Excerpt from Twentieth Annual Report: Presented to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, by Its Board of Managers, January 28, 1852, With an Appendix

Dana, Jr., Esq, who were the Counsel of the accused in all these cases, distinguished themselves by the zeal, industry, and talent, which they brought to their work.

These trials were of the deeper interest to all who watch intelligently the bearings and remoter issues of contemporary events, from their being the first, within the memory of most men on the stage, in which the Government evinced a strong partizan feeling against the accused. The Vindication of the Fugitive Slave Law, and of the conduct of the Government at the time of this occurrence, most earnestly demanded a Victim. For almost the first time in our history, the sufliciency of the trial by jury, and of the other safeguards which the wisdom of past time has sought to throw around the liberty of the citizen when con fronted with an incensed government, were brought to the test of actual experiment. One of the main objects which the assertors of free gov ernments have ever professed to have in View has been the pure and impartial administration of justice. In England, especially, the efforts to surround the tribunals of the law with such circumstances as should make the Judge inaccessible to temptation and above the breath of suspicion, have been unceasing. Indeed, the whole course of English Constitutional history is marked by these attempts, and its different periods may be distinguished by them as the monuments of its progress. This just and salutary jealousy was inherited by their sons, our anecs-f tors, and the danger to liberty through the undue influence of the Crown over the Judges was one main motive-spring of the Revolution. The influence, direct and indirect, of power over law has always been watched with close scrutiny by all who were jealous for the preserva tion of inherited or acquired securities of liberty, or earnest to achieve them. The best of laws are nugatory when their administration is left at the mercy of time-serving or power-swayed judges. It was to guard against this abuse of the law by the administrators of the law that the anglo-saxon race have made the Trial by Jury a part and parcel of their institutions wherever they have transplanted themselves. It is an appeal, in the last resort, from the glosses of legal ingenuity, the chicanery of the Bar or of the Bench, to the common sense of the common people, having the same interest in the preservation of the purity of the administration of justice as its higher and lower oflicials, without the bias either might, in times of great political pressure, feel towards the predominant power in the State.

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