Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/66

Rh As one fine spring day we were looking from our windows in Four-and-a-Half Street we saw a great commotion and outcry. It was the most heart-breaking scene I have ever witnessed.

It was a cargo of runaway slaves who had been caught in Chesapeake Bay trying to get away from cruel masters. They had been becalmed, and so captured. Their fate was to be taken to Northern or to Washington jails, and then to be whipped and sent back again. The captain of the little craft which had essayed to save them was being carried up to the jail in a carriage, guarded by soldiers, else the citizens of Washington would have murdered him, so strongly Southern was the feeling there. I remember one poor negro mother with a baby in her arms, and two or three pickaninnies hanging to her skirts, being whipped along with the rest. Her face with its hopeless agony is before me to-day, a greater picture than that of the Cenci.

What a sight that was for a Northern girl to see! Mr. Ashmun stood at my side, and as he watched the impotent tears fall down my cheeks he said:

And yet, after all that, we had to hear our idol, Mr. Webster, make the 7th-of-March speech.

I have never been able to decide whether it was because his great and well-informed mind saw the other side so clearly that it could not see the right side, or whether it was because he so much desired to be President, that he on that occasion advocated compromise and temporizing. It killed him, this Fabian policy. Had he taken strongly the Northern view, the view which Abraham Lincoln took, "Do right — and