Such an injustice cannot be restricted in influence. Everywhere it is an extension of Slavery, with all the wrong, violence, and brutality which are the natural outgrowth of Slavery. The Free States became little better than a huge outlying plantation quivering under the lash of the overseer; or rather, they were a diversified hunting-ground for the flying bondmen, resounding always with the “halloo” of the huntsman. There seemed no rest. The chase was hardly over at Boston before it was started at Philadelphia, Syracuse, or Buffalo, and then again raged furiously across the prairies of the West. Not an instance occurred which did not shock the conscience of the country and sting it with anger. Records of the time attest the accuracy of this statement. Perhaps there is no example in history where human passion showed itself in grander forms, or eloquence lent all her gifts more completely to the demands of Liberty, than the speech of an eminent character, now dead and buried in a foreign land,[373] denouncing the capture of Thomas Sims at Boston, and invoking the judgment of God and man upon the agents in this wickedness. In the history of Humanity this great effort cannot be forgotten. But every case pleaded with an eloquence of its own, until, at last, occurred one of those tragedies darkening the heavens and crying out with a voice that will be heard. It was the voice of a mother standing over her murdered child. Margaret Garner escaped from Slavery with three children, but was overtaken at Cincinnati. Unwilling to behold her offspring returned to the shambles of the South, this unhappy person, described in the testimony as “a womanly, amiable, affectionate mother,” determined to save them in the only way within her power. With a butcher-knife, coolly and deliberately, she took the life of one of the children, “almost white, and a little girl of rare beauty,” and attempted, without success, to take the life of the other two. To the preacher who interrogated her she exclaimed: “The child was my own, given me of God to do the best a mother could in its behalf. I have done the best I could; I would have done more and better for the rest; I knew it was better for them to go home to God than back to Slavery.” But she was restrained in her purpose. The Fugitive Slave Act triumphed, and, after the determination of sundry questions of jurisdiction, this devoted historic mother, with the two children remaining to her, and the dead body of the little one just emancipated, under a national escort of armed men, was hurried to the doom of Slavery. Her case did not end with this revolting sacrifice. So long as the human heart is moved by human suffering, the story of this mother will be read with alternate anger and grief, while it is studied as a perpetual witness to the slaveholding tyranny which then ruled the Republic with execrable exactions, destined at last to break out in war,--as the sacrifice of Virginia by her father is a