Giddings broke that rule by defending a slave rebellion aboard the Creole, a ship that had sailed from Virginia carrying 135 slaves to be sold in New Orleans. After seizing control of the vessel in a bloody uprising at sea, the slaves sailed for Nassau in the Bahamas, where the British colony had outlawed slavery a decade earlier.

The federal government sought to recover the slaves. Daniel Webster, then secretary of state, asserted that since they were on an American ship, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction as “private property.”

But Giddings, a staunch abolitionist who subsequently became a Republican, argued “that the persons on board [the Creole], in resuming their natural rights of personal liberty violated no law of the United States, incurred no legal penalty, and are justly liable to no penalty.” The United States had no right to “regain possession of, or to re-enslave” those aboard the Creole, he said; any attempt to do so would reflect American complicity with the (illegal) international slave trade.

The House declined to vote on Giddings’s resolutions and censured him instead. Giddings resigned in protest later that day. On May 5, 1842, his constituents overwhelmingly voted for him in a special election called to fill his own vacancy. He thereupon re-assumed his chairmanship of the House Committee on Claims.

Giddings died in Montreal in 1864, at age 67, while serving as the U.S. consul general in Canada during the U.S. Civil War.

SOURCE: OFFICE OF HISTORY AND PRESERVATION, CLERK OF THE U.S. HOUSE