On page 137 I have alluded to Hon. J. G. Palfrey. He evinced his
respect for the rights of man by an act which was incomparably more
significant and convincing than the most eloquent words could have
been. On the death of his father, who was a slaveholder in Louisiana,
he became heir to one third of the estate, comprising about fifty
slaves. His co-heirs would readily have taken his share of these
chattels and have given him an equivalent in land or money. But he
was too conscientious to consent to such a bargain. If his portion of
his father’s bondmen should thereafter continue in slavery, it must
be by an act of his own will, and involve him in the crime of making
merchandise of men. From this his whole soul revolted. Accordingly,
he requested that such a division of the slaves might be made as
would put the largest number of them into his share. The money value
of the women, children, and old men being much less than that of the
able-bodied men, twenty-two of the slaves were assigned to him. I
presume their market value could not have been less than nine thousand
dollars. All of them were brought on, at Mr. Palfrey’s expense, from
Louisiana to Massachusetts.
Assisted by his Abolitionist friends, especially Mrs. L. M. Child,
Mrs. E. G. Loring, and the Hathaways of Farmington, N. Y., and their
Quaker friends, he succeeded after a while in getting them all well
situated in good families, where the old were kindly cared for, the
able-bodied adults were employed and duly remunerated for their labors,
and the young were brought up to be worthy and useful. It has been my
happiness to be personally acquainted with some of them and their
friends, and to know that what I have stated above is true. Their
transportation from Louisiana to Massachusetts; their maintenance here
until places were found for them; and their removal to their several
homes, must have cost Mr. Palfrey several hundred dollars,--I suppose
eight or ten hundred. If so, he nobly sacrificed ten thousand dollars’
worth of his patrimony to his sense of right and his love of liberty.
In 1847 this excellent man was elected a Representative of
Massachusetts in the Congress of the United States. As those who knew
him best confidently expected, he early took high antislavery ground
there.
The following are extracts from his first speech in Congress: “The
question is not at all between North and South, but between the many
millions of non-slaveholding Americans, North, South, East, and West,
and the very few hundreds of thousands of their fellow-citizens who
hold slaves. It is time that this idea of a geographical distinction
of parties, with relation to this subject, was abandoned. It has no
substantial foundation. Freedom, with its fair train of boundless
blessings for white and black,--slavery, with its untold miseries for
both,--these are the two parties in the field.... I will now only
express my deliberate and undoubting conviction, that the time has
quite gone by when the friends of slavery might hope anything from an
attempt to move the South to disunion for its defence.... I do not
believe it is good policy for the slaveholders to let their neighbors
hear them talk of disunion. Unless I read very stupidly the signs of
the times, _it will not be the Union they will thus endanger, but the
interest to which they would sacrifice it_. If they insist that the
Union and slavery cannot live together, they may be taken at their
word, but IT IS THE UNION THAT MUST STAND.”
At its close, the Hon. J. Q. Adams is reported to have exclaimed:
“Thank God the seal is broken! Lord, now lettest thou thy servant
depart in peace.” And “the old man eloquent” died at his post a month
afterwards.