, is, that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope, is, that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof, of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which misled me, and its consequences be judged by my country, with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

Such being the impressions under which I have, in obedience to the public summons, repaired to the present station, it would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe-who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect-that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States, a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge. In tendering this homage to the Great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own; nor those of my fellow-citizens at large, less than either. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men, more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some