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Representatives, communicated to them by massage from Mr. Van Buren himself, this original, erroneous, uncorrected order of the 7th of January, 1840, was the only one included in the communication.
But in the confidential answer of the Secretary of State of the 12th of January to the inquiries of the Marshal, he says, "I have to stated by direction of the President, that if the decision of the Court is such as is anticipated, (that is, that the captives should be delivered up as slaves,) the order of the President is to be carried into execution, unless an appeal shall actually have been interposed, you are not to take it for granted that it will be interposed.  And if on the contrary the decision of the Court is different, you are to take out an appeal, and allow things to remain as they are until the appeal shall have been decided."  The very phraseology of this instruction is characteristic of its origin, and might have dispensed the Secretary of State from the necessity of stating that it emanated from the President himself.  The inquiry of the Marshal was barefaced enough ; whether, if the Executive warrant and the judicial decree should come in direct conflict with each other, it was expected that he should obey the President, or the Judge?  No ! says the Secretary of State.  If the decree of the Judge should be in our favor, and you can steal a march upon the negroes by foreclosing their right of appeal, ship them off without mercy and without delay : and if the decree should be in their favor, fail not to enter an instantaneous appeal to the Supreme Court where the chances may be more hostile to self-emancipated slaves.
Was ever such a scene of Liliputian trickery enacted by the rules of a great, magnanimous, and Christian nation?  Contrast it with the act of self-emancipation by which the savage, heathen barbarians Cinque and Grabeau liberated themselves and their fellow suffering countrymen from Spanish slave-traders, and which the Secretary of State, by communion of sympathy with Ruiz and Montes, denominates lawless violence.  Cinque and Grabeau are uncouth and barbarous names.  Call them Harmodius and Aristogiton, and go back for moral principle three thousand years to the fierce and glorious democracy of Athens.  They too resorted to lawless violence, and slew the tyrant to redeem the freedom of their country.  For this heroic action they paid the forfeit of their lives : but within three years of the Athenians expel-


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led their tyrants themselves, and in gratitude to their self-devoted deliverers decreed, that thenceforth no slave should ever bear either of their names.  Cinque and Grabeau are not slaves.  Let them bear in future history the names of Harmodius and Aristogiton.
This review of all the proceedings of the Executive I have made with the utmost pain, because it was necessary to bring it fully before your Honors, to show that the course of that department had been dictated, throughout, not by justice but by sympathy—and a sympathy the most partial and unjust.  And this sympathy prevailed to such a degree, among all the persons concerned in this business, as to have perverted their minds with regard to all the most sacred principles of law and right, on which the liberties of the people of the United States are founded ; and a course was pursued, from the beginning to the end, which was not only an outrage upon the persons whose lives and liberties were at stake, but hostile to the power and independence of the judiciary itself.
I am now, may it please your Honors, obliged to call the attention of the Court to a very improper paper, in relation to this case, which was published in the Official Journal of the Executive Administration, on the very day of the meeting of this Court, and introduced with a commendatory notice by the editor, as the production of one of the brightest intellects of the South.  I know not who is the author, but it appeared with the almost official sanction, on the day of meeting of this Court.  It purports to be a review of the present case.  The writer begins by referring to the decision of the District Court, and says the case is "one of the deepest importance to the southern states."  I ask, may it please your Honors, is that an appeal to JUSTICE?  What have the southern states to do with the case, or what has the case to do with the southern states?  The case, as far as it is known to the courts of this country, or cognizable by them, presents points with which the southern states have nothing to do.  It is a question of slavery and freedom between foreigners ; of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the African slave trade ; and has not, when properly considered, the remotest connection with the interests of the southern states.
What was the purpose or intent of that article, I am not prepared to say, but it was evidently calculated to excite prejudice, to arouse all the acerbities of feeling between different sections of