Chapter XXII: Letter II: To the Editors of the Boston Atlas; (10)

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.”

Of this declaration there can be but one interpretation. It was perfectly understood by those to whom it was addressed. It says, without enigma or riddle, surrender the territories to the incursions of the slave states, pacify the slave power, give up blood-bought rights for this life, and Savior-bought hopes for another, and you can have your pay in a cent a yard on calico, and a cent a pound on iron. And, as a means of accomplishing this object, it says the discussion of the slavery question must be “_suppressed_.”

From that time until the close of the last session of Congress, in every form in which so intrinsically wicked an idea could be set forth without shocking not only all principle, but all decency, this idea was inculcated upon the public mind of the north, especially upon the cities. In unofficial speeches and letters, Mr. Webster urged this seduction more and more pointedly and earnestly, until, on the 17th of July, 1850, in the last speech which he ever made in Congress, he appealed to the senators of the north, and to the people of the north, in language as explicit as he could make it, to adopt the compromise measures, to take even the abhorred Fugitive Slave bill itself, for the sake of the money to be made out of them. Throughout that speech he held out the apple of temptation before their eyes, he jingled the thirty pieces of silver in their ears, to seduce them into the surrender of liberty for pelf.

I appeal to the common knowledge of the citizens of Boston, if, during the last summer, it was not an expression as familiar to their lips as the salutations of the day, that they had Mr. Webster’s authority for saying, that if they would surrender the great questions involved in the compromise, they could have a tariff.

Now, on this state of facts, I have two observations to make,--

1st. That a proposition to barter or to jeopard the liberty of our fellow-beings for any amount of money, however great, was intrinsically inhuman and wicked.

2d. That every new concession we made to the south on the subject of slavery, for the sake of getting protection for our manufactures and other industrial interests, only impaired and postponed our chance of getting that protection.

For the correctness of the first of these propositions, I appeal to every man who has a conscience, or even any elementary ideas of right or wrong, which are not smothered by his interests or his passions. And for the second, I appeal to the case of Texas which defeated the tariff of ’42, and to the fact that, though we did consent to all the detestable provisions of the compromise,--slave territories, slave states, ten millions of dollars for Texas, Fugitive Slave bill, and all,--yet we get no tariff, and have now no rational prospect of one.

That the surrender of all our glorious patrimony of free principles should help to make some northern man President, I can readily understand. That is intelligible. Before the 7th of March speech, it was announced, from high southern sources, that they would take the northern man for the next presidential term who would do the most for slavery; and since that time, the same declaration has been reiterated. [See, among others, Mr. Toombs’s speech before the Georgia Union meeting.] But I state it as a fact within my own personal knowledge, that there was not an intelligent man in Congress who was not implicated, on the one side, in the manufacture of goods, or, on the other, in the manufacture of presidents, who did not then foresee and predict that every forward step we took towards the compromise was a step backwards from protection. And we now have this stubborn fact to show for the soundness of that opinion,--the event has ratified it. They have not obtained the tariff they were promised, though they have given for it the price of blood.

Now I wish to ask the manufacturers and commercial men of the north, whether, if they had seen,--as it was seen by every unbiased man at the seat of government,--that upholding the compromise would put down protection, they would have consented to the compromise? And a further question which I wish to put to all Massachusetts and all New England is, if, during the last year, we had had the tariff of 1842 in full operation, and if the current of prosperity had filled the deepest channels that enterprise and industry had cut for it, whether then Massachusetts citizens would have unsaid and retracted all the noble things they have been saying in favor of liberty for the last ten years; whether then the Massachusetts press, or so large a portion of it, would be found openly advocating doctrines which they have always heretofore professed to hold in utter detestation and abhorrence? No man will pretend it. If we had had the tariff of ’42 last year, the compromise measures never could have passed, and it would have been impossible for any presidential aspirant, or all of them together, to have subdued the northern mind to their acceptance.

The commercial and manufacturing interests of the north, then, have been deceived, grossly deceived and imposed upon. When their real interests were all on the side of freedom, they have been made to believe that it would promote those interests to unsay all they had ever said, and undo all they had ever done adverse to slavery. Their chance for a tariff lay in standing to their principles like men, and not in abandoning them like cowards. President-making has been the agency, and Cotton has been the instrument, of this deception. It has been said that the Press is the fourth estate in the realm; but I say Cotton is the fourth estate, for Cotton subdues the Press. The eyes and ears and nose and mouth of a portion of our people have been so filled with cotton, that they have come to consider cotton not only as their daily bread, but their bread of life.

Gentlemen, whatever convictions or doubts there may be on the subject of Animal Magnetism, I am a firm believer in Cotton Magnetism. The southern planter seems to possess some wizard art, unknown to the demonology of former times, by which he impregnates his bales of cotton with a spirit of inhumanity, with a contempt for all the dearest, tenderest, holiest ties that bind man to man and heart to heart; he fills them with this spirit as an electrician fills a Leyden jar, and then he sends them here; and if the man who comes within the circle of their influence is not himself filled with the strong, counteracting, disinfecting magnetism of duty and truth, of love to God and love to man, he is overcome and subdued by the infernal spell; he is brought into “communication” with the southern sorcerer, and into subjection to his will; and then he seems bereft of reason and conscience, he belies his Pilgrim parentage, talks gibberish about the dissolution of the Union, kneels, lies down, eats dirt, and says to his southern master, as Balaam’s beast said to him, “_Am I not thine ass upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine?_”

Still worse is it, when this cotton, so diabolically impregnated, gets beneath the rich velvet seats and embossed cushions of the pulpit;--unless, indeed, a double measure of the spirit of the Lord shall descend upon the preacher and exorcise both him and it, of the evil spirit it contains. When the soul of the clergyman is struck with this cotton magnetism, he grows delirious over his Bible, ignores the new dispensation, seeks out all the pro-slavery parts of the old, discards Jesus Christ as his example, and the precepts of Jesus Christ as the law of his ministrations, and proves himself a pagan, discoursing paganism in a Christian pulpit.

God grant that this kind of cotton may never stuff the cushions of our judges! I fear we are not wholly out of danger of so unspeakable a calamity. Give us the old English woolsack for them, within whose magic presence the chains of the slave drop from his limbs, and he is gloriously transfigured into a man.

Compare the newspapers of our cities now with what they were only one short twelvemonth ago, and see what demoralization cotton can work when it gets into editorial chairs.

As for those slave-catching commissioners who assume to exercise the functions of judges, to abolish human liberty, and to find property in the bodies and souls of men, but are no more a judge than an image “made after supper of a cheese-paring” is a man,--as for them, I say, they seem to have this virus the natural way; and if all moral diagnosis does not fail, it would be found, on an anatomical dissection of their hearts, that their right and left auricle and their right and left ventricle were only four cotton bolls.

But I believe that the reign of Cotton is to be short-lived. Improvements in the arts give confident promise that some new textile substance will soon be discovered which will supersede this slave-made and slave-making material. Even should this hope fail, every body sees what an unnatural attitude of power and strength the cotton-producing states now occupy. Extending over only a small area of territory, which you can cover on the map with your hand, they raise a staple which clothes, more or less, a great part of the world; while there are Brazil, Egypt, India, and regions of unknown vastness in Africa, to all of which, or nearly all of which, the plant is indigenous. Either then by the progress of the arts, or by an extension of cultivation, the majesty of Cotton will soon be dethroned; and then, _then_, how will these men appear, historically, who are now willing to trample upon human rights, and to send men, women, and children into all the horrors of southern bondage for the temporary profits which cotton can bestow?

I rejoice that this reference to the demoralizing power of interest gives me an opportunity to bestow well-deserved honor and praise upon a class of men who have nobly withstood its temptations. Not every man engaged in manufactures or in commerce has yielded to the seductions of this tempter. There are many noble exceptions. I have in my mind one of my own constituents largely interested in manufactures, who told me last summer that half his spindles were lying idle, and property that should have yielded income was incurring cost; “but,” said he, “do you see them _all_ stop, and the mills decay and go down stream, before you vote for that compromise.” Another of my constituents told me he was largely interested in three ships, then at sea; but declared he would see them all sink to its bottom before he would disgrace the country by passing the Fugitive Slave bill. These are but specimens of that noble spirit which was expressed with such Spartan terseness and vigor by Bowen & McNamee, of New York, when the foul panders to southern slavery threatened them with a loss of custom. Said they, “Our goods, and not our principles, are in the market.”

O, how these declarations contrast with what a manufacturer in a neighboring county is reported to have said,--that if he could work his mills any cheaper with slave labor than with free, he would employ slaves! And what, also, as I am credibly informed, another has said,--“The south want slaves to raise cotton to sell; we want slaves to raise cotton to manufacture; therefore, we must unite with the south to uphold slavery.” Now, I believe these things to have been _said_; but it is of no consequence whether they were said or not; we know they have been _acted_. Every man who upholds this Fugitive Slave law _acts_ them, whatever his language may be.

The compromise was forced through Congress partly by government interference, and partly by the delusive hope of a tariff. An appeal is now made, in behalf of the Fugitive Slave law, to the same mercenary motives. It is said, if opposition be made to this law, however legal or constitutional such opposition may be, we shall lose southern custom. Base and infamous appeal! Such men are made of the stuff of the tories of the revolution. Even if this appeal were true, it would be one that no honorable man could hear without indignation. But it is not true. The south must have their goods from somewhere, and our industrious artisans will make them, whoever the go-betweens may be. Will the south go bare-headed and bare-footed and unkilted, because they cannot have a law to catch freemen and slaves promiscuously? But it is said the south will abandon their slothful habits, become industrious, and manufacture for themselves. I wish they would. It would be most fortunate for us. They would then have the means of buying more from the north, and paying us better for what they do buy. Instead of spending only the money which their slaves earn, they would then have money to spend earned by the whites, and would become better customers for those ever new forms of commodities which our industry and inventive skill, while we keep our schoolhouses in operation, will always be able to supply.

Now, fellow-citizens, I have gone into these considerations for the purpose of ascertaining and of measuring the extent and the efficacy of the motives brought by our opponents to bear against us. You see they are mercenary, almost exclusively so. As for that bugbear of a dissolution of the Union, I say, without fear of contradiction, that no practical man has ever believed in it for a day. United States stocks at a hundred and sixteen, on the eve of a dissolution of the Union! The whole South Carolina, and Mississippi, and Texas delegations in Congress contending for every local advantage, for the establishment of new United States courts, for the increase of salaries, for appointments at home and abroad, as though the Union had been just insured for a thousand years! Show me one intelligent man in the whole country who has sold his stocks or his farm, or changed his residence, or altered his course of life in any respect, through fear that the Union was about to be dissolved. I think some persons may have left South Carolina, to get rid of the clamor about dissolving it. Why, what would the English national debt be worth under any well-founded apprehension that the British monarchy was crumbling to pieces? There would not be a pound of government securities that could not be bought for a penny. Confidence in the stability of our Union has not only pervaded this country, but other countries. The great bankers abroad who deal in our stocks have never changed their terms one mill in a million of dollars, through any such idle fear. They are the men whose barometers presage political storms. With such facts before us, to say that the Union has been in danger is as absurd as to say that a whirlwind is raging when the leaf of the aspen is pendulous, and cannot be seen to move. If the south wishes to dissolve the Union, let them do it, and at the end of thirty years there will be no slave in all their borders. The slaves will have made a new Jamaica or a new St. Domingo of it, as the masters shall behave themselves. No, this is nothing but a clumsy trick of the politicians; and if any one of them could be nominated for the presidency, we should hear nothing more from him about any deluge which threatens to submerge the Union. They profess peculiar love for the Union. Their clamorous notes bring to mind what Dr. Franklin remarked of self-righteous people. He said they always reminded him of scarcity of provisions;--those who had enough said nothing about it; it was the destitute who made all the clamor.

I say, then, the only remaining motive with which our adversaries can work is the loss of southern trade. This interests but few of our people. The farmers are not interested in it. The mechanics and artisans are not. The operatives in our mills are not. All our substantial, industrious classes are above this temptation, and would spurn it if they were not above it. The Fugitive Slave law champions, then, can make no more converts among them. Let us, then, continue to oppose this law in all constitutional modes. Let us explain its religious and moral bearings to the Christian. Let us tell the patriot of the disgrace it brings upon our country. Let us show to the working-man that those who are ready to make slaves of his fellow-beings for lucre will be equally ready to make a slave of him whenever interest shall supply the temptation.

Fellow-citizens, it has been asked why we are assembled here to-day, and not in the Hall consecrated to liberty. It is because the doors of that hall have been closed to Liberty knocking for admission. But there is a melancholy propriety in this. When the court house is in chains, Faneuil Hall may well be dumb. Those chains which girt the courts of justice are but typical of the chains which tyrannous men are striving to put upon our lips. This is not the first temple that has been unrighteously invaded and taken possession of by money changers and those who sold doves,--doves! _doves_!! No, not doves,--but men, women, and children. But I trust the time is not far distant when a better spirit shall enter their doors, and shall scourge out their invaders with cords, smaller or larger, as the exigencies of the case may require.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] This meeting was held pending the trial, before Mr. Commissioner Curtis, of Thomas Sims, an alleged fugitive slave from Georgia. During the trial, the Boston court house was surrounded by a large police force, and was enclosed in chains, beneath which the judges of the supreme court of Massachusetts bowed as they entered and retired.

SPEECH

DELIVERED AT WORCESTER, SEPTEMBER 16, 1851, ON TAKING THE CHAIR AS PRESIDENT OF THE FREE SOIL STATE CONVENTION.

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONVENTION;

Accept my thanks. It would be an honor at any time to stand in this position before a body of men so large in their number and so influential by their respectability. But, gentlemen, at this hour of trial, at this time of peril to great principles, when the lights upon earth seem to be going out around us, and we must look for guidance to the lights above,--at this hour, I say, of trial and of peril, it is an especial honor to be called to a post of duty. The position of the friends of freedom at the present time reminds me of a beautiful sentiment expressed by one of the noblest of the old Roman philosophers, who said that those who were called to fill stations of danger and self-sacrifice should thank God for the honor of being deemed worthy of such a trust.[25]

Gentlemen, it was not until this morning, and since sunrise, that I was waited upon by a delegation from your state committee, requesting my presence on this occasion. They knew, and you all know, how strongly my heart throbs, even at the mention of the great principles for which you contend. They knew, as you all know, how happy I should be if I could do any thing to deepen or to diffuse a feeling of devotion to human freedom.

But, gentlemen, there were certain circumstances connected with my position which seemed to make it necessary for me to say to your delegation, that, if I should appear here to-day, it should be with an entire privilege to speak out my mind fully on any political subject, and to say in what relation I stand to the present condition of public affairs, both state and national.

I say, then, gentlemen, that I stand where I have always stood, holding the principles of human freedom first and foremost in my regards, and, after these, our pecuniary, or merely worldly interests; holding, according to the order in which they are mentioned in the constitution of the United States, “life and liberty” to be before “property.” I stand where I stood in 1848, when I was first elected to Congress; and where my recorded votes and speeches show me to have stood through all the struggles of 1849 and ’50. I stand on the same principles yet. If other men have seen fit to go off to the right hand or to the left, I remain where I was. And if any individual of any party,--Whig, Democrat, or by whatever other appellation he may be known,--shall ever return from his wanderings to the good old homestead of Massachusetts principles,--Free Soil, Free Speech, and Free Men,--there, in that immortal birthplace of human liberty, he will find me, early in the morning and late at night, hard at work, to maintain the honor of the Pilgrims and the principles of our revolutionary sires.

Gentlemen, the perusal of the address and resolutions put forth by the Whig State Convention at Springfield, last week, brought me here. It seems to me that no true lover of human freedom can read that address and those resolutions intelligently, and understand their full scope and bearing, without being struck down by conviction, as suddenly as was St. Paul,--though the light and the voice come from an opposite quarter. Whatever the design of those papers may have been, their whole argument and office are to wheel the Whig party into line, to fight the battles of slavery.

Under these circumstances, I do not ask with a certain distinguished individual, on the prospective breaking up of parties, “Where am I to _go_?” I believe I do but echo the sentiments of thousands of as good and true Whigs as can be found in this commonwealth, (and there are none better any where,) when I say that, let others go where they will, here, _here_, on the old Whig platform of opposition to the extension of slavery, either into New Mexico _or into New England_; of freedom for the District of Columbia; and in favor of the old guaranties of _habeas corpus_ and trial by jury,--_here I remain_.

Gentlemen, the Free Soil party, as the name imports, is the party of freedom. The cardinal principle of their _creed_ is, that “all men are created free and equal,” and that they have an inalienable right to “life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.” Their _faith_ consists in the assurance that, in the good providence of God, the day will yet come when the blessedness of their creed will be realized among men; and by their _works_ they seek to hasten the advent of that glorious day.

A party of Freedom has existed in all ages of the world, but a mightier party of oppression has been arrayed against it. And though the lovers of human liberty have consisted of the greatest and best men who have ever lived, yet they have been overborne by violence, crushed and trampled upon by power, buried in dungeons, gibbeted on scaffolds, burnt at the stake! God, like the householder who sent servants to his vineyard from a far country, has, from age to age, sent great and mighty souls into the world to redeem it from oppression; but the oppressor has seized and mutilated and martyred them, with every form of ignominy towards the messengers themselves, and of impiety towards the Lord who sent them. The possessors of power and wealth seek to perpetuate these advantages in their families, their clan, or their caste; and over almost all the earth they have established dynasties for governments, landed or moneyed feudalisms for lords, and entails for individual families.

That we may see how fearful a thing this spirit of oppression is, not only for its cruelties, but for the tenacity of its malignant life, let it be remembered that the world had existed almost six thousand years before the principles of human liberty, civil and ecclesiastical, were clearly and fully set forth even on paper. This was first done by Mr. Jefferson, in 1776, in the Declaration of American Independence; and every body knows how intensely the same partisans who are now summoning their forces against the party of Freedom have hated him for his glorious efforts in favor of the freedom of man; how they pursued him with maledictions to his grave, and still break through the sanctity of the tomb to blacken his memory.

The immortal principles of the Declaration of Independence were partially embodied in the constitution of the United States. But, as the preëxisting metaphysics and mythology of the heathen nations mingled with the pure spirit of Christianity, and corrupted it, so the preëxisting laws and usages of oppression deformed to some extent the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, and stamped some hideous features upon the otherwise fair face of the federal constitution. But such a preponderance of good did that instrument contain, that it was adopted by all the states. It was adopted, however, with the universal understanding that the healing influence of time would purge away the virus of the disease; and with no apprehension of the now undeniable fact, that the disease would be allowed to spread, like a gangrene, over the healthy parts. Had our fathers foreseen that the pro-slavery clauses in the constitution would prove a curse to whole classes and races of men entitled to protection under it, that they would be a shame to its administrators, and an opprobrium, throughout the civilized world, to the name of Republic,--it would be impious towards their memories to say they would ever have ratified it. But instead of the sounder parts diffusing healthful influences, and gradually eradicating the disease, the diseased parts have shot their infection through all the veins and organs of the body politic, until, from the heart to the extremities, there is not now to be found an uncontaminated spot.

Or to leave metaphor for literal speech: The constitution of the United States gave the most comprehensive and fundamental guaranties in favor of freedom, with here and there only an exception in behalf of slavery. It allowed “persons” who were held to service or labor and who should escape into other states to be retaken, but it also secured the trial by jury to every “person” who should claim it on any question of life or liberty, and on all questions of property even down to the paltry sum of twenty dollars. Yet there is not now, in the United States, a single spot, from ocean to ocean, where a free man is free from danger of being kidnapped and carried into horrible bondage for himself and his posterity forever; or,--what is as keenly torturing to every mind penetrated by the spirit and amenable to the precepts of the gospel,--of being called upon, under penalty of fines and fetters, to surrender his soul to this accursed work.

Now, as a true disciple of Christ ought to feel if he saw the imbruting dogmas and Moloch rites of heathenism returning to invade Christendom and to extinguish the lights of the gospel, so should every lover of liberty feel when he sees the fell spirit of slavery regaining its lost empire over the institutions of freedom.

The analogy between the present condition of this country and that of Europe is too striking not to attract attention. In 1848, there was a great uprising of the friends of liberty in both hemispheres. Thousands and tens of thousands sought to redress the wrongs of humanity,--by the cartridge box there, and by the ballot box here. The phalanx of tyranny and of mammon was unprepared for so sudden an onset, and for a moment their ranks were broken by the violence of the shock. But despotism and wealth have almost inconceivable advantages in a contest with the honest and toiling millions. In Europe, they have the military force,--a soulless machine, always ready to be turned against the people who are made to maintain it. They have also the whole ecclesiastical power, which leans upon the government for support, and fights with spiritual weapons for the masters whose plunder it shares.

In this country, owing to our different institutions, the means of quelling the spirit of liberty have been different. The administration have an immense amount of patronage at their disposal. They give contracts to the amount of millions, and select the contractors. Directly, or indirectly, they appoint some thirty thousand office-holders; and, by a lamentable reduplication of the powers of evil, they control twice or four times that number who are aspirants for office. Their influence bought over the slave power, by surrendering all our new territories to the invasion of slavery, and by giving fifty thousand square miles of free New Mexican territory to be turned into Texan slave territory, thus adding to the already enormous size of that slave-begotten state. Ten millions of dollars of almost worthless Texan stock were raised to par value by the signature of Millard Fillmore. During the whole pendency of the compromise measures, agents and brokers, reputed to be interested in this stock, hovered about the purlieus of the national Capitol. The stock was transferred from hand to hand, without record and without daylight, so that, besides the accomplices, Heaven and Satan only know into whose possession it came. And, as though the means of patronage and seducement on so magnificent a scale were not sufficient, a private purse, almost up to the figure of fifty thousand dollars, was presented to the “foremost man of all this world” in his apostasy to the principles of human liberty. These, fellow-citizens, were among the agencies and seductions which caused the discomfiture of the friends of freedom in the national contest of 1850. The tyrants of Europe had no vacant lands, or Texas stocks, wherewith to put down humanity, and so they used gunpowder and bayonets. Our slave power and its northern allies, being debarred by the principles of our government from bullets and bayonets, accomplished their work by the Judas articles of scrip and “dotation.” To carry out these purposes, the generals Haynau and Radetsky were found there; the senators, Webster and Cass, here.

The origin and the present necessity of the Free Soil party may be briefly stated. Some years previous to the annexation of Texas, an apprehension existed that that great breach of the constitution and outrage upon northern principles and feelings were meditated. Mr. John Quincy Adams sounded the alarm; but men were so engrossed by their business, and by their paltry local and temporary political strifes, that even his voice, potent and prophetic as it was, passed by unheeded. Some respect, however, was due, at least from policy if not from principle, to the many humble but earnest opponents of so flagrant a wrong. Before the consummation of that iniquity, the Massachusetts legislature passed strong resolutions against it. The question was taken by yeas and nays, and all the Whigs and almost all the Democrats in the general court recorded their names on the side of the constitution and liberty. But the slave power then had possession of all the departments of the national government, and under the auspices of a slaveholding President, a breach was made in the walls of the constitution wide enough to let in a foreign government, with all its burden of slavery on its back. Yet, notwithstanding this perfidy to all the principles of a true democracy, such was the external pressure brought to bear upon the members of the Democratic party, that but few of them abandoned its ranks. They “_acquiesced_,” as the modern phrase is, when any thing specially iniquitous is to be sanctioned. They were told, as the Whigs are now told in regard to the compromise and the Fugitive Slave law, that the act was _done and irrevocable_. The merchants were told, as the Whig merchants now are, that the crime of extending slavery would at least be attended by increased profits of trade. The manufacturers were told, as the Whig manufacturers now are, that if the number of slaves were increased at the south, it must create an increased demand for whips and negro cloths. And the mere blind political partisans were told, as the same class of Whigs are now, that if God designed to stop the heaven-defying enormity of spreading slavery over this continent, he must do it in some way consistent with the integrity of the Democratic party. Precisely the arguments which were then used to seduce and corrupt the Democratic party into “_acquiescence_” are used by leading Whigs and Whig presses now for the same unhallowed purpose. They are alike, except that in the one case there was the crime of originality, and in the other, the meanness of plagiarism.

But from the fatal day of the annexation of Texas, thousands and thousands of honest and intelligent Democrats, though still remaining true to what they believed to be the principles of the party, became alienated from its leaders. From that day, the claims of the party lay lightly, but the sins of the party heavily, upon their souls; and some there were who, like Daniel of old, went into their chambers three times every day, and, throwing open the windows which looked towards the Jerusalem of liberty, prayed aloud to the true God, although within hearing of the wild beasts which had been prepared to devour them.

The Whig party at the north, and particularly in Massachusetts, flourished under the reäction of the Texas fraud. Some of its leaders, it is true, shouted a welcome to Texas, though yet afar off; and, even while she stood outside of the Union, they threw their arms around her blood-besmeared form, hideous as Milton’s picture of Sin, with all her hell-hound progeny of future slave states howling in her womb, and gave her a fraternal embrace; and when the time came, they were also ready to vote men and money,--human blood and human souls,--for the robber atrocities of the Mexican war, which a majority of the House of Representatives in Congress, on motion of Mr. Ashmun, of Massachusetts, declared to be “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced.” My friends, in your observations of men, you will find there are some moral nonentities,--political availabilities though they may be,--who can listen most sanctimoniously to the Saint Stephens, when they prophesy, and then hold the clothes of the Lynchers who stone them to death.

During all this period, however, the managers and the presses of the Whig party discoursed and printed very edifying anti-slavery homilies. As the harvest months came on, an anti-slavery zeal became an epidemic among them; and sporadic cases happened at other times, depending upon the days and places appointed by the governor and council for special elections. Every body remembers how the Boston _Atlas_ used to stir up the pure minds of the Democratic party by way of remembrance, by publishing,--periodically, as they say, and sometimes oftener,--the names of those Democratic senators or representatives in our general court who had voted for freedom and against Texas, in order to show their flagrant inconsistency in still adhering to a party that had been false to liberty. That paper has done some good service to our cause, especially in holding up for a long time the Fugitive Slave act to reprobation, while the other Whig presses in the city were daily striving to hide its atrocities from public view, and to defend what they could not hide. I trust the reluctant and struggling editors of that paper are not to be overcome by the mammon of slavery, whatever disguises it may assume or compulsion it may use. I trust the slave power will never be able to use towards them the language which hell’s portress addressed to Satan:--

“At first they called me _Sin_, and for a sign
Portentous held me; but, familiar grown,
I pleased, and with attractive graces won
_The most averse; thee chiefly_.”

Those prosperous days of the Massachusetts Whigs continued until 1848. They thrived in basket and in store, until, like Jeshurun, they waxed fat, and, at least in the fourth and fifth congressional districts, they performed some very hard kicking. Then came the nomination of General Taylor. General Taylor was a Louisiana slaveholder. He had been the hero of the Florida war,--as great an outrage against a race as ever Rome or Russia committed. He had been a prominent, and, as many believed, a willing instrument in spilling the innocent blood of a sister republic. Even should the executive divest him of military command, or he should grow too old for service, it was universally known that there was a full black battalion on his own plantation which he would always command. The south demanded his nomination absolutely. They would hear no terms, and would offer no terms. In the northern canvass it was strongly asserted that he had written a letter, saying in so many words that he would not veto the Wilmot proviso; but that letter was so warily kept in a certain unmentionable part of a Whig merchant’s wardrobe, that neither Mesmerizers nor spiritual rappers could read it aloud to the people.

Hence all omens foreboded evil. Those which we looked for on the earth augured ill to our earthly interests; and those which we looked for above were in the wrong quarter of the heavens. The character of many of General Taylor’s friends brought distrust upon himself. He owed his election far more to the repulsion which good men felt towards his opponent, [General Cass,] than to any attraction they had towards him.

It was an occasion that tried the sagacity and the discretion of honest men, and I have always felt great charity both for his advocates and his opponents;--each being able to make out so plausible a case. The course which the Connecticut clergyman took on that occasion always commended itself to me. He voted the Taylor electoral ticket, but indorsed a prayer on the back of his ballot, saying that he was painfully uncertain as to the course of duty, and imploring that his vote might be sanctified for the good of the country.

But I am happy to avail myself of this, and of all opportunities, to do justice to the name of General Taylor. He turned out a very different man from what his friends or his foes supposed him to be. I believe he desired freedom for all the territories; and, could he have been permitted to carry out his own plans, he would have secured not only the freedom of the territories, but would also have consummated all the great national measures of the party that brought him into power. Mr. Clay threw the first stumbling-block in his way, by his compromise scheme. This, alone, might have been surmounted. But Mr. Webster’s apostasy, on the seventh of March, turned the tide of battle. It broke up General Taylor’s phalanx, both north and south. It roused the drooping and just yielding spirits of the slave power to frantic exertion. An enemy on the field General Taylor was always ready to meet; but he was not prepared for treachery in his own camp. Still, he maintained his ground resolutely, until struck down by the power that conquers the conquerors. There are many who believe it was Mr. Webster’s perfidy, with the nameless labors and anxieties that came in its train, which caused General Taylor’s death. It remains to be seen whether the political Macbeth shall succeed to the Banquo he spirited away, though all the “weird” brethren of the slave mart and of the “Union and Safety Committees” still tempt him onward by their incantations.

But it was under the circumstances of General Taylor’s nomination, and not of his death, that a portion of the Free Soilers parted company with the Whigs; as another portion did with the Democrats, because of General Cass’s avowed subserviency to the south,--and the conduct of all men is to be judged by the circumstances contemporary with their acts, and not subsequent to them.

If, however, there are those who judge of motives by results, this certainly can be said in vindication of the Free Soil party, that the now acting President of the United States, who came in on General Taylor’s ticket, and is now completing his presidential term, has done more for slavery than the Free Soil party ever predicted or feared would or could be done by the candidates whom they opposed. Even now, when the third year of the presidential term is but half spent, the Whig administration, aided by many leaders in the Whig party, is carrying out, with a relentless hand, and a more relentless heart, worse pro-slavery measures than the Free Soil party ever charged upon them during the canvass, or ever believed or conceived they could commit.