FOOTNOTES:

“O, who can paint a sunbeam to the blind,Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?”

“O, who can paint a sunbeam to the blind,

Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?”

Fellow-citizens, I might occupy your attention much longer upon this unprecedented opinion of the commissioner; but there are two or three other topics to which I wish to call your attention, and I therefore forbear. In saying what I have said, I disclaim all personal ill will or discourtesy towards that magistrate. Even should I appear not to have succeeded in suppressing my own feelings, I certainly cannot wound his more than he has wounded mine, and those I believe of nine tenths of all who have ever read his opinion;—not by a thousand fold as much as he has wounded the law, whose servant he is, or the fair fame of Massachusetts, of which he is a citizen; not so much as his decision will wound the hearts of an intelligent posterity, who shall look back upon it as a partisan and an ignoble act, not to be remembered without a sigh.

If the legal relations of slavery did not sustain the moral ones, as the root sustains the branches and nourishes the fruit, those moral relations would seem to demand all our attention. I know but comparatively little, and no man living at the north can know but comparatively little, of the various and ever-repeated wickednesses of this institution. It has been my lot, however, to live for about half the time, during the last four years, in the midst of a milder form of slavery. And besides this, I was once engaged for about six weeks in the trial of causes growing directly out of slavery; and that experience gave me some insight into its dreadful mysteries. For a moment, the wind blew the smoke and flame aside, and I looked into its hell. I saw, then, as I had never seen before, what a vital and inextinguishable interest every human being has in this subject;—not the slaves alone, but the free men; not voters only, but all who can be affected by votes; not men only, but especially women.

For this reason, I am glad to see so many ladies inthis audience. It becomes them to be here. If any mortal should cultivate an abhorrence of slavery, the female sex should do it. Whatever any one may hold to be the social relation between free women and slave women, yet before God and Christ, and all the holy angels, they belong to the same sisterhood of the human race. They are your sisters. And what is the condition of these your sisters, in regard to everything that a virtuous and noble woman holds most sacred and dear?

Ladies, there are now in this land of pretended freedom and pretended gospel a million and a half of women who have no practical knowledge of what a woman’s higher life should be, or what a woman’s most precious rights are. Since the Declaration of Independence, the number of slaves in this country has increased from less than five hundred thousand to more than three millions; and before the close of this century, their descendants will increase to more than thrice three millions. And yet, neither as to the living nor as to the dead, has there ever been a lawful marriage among them all. There has never been a man slave who could say, “This is my wife, heart of my heart, and life of my life, and no mortal power shall pluck her from my side.” There has never been a woman slave who could say, “This is my lawful, wedded husband, whom I promise to love and cherish, and to whom I vow inviolable constancy.” “For this cause,” says Christ, “shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.” But the “twain” of slaves are never one. And even when any sham ceremony is observed, to distinguish this holy relation of husband and wife from the cohabitations of beasts, and he who officiates comes to those other words of Christ, “What, therefore, God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he stops; for he knows, and they all know,that a few dollars, at any time, will bring bereavement upon both,—a double bereavement, he a widower and she a widow, both still surviving. Their life, at best, is but a life of concubinage;—not even that concubinage, which, though not founded upon a lawful contract, has still something like conjugal fidelity in it, and therefore a semblance of virtue; but a various and vagrant concubinage, traversing the circle of overseer, master, master’s guests, and master’s sons. The fate of the children born to the slave mother you all know. Those objects upon which all maternal affections meet and glow as in a focus, are torn from her bosom, like lambs from the flock when the shambles are empty.

And as to those females who are young, sprightly, and handsome:—

Charge me not with indelicacy in touching upon this theme.Honi soit qui mal y pense.I speak not to fastidious ears, but to the pure in heart, to whom all things are pure. I speak of eternal verities, before whose massive force the heart trembles and bows itself, as reeds before the tempest. It is the grossest and most shameless of all indelicacies to patronize and multiply vice, through pusillanimity in exposing it,—

As to those females, I say, who are young, sprightly, and handsome, whom God has damned with beauty of form and beauty of face, because they only attract the gloating eye of passion, who can describe the loathsomeness of their life? They are ripened for the New Orleans, or for some other market, whence southern harems are supplied; as, under the Mahometan religion, white Caucasian beauties are sent to the slave marts of the darker-skinned Turk.

In that company of seventy-six persons who attempted, in 1848, to escape from the District of Columbia in the schooner Pearl, and whose officers I assisted in defending, there were several young and healthygirls who had those peculiar attractions of form, of feature, and of complexion, which southern connoisseurs in sensualism so highly prize. Elizabeth Russell was one of them. She fell immediately into the slave-traders’ fangs, and was doomed for the New Orleans market. The hearts of those who saw her and foresaw her fate were touched with pity. They offered eighteen hundred dollars to redeem her, and some there were who offered to give, who would not have had much left after the gift. But the fiend of a slave trader was inexorable. He knew how he could transmute her charms into gold through the fires of sin. He demanded twenty-one hundred dollars, (though for menial services she would not have been worth more than four or five,) and would take nothing less. She was despatched to New Orleans, but when about half way there, God had mercy upon her and smote her with death. Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide. There were two girls named Edmundson in the same company. When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims. He bantered her, telling her what fine dresses and fine furniture they would have. “Yes,” said she, “that may do well in this life, but what will become of them in the next?” They, too, were sent to New Orleans, but they were afterwards redeemed at an enormous ransom, and brought back. There was one girl, who, after her recapture in the Pearl, was sold six times in seven weeks, in Maryland and Virginia, for her beauty’s sake. But she proved heroically and sublimely intractable. Like Rebecca, the Jewess, she would have flung herself from the loftiest battlement, rather than yield her person to a villain. Notwithstanding her masters’ pretence that they had bought her with their money, andowned her soul, yet she had wealth, which, though all the earth were “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” it could not buy. It was not difficult, therefore, to purchase her, and she was redeemed and came to New York; and I have been informed in the most authentic manner from the lady of the very respectable family of which she became an inmate, that, on an examination of her person, after the healing-time of the journey had passed, her body was found scarred and waled with whip marks, which the villains inflicted upon her because she would not come to their bed.

Now, suppose a sister or daughter of yours, of this heroic soul and spotless purity, should find herself on the way to New Orleans;—suppose, by almost superhuman power and adroitness, she should escape, and should thread her solitary and darksome path, for hundreds of miles, towards the north star; should lie down in caverns, with poisonous reptiles by day, and pursue her lonely journey by night, finding the beasts of the forests to be less terrible than man; should swim rivers, and keep off famine by roots and insects, until at last, thanks be to God, she sets her mangled and bleeding feet upon the soil of freedom. Perhaps some echo of the fame of the Pilgrim mothers has reached her ears. She has heard of Boston and its noble women of old, and she hies hither as to a city of refuge,—as to a sanctuary where virtue has an altar, and where she can lay down her hunted and weary body, and be at rest. Fallacious hope! The lecher pursues his prey, and he is here. He goes to some Glossin lawyer who sues out a warrant; and to some Jack Ketch who serves it. The victim is seized at midnight, under some lying charge, and she is carried before a commissioner, whose conduct, were he aquasijudge, as he pretends to be, would be enough to make every hair of the judicial ermine forever detestable. Here a process is gone through which she does not understand,and some papers are read of which she never heard, and then a judgment is pronounced that her “labor” is “due” to her pursuer, (and such labor!) that she “owes service” to him, (and such service!) and then the commissioner delivers her into his arms, and pockets a fee which common pimps would be ashamed to work for.

And, my friends, the keenest pang in the grief of all this is, that there is no fiction or romance about it. A commissioner who could bring himself down to send amanto a Georgia cotton-field under this law, the first time trying, could send a virtuous and spotless woman into enforced harlotry the second time; and the prince of darkness only knows what he could not set him to do afterwards. The clergymen who could defend the enslavers of Sims because he “owed” the “service” of one sex, could defend the enslavers of a woman because she “owed” the “service” of the other sex;—the clergymen of the rich parishes I mean;—for it happens, with the constancy of a law of nature, that it is only the clergymen of the rich parishes who do this. Do they not know how to serve and reverence their Lord and Master,—that is, their Landlord and Paymaster!

But, fellow-citizens, as our feelings are stimulated to the keenest sensibility, in looking at the infinite of wrong which slavery commits; as we see the millions and millions of human beings dimly emerging into view, and crowding down the vista of futurity to blast our eyes with the vision of their woe, a potent voice rings in our ears, exclaiming, “Conquer your prejudices,” “Conquer your prejudices.” And this execrable counsel is uttered in reference to the infinite crime and disgrace of sending into slavery, without a trial, those who are free under our laws,—the men to stripes and death, and the women to the body’s shame and the soul’s perdition. Fouler, baser, more ungodlycounsel was never uttered, since it was said to our first parents in the garden of Eden, “On the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die.”

And what is it that this long-honored eulogist of liberty, but now its great apostate, blasphemes with the name of “prejudice”? If there be one sentiment more deeply rooted in the public heart of Massachusetts than any other, more intertwined and grown together with all the fibres of its being, it is the sentiment of liberty. We have drunk it in with our mothers’ milk; we have imbibed it from all the lessons of the school-room and the teachings of the sanctuary; we have inspired it with the atmosphere we breathe, and our organs have been attuned to it from our birth, by the anthems of the mountain’s wind and the ocean’s roar. It was from the love of liberty that our earlier fathers plucked themselves up by the roots from that natal soil into which they had been fastening for centuries. For this they wandered abroad upon the ocean, deeming its ingulfing surges to be more tolerable than a tyrant’s power. For this they transplanted themselves to this land, at that time more distant and more formidable to them than any part of the habitable globe could now be to us. For this they performed the double task of enduring all privations and dangers, and at the same time of laying the foundations of all our free and glorious institutions; and as the sires were stricken down by toil and death, the sons took up the work and bore it on, generation after generation.

For this noble sentiment of liberty our later fathers encountered the perils and deaths of a seven years’ war, and amid poverty and destitution, amid hunger and cold and nakedness, without any of the protections and defences of battle which the wealth of their foe could command, they bared their noble breasts to the shock of the mailed legions of the British crown. And when the struggle was ended and the triumph won,they achieved labors of peace not less magnanimous and wonderful than their labors of war.

They were the pattern men of the world;—not aggressive, not submissive; not hostile, not servile; doing right, demanding right; they were the men who would never wield the oppressor’s rod, and would go mad at the touch of his heel.

Now, there is not one of all those glorious deeds, from the embarkation at Delfthaven to the signing of the peace of 1783, or the inauguration of the federal government in 1789, which was not begotten by the love of liberty, or would have been performed without its creative energy. And yet, the arch-apostate, standing in the city of Boston, the home of old Samuel Adams and John Hancock, within a stone’s throw of the spot where Benjamin Franklin was born, in sight of Bunker Hill, and with Lexington and Concord, as it were, just hiding themselves behind the hills for shame, calls all this a “prejudice,” and commands us to cast it from us as an unclean thing. Was it not enough to make the stones in the streets, and every block in that eternal shaft which marks the spot where Warren fell, cry out “with most miraculous organ” to rebuke him?

We have another, and it is a kindred “prejudice.” We have a “prejudice” of sixty years’ standing in favor of the principle of the ordinance of 1787. That ordinance has been cherished in our memories, it has been taught to our children, and we have displayed it before the world both as the pledge and the promise of our devotion to liberty. Five states, now numbering five millions of men, were the battalions whom that ordinance wheeled from the ranks of Belial to the Lord’s side. Hundreds of times have the Whig party and the Democratic party resolved that the principle of that ordinance should be maintained inviolate. Mr. Webster claimed the application of it to the newterritories, as his thunder, and swaggered as he rattled it. Now he calls the great achievement of Thomas Jefferson and Nathan Dane a “prejudice,” and dishonors their graves by his scoffs. He abandons the vast regions of Utah and New Mexico to the slaveholder; he gives more than fifty thousand square miles of free territory to Texas; he gives ten millions of dollars in money, (more than, with all our devotion and self-sacrifice, we have been able to appropriate to public education in Massachusetts for the last ten years;) and worse than this, he gives permission that she may carve out of her territory a slave stateadditionalto what had been unconstitutionally contracted for when she came into the Union.

And for what does he flout us, by stigmatizing all these sacred convictions and sentiments and instincts as “prejudices”? Only to feed the famine of his ambition. He began to see, what every body else has so long seen, that his vices were bringing upon him the retribution of premature old age and decrepitude; and that, unless he could enter the White House the next term, he must wait, at least until the great Julian period should bring the world round again. He parleyed with southern tempters, and fell.

Nor did he outrage our feelings only. He sacrificed our pecuniary interests, our very means of subsistence. Massachusetts would be prospering under an improved system of protection for our domestic industry to-day, but for Mr. Webster’s apostasy, which stripped us of all our power and of all our unity, and inflamed the spirit of southern aggrandizement to demand every thing and yield nothing. Could the issue be now formed, and the case tried, whether Daniel Webster’s course in 1850 did not deprive the working-men of the country of a tariff for the protection of their labor, not an intelligent and impartial jury could be found that would not bring him in guilty. This resultevery unbiased man at Washington saw, last summer; while he was cajoling the men of the north with the delusion that, if they would surrender liberty, they should have their reward in a tariff. I speak of this with confidence, because there are hundreds of my constituents and acquaintances who will bear me witness that, in personal interviews, and by correspondence, they were warned, that if they followed Mr. Webster in his recreancy to principles, he would leave them without relief in the matter of property.

Fellow-citizens, I will trespass upon your attention but for a moment longer. I wish to advance one idea for the consideration of all sober, moral, and religious men; and when this idea is duly considered, I trust to its working a revolution in public sentiment. In selecting men to be our political leaders, we have sometimes committed the gravest moral error. We have assumed the falsity of a distinction between a man’s public and his private life. We have supposed that the same individual might be a bad man and a good citizen; might be a patriot and an inebriate, a faithful officer and a debauchee, at the same time; might serve his country during “office hours,” and the powers of darkness the rest of the twenty-four. But I say, as of old, no man can serve God and mammon.

We have been too prone to judge of men by their professions and by their connections. We seem to have forgotten that the tree is to be known by its fruit, and a man by his life. If we are to take the Pharisee’s rule, and determine a man’s piety by his creed, and by the number and length of his prayers, then piety will be the cheapest thing in the market, and as worthless as it is cheap.

In choosing teachers to be the guides and exemplars of our children, we demand high moral worth; and we would as soon thrust our youth into the centre ofpestilence, as amid the contagion of vicious and profligate men.

In selecting our religious guides, we feel almost justified in being captiously and morbidly critical; we hardly admit that we can be strict to a fault; and the man who fails to carry personal purity and exemplariness into the pastoral life, is driven from it with indignation and contempt.

I admit too, rejoicingly, that, in Massachusetts, this preventive and praiseworthy discipline has been more extensively applied to political men than in any other state in the Union. Our highest state offices have been filled for years, saving very rare exceptions, with men of distinguished probity and a spotless life. And why, in this department, should weevergrant dispensations and absolutions; or, like the old popes, sell indulgences to sin?

Now, let this doctrine be applied; for I hold it to be no unwarrantable invasion of private character to apply these principles to public men. When public men openly and notoriously practise vice, they make the vice public, and bring it within public jurisdiction. If it is public for example, it is public for criticism; and, under such circumstances, the moral and religious guides of the community are as solemnly bound “truly to find, and due presentment make,” of these offences, as the grand jury is in the case of crimes against the laws of the land. I say, therefore, let us apply this doctrine.

How long have all good citizens in Massachusetts labored in the glorious cause of temperance! They have devoted time, expended talent, lavished money, incurred obloquy; but, as their reward, they have plucked the guilty from perdition; rescued the young, just losing their balance over the precipice of ruin; saved the widow and the fatherless from unutterable woe, and driven demons of discord from domesticEdens. Now why, after all our toils and sacrifices to uphold and carry forward the cause of temperance, and to make its name as honorable as it is blessed; why should we demolish all our work by elevating a man to a high political station, or by upholding him when in it, who, in the face of the nation and of the world, will become so drunken that he cannot articulate his mother tongue? Is this an example you desire to set before the ingenuous and aspiring youth of the land; ay, before your own children?

We have had men in the presidential chair not without faults and blemishes of character; but hitherto we may proudly say, that we never have had one there who drowned his reason in his cups. God grant that we never may. Think of this magnificent ship of state freighted with twenty-three millions of souls, and laden to the scuppers with the wealth of the world’s hopes, with a pilot at the helm—drunk!

We are an industrious and a frugal people. The aptitude is born with us. A true Massachusetts boy seems to take to ingenious labor and to labor-saving contrivances from his birth,—like a duck almost impatient to be hatched, that it may get into the water. We prize and honor the home-bred virtues of diligence and thrift; for they bestow upon us all our comforts, the means of educating our children, and leave us a magnificent surplus for godlike charities to be scattered over the world.

Dr. Franklin has stamped a family likeness upon us all. His economical wisdom is domesticated among us. Take a sound and pure specimen of a Massachusetts farmer or mechanic, and analyze him, and you will find that, of his whole composition, from six to ten ounces in the pound is made up of Dr. Franklin. Now, why should we root out this luxuriant, fruit-bearing virtue? Why welcome and court and feed the prodigalities and sensualities of the old world, tocorrupt the pristine virtues of the new? Can he be a republican after the severe simplicity and grandeur of the old Roman type; can he be an exemplary citizen, who must have his thirty, forty, or even fifty thousand dollars a year, to squander upon what I must not call, “to ears polite,” his vices and passions, but, more genteelly, “his tastes and feelings,” while millions of honest laborers thank God if by incessant toil they can earn their daily bread for their families, and the bread of knowledge for their children? Can they be good citizens, or, at least, are they not grievously deluded, who will give such purses to such a man for being the advocate and agent of their special interests, while there are hundreds of suffering men and women, and more suffering children, at their own doors? Do you want your children to grow up inflamed by such examples of excess and wantonness? I know that all this is defended on the ground that something must be done for a great man’s family.Ay, that family!The progeny and costliness of the vices, what Californias shall be able to support? I know, too, that it is also said we must have great talents in the public councils, at whatever price. Well, if this be your philosophy, don’t do the work by halves, but import Lucifer at once!

Now, fellow-citizens, you know that all the men who are guilty of these great derelictions from civil and social duty are the men who uphold the Fugitive Slave law.

I might touch upon more holy relations in life; upon virtues without which there is no home and no domestic sanctuary; without which there may be children, but the sacred institution of the family is gone. But I forbear. I only desire to awaken your attention to the great duty of extending the domain of conscience over politics; of holding public men answerable for those vices which it is a great misnomerto call private when they are committed in the face of the world. “The pulpit is false to its trust” if it does not follow and rebuke them, under whatever robes of official dignity they may hold their revels.

Three great stages of development belong to the world. First, there was the period of physical development, when the tallest man was crowned king, when the strongest muscles enacted the laws, when brute force was “His Royal Majesty,” and claimed and received the homage of mankind. That age has passed; and how contemptible does all its greatness now appear! Then came the age when the mind towered above the body, when a nation’s power no longer consisted in the millions of its men, but in the treasuries of its knowledge; when the intellect took up the vastest concentrations of animal strength, which seemed omnipotent before, lifted them off their fulcrum, and they became like a feather, in the breath of its power. That age is the present. The moral age is yet to be ushered in. In this age, the intellectual forces shall still retain all their dominion and supremacy over the physical world, but the moral shall preside over the intellectual, and move them as God moves the stars, bringing them out of chaos, and wheeling them in circuits of unimaginable grandeur, and for purposes of beneficence yet inconceivable. In that day, the lawgivers of the land shall be no longer “compromisers” between duty and mammon, and the judges shall judge in righteousness. In that day, the merchant, for the lucre of trade, shall not pay tribute in human beings, and send his flesh-tax across the free waters. In that day, the gospel of human brotherhood, of doing as we would be done by, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves, shall no longer be doled out to us by priests of the broad phylactery sort, in homœopathic doses, reduced to the five hundredth dilution. But in that glorious day, the men who sit in the Areopagusof the nation, clothed with the ermine of the law, shall be, as the heathen of old figured the emblem of Justice, blind in the outward eye; and all they know of color shall be to give no color to the law. In that day the successors of St. Paul shall preach what he preached, when standing “in the midst of Mars Hill,”—a God of equity, of righteousness, of justice, of benevolence; the God who made “of one blood all nations of men,” who, alas! to so many in our day is “theunknown God.”

In that day, when a whole people are aroused to ponder, with unwonted intensity, upon the great principles for which Sidney and Vane bled; for which Hampden smote the tyrant of his day; for which the heroes of the revolution pledged fortune, life, and sacred honor; no voice shall strive to seduce them from their sacred work by its Belial cry, “Conquer your prejudices!”

Fellow-citizens, if you wish to coöperate in bringing on this glorious era, your first step is to vote for that noble man who ransomed his own slaves,—John G. Palfrey.

FOOTNOTES:[21]It is substantially conceded by the supreme court of Massachusetts, in delivering their opinion on the application of Sims for a writ ofhabeas corpus, that the Fugitive Slave law stands upon precedent alone, and is disowned by principle. Chief Justice Shaw says,—“At the same time it may be proper to say, that if this argument, drawn from the constitution of the United States, were now first applied to the law of 1793, deriving no sanction from contemporaneous construction, judicial precedent, and the acquiescence of the general and state governments, the argument from the limitation of judicial power would be entitled to very grave consideration.”I submit that the precedents, on this subject, both legislative and judicial, are substantially divested of all their force, by the fewness of the cases that have ever arisen under the law, by the general obsoleteness into which it fell, and, more than all, by that uniform indifference and neglect, and I may add inhumanity, with which colored people and the rights of colored people, have been almost universally regarded in the different states of the Union.[22]Mr. George T. Curtis.[23]I object to Mr. Curtis’s calling the county commissioners “the courtof county commissioners.” They are nowhere so called in the act creating them, or in the act defining their duties. On the contrary, they are expressly contradistinguished from the “court of common pleas,” which is a court. This may have been an inadvertence, but it shows how he mistook the nature of their powers.

[21]It is substantially conceded by the supreme court of Massachusetts, in delivering their opinion on the application of Sims for a writ ofhabeas corpus, that the Fugitive Slave law stands upon precedent alone, and is disowned by principle. Chief Justice Shaw says,—“At the same time it may be proper to say, that if this argument, drawn from the constitution of the United States, were now first applied to the law of 1793, deriving no sanction from contemporaneous construction, judicial precedent, and the acquiescence of the general and state governments, the argument from the limitation of judicial power would be entitled to very grave consideration.”I submit that the precedents, on this subject, both legislative and judicial, are substantially divested of all their force, by the fewness of the cases that have ever arisen under the law, by the general obsoleteness into which it fell, and, more than all, by that uniform indifference and neglect, and I may add inhumanity, with which colored people and the rights of colored people, have been almost universally regarded in the different states of the Union.

“At the same time it may be proper to say, that if this argument, drawn from the constitution of the United States, were now first applied to the law of 1793, deriving no sanction from contemporaneous construction, judicial precedent, and the acquiescence of the general and state governments, the argument from the limitation of judicial power would be entitled to very grave consideration.”

I submit that the precedents, on this subject, both legislative and judicial, are substantially divested of all their force, by the fewness of the cases that have ever arisen under the law, by the general obsoleteness into which it fell, and, more than all, by that uniform indifference and neglect, and I may add inhumanity, with which colored people and the rights of colored people, have been almost universally regarded in the different states of the Union.

[22]Mr. George T. Curtis.

[23]I object to Mr. Curtis’s calling the county commissioners “the courtof county commissioners.” They are nowhere so called in the act creating them, or in the act defining their duties. On the contrary, they are expressly contradistinguished from the “court of common pleas,” which is a court. This may have been an inadvertence, but it shows how he mistook the nature of their powers.

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