and time to procure evidence of his ownership.  But worse still Massachusetts officials and one of her jails were employed to aid in the return of a man to slavery.  This degradation aroused the greatest indignation in the State and led to the enactment of a law prohibiting its officials from taking part in 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 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.  Whereupon, wisely conceiving discretion to be the better part of valor, they beat a hasty retreat back to their native air.  The Massachusetts agents were driven out of Charleston and New Orleans.  Where was the sacred and glorious union between Massachusetts