Page:Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (1895).djvu/321

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John L. Brown, a young white man of South Carolina, was in 1844 sentenced to death for aiding a young slave woman, whom he loved and had married, to escape from slavery. In pronouncing the sentence Judge O’Neale addressed to the prisoner words of appalling blasphemy [of which the following passages give some notion]:—

You are to die! … Of your past life I know nothing, except what your trial furnished. That told me that the crime for which you are to suffer was the consequence of a want of attention on your part to the duties of life. The strange woman snared you. She flattered you with her words, and you became her victim. The consequence was, that, led on by a desire to serve her, you committed the offence of aiding a slave to run away and depart from her master’s service; and now, for it you are to die! …

You are young; quite too young to be where you are. If you had remembered your Creator in your past days, you would not now be in a felon’s place, to receive a felon’s judgment. Still, it is not too late to remember your Creator. He calls early, and He calls