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 employes. 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 Massachusetts by the affair of her
colored seamen. Unable to obtain redress of the wrong done her citizens,
the State appointed agents to go to Charleston and New Orleans and test
the constitutionality of the State laws under which the local
authorities had acted. But South Carolina and Louisiana, especially the
former, to whom Samuel Hoar was accredited, evinced themselves quite
equal to the exigency to which the presence of the Massachusetts agents
gave rise. To cut a long story short, these gentlemen, honored citizens
of a sister State, and covered with the aegis of the Constitution, found
that they could make no success of the business which they had in hand,
found indeed that as soon as that business was made public that they
stood in imminent peril of their lives.
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