If general, it may be said that its authors were the representatives of Slavery, constituting that same Oligarchy, or Slave Power, which has madly plunged this country into civil war. Some of them, even at the time of its enactment, were already engaged in treasonable conspiracy against the Union. They thought little of any pretended interests in property; but they were occupied with two controlling ideas: first, how to unite their own people at home; and, secondly, how to insult and subjugate the Free States. The Fugitive Slave Act furnished a convenient agency for this double purpose, and was naturally adopted by men who had lost the power of blushing as well as the power of feeling. Unquestionable facts show how little real occasion there was for this barbarous statute. It is now established by the report of the census in 1860, that the loss of slaves by escape was trivial. According to this document, “the whole annual loss to the Southern States from this cause bears less proportion to the amount of capital involved than the daily variations which, in ordinary times, occur in the fluctuations of State or Government securities in the city of New York alone.”[374] Such a statement is most suggestive. Official tables furnish confirmatory details. From these it appears that during the year ending June 1, 1860, out of 3,949,557 slaves, only 803 were able to escape, being one to about five thousand, or at the rate of one fiftieth of one per cent. Then again, out of more than one million of slaves in the Border States in 1860, fewer than five hundred escaped. Such are authentic facts. Nor is this all. The slave who succeeded in escaping, even when reënslaved, was never afterwards regarded as good property. All the work he could do would not compensate for his bad example. Jefferson Davis, in the frankness of an address to his constituents at home in Mississippi, on the 11th July, 1851, said openly that he did not want any fugitive slaves sent into his State; that “such stock would be a curse to the land,--for, with the knowledge they had gained, they would ruin the rest of the slaves, and very probably give rise to the most dreadful consequences”; and he concluded by announcing, that “he would not have in his quarters a negro brought from the North on any account whatever.”[375] And yet, in face of such authentic facts, showing how few escaped, and in face of an instinctive repugnance to any commingling with other slaves by those who had once tasted Liberty, this atrocious statute was enacted, and its enforcement was maintained at the point of the bayonet, while Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War.