Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

[75] and reporting resolutions not more peremptory¹ than that Congress had no authority to interfere in any way with slavery in the States;² that (though it might have the power) it ought not to interfere with it in the District; and that all resolutions to that end should be (not rejected, but) laid on the table without printing. Still, in the large majority who joined him in placing this ineffectual gag upon Northern freemen, the South had many representatives.

Northern governors and legislatures differed with the South as to the lawfulness of the measures of repression demanded of them, and among themselves as to their willingness to try what they could do. Governor Marcy, of New York, refused his assent to the constitutional gloss³ by which Governor Gayle, of Alabama, made requisition for Ransom G. Williams, publishing agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society at New York, under an act of Congress concerning ‘fugitives from justice.’ Williams had been indicted as ‘late of said [Tuscaloosa] County’; and Governor Gayle, while not pretending that he had been in the State ‘when his crime was committed,’ or had ‘fled therefrom,’ nevertheless held that he had ‘evaded the justice of our laws,’ and hence was a fugitive to be delivered up. Governor Marcy, however,⁴ mingled with his admirable exposure of this attempt on the ‘sovereignty’ of New York some hearty abuse of the abolitionists. Shortly afterwards, in transmitting the requisition and his response to the New York Legislature, with resolutions adopted by the Legislature of⁵ South Carolina, asking for penal enactments against the abolitionists, he expressed his belief that these might properly be framed, to prevent ‘the citizens of this State and residents within it from availing themselves with impunity of the protection of its sovereignty and laws, while they are actually employed in exciting insurrection ’