Speech of Wendell Phillips, ESQ

Speech of Wendell Phillips, ESQ.

I am glad, Mr. President, as other speakers have expressed themselves, to hear from so many parts of the country to-day,--from so many different States. I am glad, sir, to hear the testimony of these different representatives of the anti-slavery sentiment. It is well known that on our platform, we accept the services of any man who hates slavery, no matter in what form he chooses to manifest his opposition. I was glad to see here, sir, glad to talk with, the devoted editor of the only anti-slavery paper in a slave State. I hope he will not go out of our gathering without carrying many remembrances of our interest in Kentucky with him. I do not know very particularly about his anti-slavery sentiments and method, but I have a very good test;--he has beaten down eight pro-slavery presses, and has been mobbed until they got tired of mobbing him. That is good anti-slavery! (Cheers.) The man who can draw so nice a distinction as to say, that often as he has been beaten, he never was whipped, has a very excellent notion of logic. (Renewed cheering.) I say, I accept all methods of anti-slavery. I well remember the description with Cassius Clay gave me of that meeting at dripping Springs, to which our friend Bailey referred. I had asked him to describe how, and the description is one which shows you what large empire of mind this anti-slavery movement covers. The description was as unconscious, as childlike as simple, as if one should attempt to describe this meeting, and say, ‘We had thousands, and heard Higginson and Conway.’ ‘Why,’ said Clay, ‘at the Dripping Springs, we had a great meeting. I should think,’ said he, ‘there were a hundred bowie knives and seventy pistols.’ (Laughter and cheers.) That was a Kentuckian’s notion of a great meeting! I accent it; it was on his own level. It was a proof that the men who went there were in earnest, according to their own thinking.
This leads me to another point just here. There has been something said of Mr. Burlingame to-day. I do not like dueling. I think that the North does rightly when it frowns on dueling. I think that one of the great efforts of the anti-slavery press and speakers should be to show that the South is barbarous. Our labor for the next twelvemonth is to convict the slave territory as barbarous. We are to take this attack on Mr. Sumner, with its endorsement by the South, and convict fifteen States of barbarism. There is a great deal in words. I will call the House of Representatives a ‘Chamber of Assassins,’ while Preston S. Brooks sits in it, and the Senate likewise. I want to stamp fifteen States not only as a slaveholding, but as barbarous. It is the fourteenth century. It is burning a man for opinions. It is the fire and stake which the Jesuits said was the only light by which truth could be elicited. It is worse than the Inquisition and its tortures, which the Jesuit teacher alone, of all the other punishments, suffered his pupil to behold four centuries ago. It is the barbarism of a corrupt faith, and a reckless and coward nobility. When Mr. Burlingame consented to accept a challenge, he borrowed an element from the barbarism of fifteen barbarous States. It was a great blunder. It sullied the position of Massachusetts, which stood untarnished in the hands of Sumner and Wilson.
So much I say; but, on the other side, I say this also. I have all along been willing to say to men who votes and who go into Congress—‘I cannot vote—I should think it immoral; I cannot accept office—it would be a violation of right. But if there is any men that can vote, let him; if there is any man that can accept office, conscientiously, let him.’ When Mr. Sumner entered the Senate, I said, ‘In our view, he is perjured; but if he does not think so, in God’s name let him enter and do his best!’ So I say, Burlingame, when he stood in Washington, stood crowded and trampled in the dust. In god’s name, if he could fight anywhere, let him fight! (Great applause.) On his own conscience be the responsibility of fighting, according to what he thinks right. I have no criticism therefore, to make on the individual act. When he entered the House of Representatives, in my view, he did as foul, as immoral, as barbarous and act as when he accepted a challenge. I made a distinction in his favor when he went there, hoping that in the present state of the cause, he might—the dead somewhat burying the dead—do better than his fellows. So I say of his duel the same.
As to the Republican party, of whom our friend Conway speaks, I want also to say a word. Virginia though he was, he did not care to defend Mr. Jefferson, but he said, with admirable satire, that he was opposed to slavery in the abstract! Then he went on to say that our friend Fremont’s great merit was, that he was a progressive man. How far has he progressed? Why, just this far; just so far as the tomb of Thomas Jefferson! For in Fremont’s letter, the best line is, that he is opposed to slavery in the abstract, and always was.
Mr. Conway—‘And on principle.’
Mr. Philips—Yes, and on principle. But, at the same time, in the letter, very short as it is, he adds that he stands by the Constitution, which protects the slavery of the separate States, and is inflexibly opposed to any interference with it there. And his coadjutor, Mr. Dayton, undertakes to say, ‘I stand where I have always stood. I have not changed.’ Now, where did he stand? When Gov. Chase, of Ohio, moved, in the House of Representatives, to amend the Fugitive Slave Bill by making it inoperative in the territories, among the nays on that question is the name of Mr. Dayton. And on several other of the issues presented by the Free Soilers of that day against the Fugitive Slave Bill, stands recorded the name of Mr. Dayton among the seven, nine, the seventy or the hundred and twenty that successively beat down the Free Soil propositions. He stand where he did stand!
I value politics, Mr. President, not for the men whom it puts into office;--they do not do much good. I do not know anything that Mr. Speaker Banks has done since he was Speaker, except write a very blundering note for his friend Mr. Burlingame—if he did write it. It was a great triumph, his election; I acknowledge it. For the first time, it ranged the North against the South. It showed us the crack. It was a great gain. But the man that went up—nothing. He has not done anything; he has not been able to do any thing. If Mr. Fremont was President, I do not believe he would be able to do anything more. I will tell you why. I asked Cassius Clay what he intended to do when he elected an anti-slavery President. This is what I understand to-day was the reply of Mr. Clay: ‘I intend to lay it down as a principle, that no slaveholder, that no friend of slavery, in any quarter of the country, shall have an United States office. I will starve out the system. And,’ said he, ‘give me that principle, and four years to work it in, and I will fifty per cent abolish slavery.’ What say the Republican leaders to-day? The New York Tribune, when Fremont was charged with being a slaveholder, replied, ‘What if he is? We have voted for slaveholder before, and we shall vote for slaveholders again.’ Nobody pretends that if Fremont is elected, he will prohibit the employment of slaveholders in the various functions of the national government. This is not to be. What is the use of an anti-slavery President who is to know no distinction between the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder? If this government is worth fighting for, it is for the reason that when you get inside of it, you are to turn its guns against the enemy. But the Republicans party lays down no such principle.
Now, as I said, I value politics, not for the men it elects, but for the discussion it permits. The canvass is worth a hundred fold more than the election. My friend Mr. Conway, in the pulpit at Washington,--a true man in a true place,--strikes a better anti-slavery blow than the best Free Soiler in the House of Representatives, because he is founded on the granite of an unmistakable position, and there is nothing between him and the Higher Law but God’s own inspiration. (Loud cheers.) When a man enters the House of Representatives, when he enters the political canvas, the first thing he does is to say—‘I go for the Union. I am no Garrisonian. I am no Disunionist.’ ‘Don’t suspect me,’ says a New York Republican journal, ‘don’t suspect me of being a Black Republican—I am only a White one.’ What I criticize in the Republican movement is this. I want a platform, no matter who you take for your candidates, that shall drag the whole anti-slavery cause, moral as well as political, right into the centre of the cauldron of political discussion. Our friend from Wisconsin said, when he went home from New York, in 1848, he made political speeches in which he analyzed the whole moral aspect of the anti-slavery question, and that Wisconsin, when she joined the Barnburners of New York, joined them on a principle. You see the result. When the Barnburners traded themselves off, when John Van Buren fell in love with a Southern plantation, and denied every speech he had made, the moral anti-slavery of Wisconsin was found at Racine, with its hundred men—ninety muskets, ten blacksmiths—formed on the wharf at Milwaukie, making no speeches, asking no aid from Milwaukie citizens, but in silence, like a hundred ghosts, marching straight from the landing-place to the jail; and the first sound that was heard from that hundred Abolitionists was the sound of their hammers on the fetters of the United States. It was the noblest mob that history knows, for it was a silent mob! (Applause.) You know that when Solomon built his Temple, every stone of the fabric was hewn out of the mountain into beauty and proportion at a distance from Jerusalem, that the sound of no hammer should be heard in the holy place. So it was when the bright, consummate flower of radical anti-slavery bloomed on the soil of that young city, and yet so indignant, that, like the lightning-bolt of heaven, its first noise was the noise of success. It broke down the judiciary and army of the United States, and proclaimed Wisconsin in fact a sovereign, independent, and free State. (Applause.) O! if I could every move from the dust of Boston, I would finish my pilgrimage on the soil of that young and gallant State that has earned the first and greenest laurel in the anti-slavery struggle between State sovereignty and the Union. (Cheers.)
That is what we want. It seems to me, that in turning its face to the territories, and taking up Mr. Fremont, the anti-slavery party is letting slide, not the Union, but all the anti-slavery gallantry, enthusiasm, principle and spirit that thirty years of effort have produced. Our friend Conway told us of a South Carolina minister who had been turned out of his parish, because he had refused to take part in a Brook’s meeting. I would rather have him for President than John C. Fremont, and I will tell you why. When you want to find obstacles, how do you go to work to find them? If this stream around us was like Niagara, pouring down with resistless torrent, and you wanted to find a rock, where would you go? Would you go to a spot level and smooth as the glassy lake before you? No; you would go to some spot where the waters rose up in leaps and boiled in a maelstrom. I take the whole life of Fremont, from boyhood to manhood, from South Carolina to the peak of the Rocky Mountains, from California back to Washington,--it is one unbroken unopposed success; a summery, halcyon scene. I know he has battled with nature; with the frost and the snow, with starvation, with want,--all of that; but when has he battled as the unflinching advocate of an unpopular idea? When? Where is his life tossed into angry turmoil by the opposition of minds that he has roused against him? Never, but when he stole his wife! For once, he opposed a Man. I think he did well (applause); but if every man who has got a good wife is to claim a place by the Presidential chair, Massachusetts will have a fine chair trade. (Laughter and cheers.) No; the opponent of granite, of snow, of want, --the pioneer, I acknowledge him; but not he pioneer in morals. Why, thee is a head at Washington, silvered over with the battles of twenty years,--that of Giddings, (cheers,)—that has stood through fifty anti-slavery fights. Fremont has yet to see his first. Take him up, and tell us that you selected the most available! To me, it seems very like the story of the man in one of our Western States, who, insulted in the public streets, stood quite still and received another blow, when a bystander said, ‘Why don’t you fight him?’ ‘I don’t want to do that,’ said he, ‘but I will make faces at his sister.’ (Laughter.) Here is the anti-slavery cause, with four millions of clients, with the great questions of Cuba, the slave trade, slavery in the District, free speech, the abolition of slavery itself, and it is all put back—to what? The Fugitive Slave Bill—where? The Constitution of the United States—what? All vanished! The only issue presented to the public, the one, solitary issue is—Kansas; and who does not know, that long before the 4th of March, 1857, Kansas may be a settled question, beyond the reach even of John C. Fremont? O, no; this Republican discussion stands just where the Whig discussion did, in the time of Texas. It has gone back there; and I really believe, Mr. President, that the political excitements of the last ten years have used up, yes, used up, all the moral anti-slavery that existed in the community; and the function of the Abolitionist is, to go back to the slave himself, to the moral aspect of the question, to the religious duty of the country. I rejoice in a Northern party, because perhaps it may give us freedom in the pulpit. Possibly, when these Northern States declare that slavery is a fit subject for the basis of a party, Northern clergymen may be willing to preach upon the subject. If they do, we may begin a moral education. My friend Mr. Higginson said this morning that slavery gagged the pulpit. I wish to God it did, for then we should not have such sermons as we hear. (Cheers.) If it would only gag these thirty thousand preachers, and keep them silent, it would be ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished.’ (Laughter and applause.) Silence—blank paper—instead of the New York Observer—what a blessing! (Renewed applause.)
That brings me to another question. Our friend from Wisconsin said they had no respect for office at the West. He supposed it was different here, on account of the great men that fill office. Why, he never heard of Gardner. (Laughter.) He never heard of what a Governor we have got; prepare to thank Heaven for him! If we could have three such Governors, there would not be a boy born with in a hundred years from now, that could ever respect the Governor’s chair. If we could continue to have Judge Loring on the bench and Gov. Gardner in the chair, we should arrive at the excellent state of Wisconsin and Illinois, where they respect a man for what he is, not for the office he fills. You know Prentiss, of Louisville, says you can see ‘books in the running Brooks,’ and you can find a blessing in Governor Gardner. That’s ingenious! Withdraw Col. Fremont, and put me up for President! You call him the ‘pathfinder,’ the ‘discoverer,’ and want to make him President. He is nothing to me, for I have discovered a reason for thanking God that Gardner was made Governor of Massachusetts! But I should almost begin to lose my faith in human nature if he could be elected three times. Is this the hour for Massachusetts to put Henry J. Gardner into that Governor’s chair, when every man who deserves the right to vote, who is intelligent enough to vote, knows that he is consummate hypocrite? Could you have seen him as we saw him, in Faneuil Hall, when four thousand people came together to express their sympathy with Charles Sumner, you would understand him. The Governor rose and commenced his speech, beginning a covert, hidden, insidious attack on Mr. Sumner. A growl went up from the three thousand men before him, that warned him off those premises, and he paddled his light canoe into other waters. (Cheers.) For a little while he went on, then he tried a second time, with another commencing criticism on Mr. Sumner’s conduct in the last canvass,--upon the language of his speech, upon the temper and sincerity of his political conduct in the last canvass,--upon the language of his speech, upon the temper and sincerity of his political conduct. Again came the growl of the crouching lion, and the Governor made back tracks again. Awhile he talked, as all of us on platforms are apt to do, saying nothing, and then veered round in the same direction. Again came the growl of the audience, and the Governor ‘caved in,’ turned round a short corner, and elaborated a compliment for the man he had been prevented from stabbing under the fifth rib. And now you want to make him Governor! We are going through critical times, the ship of state is in peril, and you are fro putting a man into the pilot house whom you cannot trust even so far off as you can see him; a man who, if he did not have some dozen distinct and different reasons for telling the truth, would naturally tell a lie! O, if there is any thing the anti-slavery sentiment of Massachusetts is pledged to do, it is to utter its protest unmistakably in this hour, when anti-slavery needs every thing, against putting such a man as that again in nomination. It must not be! If there is any anti-slavery in the Free Soil party of Massachusetts, it will make itself felt. I know the arguments against it. I know the soothing talk of the wire-pullers, who say it is the best place to hid Garner in, to prevent him from doing worse mischief. ‘If we don’t keep him in,’ they say, ‘he will try to get Sumner out. We don’t know as we can elect any body beside him.’ Then elect nobody. The vacant chair will be clean. (Loud cheers.) My mission to-day is to say to any Free Soiler who hears me, Save me from Governor Gardner! (Renewed cheering.) We will take anybody, we will take nobody, we will pilot the ship without a Governor, but do not give us him. You may take the humblest man you can find, who never spoke, I will not say an anti-slavery word, but a true word, and he is better than Garner. Three times to be elected Governor! Why, one would almost forswear his race. At the time I was commencing my speech against Judge Loring, Mr. Dana said to me, ‘I cannot trust your doctrine that the people, the popular sentiment, the popular conscience, may invade the judicial bench.’ I said to him, ‘We can trust the people.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said he; you know it’s humbug. You can’t trust the people.’ I believe, if Massachusetts elects Garner three times over, I shall be half converted to Richard Dana’s opinion. Why we have tried him twice. He has insulted us, he has cheated us. The chair of State, like the boy’s plummet, has touched bottom; for God’s sake, let it begin to ascend! (Applause.) Where is his merit? What public good has he done that he deserves the nomination? A gasconading letter to the Governor of Alabama published without any use for it, on the very eve of an election! If there is a man here who has a word to say for him, let him say it, in God’s name, and then let Barnum take him and exhibit him round the Union as a man who still has faith in Gardner! (Cheers.) But they have nominated him. A small section of what was once his party have got together and nominated him, and the Republican papers generally are dumb.
Why, Mr. President, this fear has eaten out the heart of Kansas. Have you watched the Kansas Legislature? Have you watched the course of Col. Sumner? Nature took all the brain designed for the name, and gave it to Charles, and left the other nothing but limbs. (Laughter and cheers.) Did you mark the debate, when the United States troops marched to break up the Legislature? One of the speakers said, ‘We will resist the Missouri ruffians, but we don’t draw trigger against one of the Federal officers.’ Why? ‘It will embarrass our friends at Washington. They will nominate Mr. Fremont; we must not embarrass them. They are endeavoring to get the State admitted into the Union; we must not embarrass them.’ As if striking a good blow ever embarrassed any body! As if letting the daylight through a scoundrel’s body ever embarrassed a good cause! (Cheers.) And then, when the deed is done, to show you how Chesterfieldian they can be, they give three cheers for Col. Sumner! Did Hampden, Vane and Pym, did any of the leading men of the Long Parliament, when Cromwell turned them out of doors, go into the streets of London, and give three cheers for Oliver Cromwell? Is this my friend Higginson’s gallantry of Kansas?—the etiquette of the drawing-room! [A voice—‘Cheers for Pierce.’] Pierce! he is a decent man! Mr. Foss says he will cry sometimes, and if he sees a suffering man, and nobody is by to hinder him, will give him something. He has got a heart, when Jefferson Davis or Caleb Cushing is not by to hold it down. But this Col. Sumner, he acknowledges, in the face of the universe, that Mr. Secretary-of-War has scooped out his brain, and he sent him there to Kansas like a broomstick, with his message written upon it. I say that Franklin Pierce, who creeps into a corner and shows he has a heart, is decent to the man who stands upon the platform of constitutional liberty for the world, and says, ‘I am here to do the most unpleasant work in the world’—and does it! You all laugh at the boy who told his mother he couldn't go, for he was tied to the post. ‘Who tied you?’ ‘I.’ (Laughter.) Yet this Col. Sumner, whom the Kansas Legislature rewarded with three cheers, was the same boy, grown a little older. (Cheers.) When, when are we to each men that it is in sentiments, in hearts, in ideas, that the strength of all opinions, of all causes, resides? That they should have hissed Mr. Sumner from Lawrence back to Washington, until the whole continent rang with one loud cry of contempt for the hound who had sacrificed the honor of a name,--which, after Charles Sumner bore it, he ought to have feared to sully,--to the necessities of a diabolical Administration. (Enthusiastic applause.)
My friend Higginson was correct, he was truthful in the extreme, he was just, eloquent, sublime, when he told us that the best duel Mr. Burlingame could have fought was to say to Col. Brooks, when his message was present, ‘I fight with gentlemen; therefore, I have no answer for you.’ (Cheers.) He might have stamped him with the contempt of Massachusetts, as beneath the code of gentlemanly satisfaction. It would have been better than killing him at Clifton House. I don’t care if, according to my friend Conway, he had fought the whole South Carolina delegation afterwards. We cannot afford to spare Brooks. We want him to keep our contempt healthy and alive. (Loud cheers.) We cannot afford to have a decent man like Burlingame even blunder into acknowledging him gallant and chivalrous. No Massachusetts man must ever name him without rinsing his mouth immediately afterwards. (Applause.) When he raised Brooks into decency, Mr. Burlingame inflicted a foul insult on Massachusetts. So it is with regard to what has taken place in Kansas,--with regard to hose Federal officers who undertook to be the tools of Franklin Pierce and Caleb Cushing. We must go back to the high honor of the olden times. Do you not recollect, when one of the Spanish grandees was ordered by the King to receive the Constable of Bourbon, a traitor to his King, into his own castle, he sent back a message, that the castle was open to him; that when the bourbon entered it, the Spaniard would go out, and when the Bourbon left it, he would burn it to the ground, for no honest man’s house should ever cover a traitor? That is what I call chivalry! [Loud cheers.] We need to educate the heart of the Northern people. It is too much eaten out by gain, by money, by material prosperity. My friend Mr. Strong was making a very acute criticism in conversation this morning, in regard to this matter—the difference in respect to character between the men of the Revolution and the men of our day, outside the anti-slavery struggle, in brave, earnest sincerity of principle, even on the mistaken basis of the settlement of that day. They knew what they wanted; they were men—sincerely earnest, gallant men; men that did not measure their words; men that hewed to the line; men who, when they had planted their feet, never took them up again; men that look forward to the stake, to martyrdom, rather than take back a word. The men of our generation are hucksters; they speak to-day, and take it back to-morrow; whisper at home what they would be afraid to have heard at Washington, and say at Washington what they would be afraid to have heard at home, and are politically dead when the two places meet and compare notes. [Cheers.] We are a huckstering, half-hearted, paltering, small-patterned, half-in-earnest race; none of the broad, intelligent, earnest, practical, devoted, in one sense, reckless, enthusiasm of the revolutionary day, except in those whom the anti-slavery struggles has stirred into life. Now, we are bound to keep that spirit alive; to let no political emergency, no compromise, swallow it up. Mr. Seward says the day of compromises has passed. I want a party on that basis. If Jessie is an Abolitionist, put her up for President [cheers]; but do not put her husband up, while he allows himself bound by a Constitution, that makes slavery in the Carolinas safe from the interference of the United States government. I have got beyond Constitution and Unions. I want no man for President of these States, I will acknowledge no man as an anti-slavery candidate for any office, who has not go his hand half clenched, and means to close it on the jugular vein of the slave system the moment he reaches it, and has a double-edged daggers in the other hand, in case there is any missing in the strangulation. [Loud cheers.] I want a politics that inscribes on its banner ‘Freedom—Justice!’ and then, if they can find any room below them for ‘The Constitution of the United States,’ put it in; but Freedom first, Justice first. I hope Wisconsin will never join the Union again until we abolish slavery. I hope she will exhaust the whole catalogue of Smiths, and make them successively Chief Justices, before she takes Chief Justice Taney instead.
Massachusetts has got beyond its slavery to politics. The people are beyond the platform. I can tell you what the Free Soilers here are saying to each other, in answer to my remarks. They say—‘O, that platform don’t mean any thing. It does not matter much what the caucus says; we mean opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law; we mean an Anti-Slavery Constitution; we, the masses, are Abolitionists; this is only a pasteboard band we put out.’ I know it. I know that in the ranks of the Republican movement there are Abolitionists who mean all this. But I know also, that during this Presidential canvass, all their friends want them to keep silent. They want them out of the way. They do not want that sort of sentiment avowed. But in that sentiment is the only element of progress. How long are we going to wait for the abolition of slavery? How many Fremonts must we elect President, before you consent to be educated to a higher level of anti-slavery? It is a very costly experiment, this education of yours. You get on very slowly.
If the anti-slavery spirit exists, let it speak out in Massachusetts, as it has done in Wisconsin. Go and elect a man for Governor who will march the Massachusetts militia down to Boston before another fugitive slave shall be taken out of the city. [Cheers.] Go and elect a man who shall replace Chief Justice Slave Law unconstitutional. You have nominated Mr. Gardner. Suppose he is elected this fall. Chief Justice Shaw wants to resign; he has said to Gardner that he will resign whenever he finds anybody to take his place. Two gentlemen of the bar have been applied to, and have declined; a third is named—the Professor of Law at Harvard College; the man who, within six months, read to his pupils an elaborate argument to prove the Fugitive Slave Law constitutional! Suppose Gov. Gardner re-elected; suppose Chief Justice Shaw, wearied with years and sickness, resigns, and Prof. Joel Parker is made Chief Justice. The office is for life. You have got another incubus on the State. It is a most critical period. Our Supreme Bench is to be filled within a year or two. Massachusetts has not elective judges; she has judges for life. Henry J. Gardner may die, and be forgotten; (thank God for the blessing of death!)—but he may lave behind him a Chief Justice that may last for forty years, and plague our children in years to come. Watch this central power of the government, that lies behind the Judiciary. We shall never redeem Massachusetts until we conquer the Bench. We want a Governor, we want a succession of Governors, that shall fill up that Bench with John A. Andrew, of Hingham, [cheers,] and men of that stamp; lawyers, who have not yet parted with their hearts; men, who recognize Coke and Blackstone, but who also recognize the Higher Law above. Give us such a Bench as that, and, for once, I do not care who you do in Congress, for I will make this little State so hot that no slaveholder shall ever set foot upon it, and no fugitive slave in the country, even if he comes from the extreme point of Florida, shall ever find the climate too cold. [Loud cheers.]
The Judiciary, Mr. President, is the key to the Government. When the Stuarts wanted to subdue England they began with the Bench. The Slave Power of this country long ago subjugated the Bench. The first effort of Massachusetts towards freedom will be to secure the anti-slavery independence of the Bench. Why did not Caleb Cushing and Franklin Pierce send a file of United States troops to take Mr. Booth, who edits a paper in Milwaukie? Why did not the District Judge issue his warrant, and sodder up that broken prison of his? Why does not the Cabinet at Washington endeavor to subdue the State of Wisconsin? I will tell you why. Because Chief Justice Smith, the Mansfield of America, stands on the threshold of the State, and beneath a judge who knows what State sovereignty means, the United States authority drops powerless. We want such a judge, and in order to that, we want a Governor.
Perhaps I have spoken as long as I ought, [‘No, no;’ ‘go on, go on;’] but I entreat you, do not think us tedious. You do not live in Boston, all of you. You have not eh daily nauseous sight of a Legislature and Governor all winter. You do not know what it is, when a fugitive slave stands chained in a Boston courthouse, to have the solemn, disheartening conviction that there is not an Executive officer in the State who will do a Massachusetts act. If we could only have taken that court-house, and carried it round the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—if we could only have taken that Governor, as he stood on the platform at Fanueil Hall, and wanted to strike but dared not, and daguerreotype him in every town in the Commonwealth—you would not inflict him upon us again.
Mr. President, I acknowledge the value of politics,--moral, exclusively moral as would always be the method, individually, I should use. Yet still, that moral influence, that intellectual conviction, must flow out of the political methods of the State; and you Free Soilers, whom we are to meet for the next twelve months at our meetings, and who are going to complain, week after week, that Mr. Pillsbury, or myself, or Mr. Foss, or Stephen Foster, tears asunder your professions as an anti-slavery party, mark me! If you elect Henry J. Gardner, do not dare to show your faces within the girdle of an anti-slavery meeting, for we will make it too hot for you if you do. [Cheers.] In the name of him who has stood in the van of your political fight, and borne its brunt most fearfully, do not put behind him, at the head of the Massachusetts that he honors by representing, a convicted falsifier, a political hypocrite, an insidious assassin of your Senator, a man who cannot point to one good act with which to redeem the disgust of a public life! Forget him! Send him home! Allow him to vanish! That, if Massachusetts can ever be blessed with forgetting, she may once more be called a decent State! [Loud applause.]