Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/198

186 two of the Massachusetts delegation in Congress had voted for the Missouri Compromise in 1819, when they came back to Boston, they were hissed at on 'Change, and were both of them abhorred for the deed which spread slavery west of the great river. To this hour their names are hateful all the way from Boston to Lanesboro But their children are guiltless: let us not repeat the fathers' name. But what was the Stamp Act or the Missouri Compromise to the Fugitive Slave Bill! One was looking at a hedge, the other stealing the sheep behind it. Yet when the representative of the money of Boston, who voted for the bill, returned, he was flattered and thanked by two classes of men; by those whom money makes "respectable" and prominent; by those whom love of money makes servile and contemptible. When he resigned his place, Boston sent another, with the command, "Go thou and do likewise;" and he has just voted again for the Fugitive Slave Bill,—he alone of all the delegation of Massachusetts.

The Stamp Act levied a tax on us in money, and Boston would not pay a cent, hauled down the flags, shut up the shops, tolled the church-bells, hung its authors in effigy, made the third officer of the Crown take oath not to keep the law, cast his stamp-shop into the sea. The Slave Act levied a tax in men, and Boston fired a hundred guns, and said, "We are ready; we will catch fugitives slaves for the South. It is a dirty work, too dirty for any but Northern hands; but it will bring us clean money." Ship, shop, and church seemed to feel a solidarity of interest in the measure; the leading newspapers of the town were full of glee. The Fugitive Slave Bill became a law on the eighteenth of September, 1850. Eighty-five years before that date there was a town-meeting in Boston, at which the people instructed their representatives in the General Assembly of Massachusetts. It was just after the passage of the Stamp Act. Boston told her servants "by no means to join in any measures for countenancing and assisting in the execution of the same [the Stamp Act]; but to use your best endeavours in the General Assembly to have the inherent and unalienable rights of the people of this province asserted, vindicated, and left upon the public record, that