The Arkansas State Democrat, And Helena Commercial Advertiser

POLITICAL

From the Globe.

IDENTITY OF BRITISH WHIGGERY AND ABOLITIONISM.

We have already stated, that the Federalists and Abolitionists of the Legislature of the State of New York, at its recent session, as a further and closing pledge of their complete union, enacted a law to grant the trial by jury to runaway slaves, against the votes and voices of all the Democratic members, thus practically rendering nugatory that clause of the Constitution of the United States which provides that fugitive slaves from another State shall be given up to the persons to whom their service shall belong. We were hardly prepared to believe that the Federal majority of the New York Legislature, which proposed and created this law, would have deemed it politic to make it the subject of open boasting; but it seems that in this particular we were mistaken. In the address of the British Whigs of the New York Legislature, signed by every member of that party, and issued to the people of that State, at its close, we find the following boastful demonstration of their fidelity to the views, and anxiety for the votes, of Northern Abolitionists:

"The trial by jury, the great security of civil rights, and the distinguishing principle of Republican government, has been extended to the cases of persons arrested in this State, and claimed as fugitives from service. This law has been framed upon the great principle of State rights, the authority of a sovereign State to regulate the action of its own courts. We have also passed a law enabling and directing the Executive to resist the pretended and arrest the freedom of any citizen of this State kidnapped and carried out of our borders into slavery. Thus it happens that the very first year that the Federalists obtained a majority in both branches of the legislature of New York, they made to the Abolitionists a most important concession—One for which they had so long petitioned in vain in former years, when the Legislature was differently constituted. Hereafter, New York will be the great asylum for the runaway negroes of the Southern States: for the law of which its British Whig fathers thus vauntingly speak, provides that the jurors summoned to try the right of the master, must be unanimous before the judge can order the slave to be delivered up to his master; and with the spirit of Abolitionism, which infects all the elements of the Northern Whiggery, it would be most extraordinary if, in any case, the sheriff's panel of jurors should exhibit less than three or four Abolition or Federal Whigs, whose consciences, no matter how convincing the testimony, would not permit them to find for the master. We repeat that an express provision of the Constitution, of vital importance to the slaveholding States, has been practically repealed by a Federal Legislature of the largest State of the Union. Heretofore, when the right of the master depended upon the adjudication of the judges of the Empire State, according to State laws enacted by former Republican Legislatures, Southern owners of fugitive slaves in New York felt assured that nothing but competent evidence of title and identity was essential to the recovery of their property. It is this very act, this very disposition, ever evinced by the judicial officers, with good faith to carry into effect the spirit of the constitution, which has induced the Abolitionists of New York, year after year, to importune the Legislature to transfer the power of determining the right of property from judges to a jury; and now, in the very first year of the complete ascendency of the British whigs in the legislature of that great State, a concession is made to the Abolitionists, so subversive of the constitutional rights and interests of the South. Is there an honest slaveholding Federalist south of the Potomac, who still remains blind to the spirit and purposes of the men at the North with whom he is acting? Can any honest, inquiring mind of the South be longer deceived as to the point, which party at the North embodies its true friends? If they are still skeptical on this subject, they would not believe, "if one should rise from the dead."