there is no fiction or romance about it. A commissioner who could bring
himself down to send a _man_ to 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 ungodly
counsel 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 new territories, 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 state _additional_ to 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 result every
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 of pestilence, 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 we _ever_ grant 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 domestic
Edens. 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, to corrupt 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 misnomer to 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
Areopagus of 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 “the
UNKNOWN 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 of _habeas 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
court_ of 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.
SPEECH
DELIVERED, ON TAKING THE CHAIR, AS PRESIDENT OF THE GREAT MASS
CONVENTION, CALLED, WITHOUT DISTINCTION OF PARTY, IN OPPOSITION TO THE
FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW, AND HELD AT THE TREMONT TEMPLE IN BOSTON, APRIL 8,
1851.[24]
GENTLEMEN OF THE CONVENTION;
I thank you cordially for the honor of being called to this place;
though I could have wished that your choice had fallen upon some one of
the many more meritorious men whom I see all around me.
Gentlemen, I have come here to-day to add my feeble voice to the
thunder tones of execration against the Fugitive Slave law, with which
every free state in this Union, and every free community upon the
earth, are now echoing and reëchoing.
I do not propose to occupy your attention long. Where so many things
are to be said, and so many persons, far better qualified than I am,
are present to say them, I shall consult at once your advantage and my
duty, by being brief.
We have come together with especial reference to the Fugitive Slave
law; but that execrable statute connects itself so directly with almost
every other prominent measure of the government, and with the leading
acts of our public men, during the past year, that it opens the whole
subject of human liberty, and our duty, as freemen, in regard to human
rights. Especially does it behoove us to inquire, by what means, by
whose instrumentality, the country has been instigated to this treason
against the rights of men, and when we may expect their machinations
will be brought to an end.
Some of our official dignitaries are giving us law lectures on the
subject of high treason against the government. I hope they will not
object, if we reciprocate the favor, by giving them a lecture on the
higher treason against God and humanity, of which they are guilty.
Gentlemen, it is with unspeakable humiliation and regret that I look
back and see where Massachusetts stood twelve or thirteen months ago,
and where so many of her citizens stand now. Up to that ever-accursed
day, the 7th of March, 1850, there was not a Massachusetts man, in
the councils of the state or nation;--nay, so far as I know, there
was not a single Massachusetts man any where, of any standing or
respectability, who did not assert and proclaim his hostility to
the extension of slavery; his purpose to maintain at all times the
principle of the ordinance of 1787; and his “resolute and fixed
determination,” (to use Mr. Webster’s language,) “to make no further
concessions to slavery and the slave power.” The public men of the
state, the press of the state, the legislature of the state, avowed
these sentiments; and the political conventions of the state rang with
these declarations from side to side.
But on that ever-memorable day a senator of the United States, from
Massachusetts, saw fit to trample under foot every thing that he
had ever said in behalf of human freedom and against human bondage.
He saw fit to curl his lip and to intonate his voice in scorn of
the principle of the ordinance of 1787, and to dishonor the memory
of Nathan Dane, whom, a few years before, on the same spot, he had
eulogized. He saw fit to contemn what he knew to be the honest
sentiments of Massachusetts. He went far, far out of his way, to
fortify and extend the institution of slavery. He offered to add new
states to its power, and to take two hundred millions of dollars
from the treasury of the United States, to be expended for its
extra-constitutional security and defence.
I shall not dwell upon the perfidious nature of that deed, nor upon
the obvious motive that prompted it. I will rather advert to the
measures which have since been taken to corrupt the public sentiment of
Massachusetts, and of the whole north, and to bring over the people,
some to a palliation and others to a full indorsement of it.
As soon as the stunning effect of that treacherous blow upon all
the moral and religious sensibilities of the state, and upon its
traditional and inwrought love of liberty, had begun to subside, a
systematic effort was commenced to debauch the patriotism and humanity
of the people, by an appeal to their cupidity. Our manufacturing
and commercial interests were suffering. A majority of the slave
states were the antagonists of these interests. Political ambition
and mercantile cupidity associated these two facts together, and the
flagitious idea was engendered that by surrendering our liberty we
might have a tariff. The poison of this idea was first openly and
directly infused into the public mind by Mr. Webster, in his speech at
the Revere House, April 29th, 1850, when he said, “Neither you nor I
shall see the legislation of the country proceed in the old harmonious
way until the discussions in Congress and out of Congress upon the
subject to which you have alluded, [slavery,] shall be in some way
suppressed. Take this truth home with you, and take it as truth. Until
something can be done to allay the feeling now separating different
men and different sections, there can be NO USEFUL AND SATISFACTORY
legislation in the two houses of Congress.”