Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

[313] the return of fugitive slaves, and the use of its jails and prisons for their detention. The passage of this personal liberty measure served to increase the activity of the anti-Union working forces in the South

Then, again, the serious difficulty between Massachusetts and two of the slave States in regard to their treatment of her colored seamen aided Garrison in his agitation for the dissolution of the Union by the keen sense of insult and injury which the trouble begat and left upon the popular mind. Colored men in Massachusetts enjoyed a fair degree of equality before her laws, were endowed with the right to vote, and were, barring the prejudice against color, treated by the commonwealth as citizens. They were employed in the merchant service of her interstate trade. But at two of the Southern ports where her vessels entered, the colored seamen were seized by the local police and confined in houses of detention until the vessels to which they belonged were ready to depart, when they were released and allowed to join the vessels. This was a most outrageous proceeding, outrageous to the colored men who were thus deprived of their liberty, outrageous also to the owners of the vessels who were deprived of the service of their employs. Of what avail was the constitutional guaranty that “the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States,” many men began to question? The South was evidently disposed to support only that portion of the national compact which sustained the slave system, all the rest upon occasion it trampled on and nullified. This lesson was enforced anew upon