The statesmanlike course was to recognize
the ground of Northern resistance, to show the South that a too violent
insistence upon their constitutional rights would be fatal, and to endeavor
to obtain such concessions as would allay excited feelings. Mr. Webster's
strong argument in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law pleased the South, of
course; but it irritated and angered the North. It promoted the very
struggle which it proposed to allay, for it admitted the existence of only
one side to the question. The consciences of men cannot be coerced; and
when Mr. Webster undertook to do it he dashed himself against the rocks.
People did not stop to distinguish between a legal argument and a defence
of the merits of catching runaway slaves. To refer to the original law of
1793 was idle. Public opinion had changed in half a century; and what had
seemed reasonable at the close of the eighteenth century was monstrous in
the middle of the nineteenth.
All this Mr. Webster declined to recognize. He upheld without diminution or
modification the constitutional duty of sending escaping slaves back to
bondage; and from the legal soundness of this position there is no escape.
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