I do not believe that these laws were, as the Senator supposed, enacted
with a view to exasperate the South, or to put them in a position of
degradation. Why, sir, these laws against kidnapping are as old as the
common law itself, as that Senator well knows. To take a freeman and
forcibly carry him out of the jurisdiction of the State, has ever been,
by all civilized countries, adjudged to be a great crime; and in most of
them, wherever I have understood anything about it, they have penal
laws to punish such an offence. I believe the State of Virginia has one
to-day as stringent in all its provisions as almost any other of which
you complain. I have not looked over the statute-books of the South; but
I do not doubt that there will be found this species of legislation upon
all your statute-books.
Here let me say, because the subject occurs to me right here, the
Senator from Virginia seemed not so much to point out any specific acts
that Northern people had done injurious to your property as, what he
took to be a dishonor and a degradation. I think I feel as sensitive
upon that subject as any other man. If I know myself, I am the last man
that would be the advocate of any law or any act that would humiliate or
dishonor any section of this country, or any individual in it; and, on
the other hand, let me tell these gentlemen I am exceedingly sensitive
upon that same point, whatever they may think about it.
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