Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/200

188 comfort for them save in flight: that must be not in the winter, but into the winter of Canada, which is to the African what our rude climate is to the goldfinch and the canary-bird.

Some of the coloured people had acquired a little property; they got an honest living; had wives and children, and looked back upon the horrors of slavery, which it takes a woman’s affectionate genius to paint, as you read her book; looked on them as things for the memory, for the imagination, not as things to be suffered again. But the Fugitive Slave Bill said to every black mother, "This may be your fate; the fate of your sons and your daughters." It was possible to all; probable to many; certain to some, unless they should flee.

It was a dark bill for them; but the blackness of the darkness fell on the white men. The coloured men were only to bear the cross; the whites made it. I would take the black man's share in suffering the Slave Act, rather than the white man's sin in making it; ay, as I would rather take Hancock's than Huske's share of the history of the Stamp Act. This wicked law has developed in the Africans some of the most heroic virtues; in the Yankee it has brought out some of the most disgraceful examples of meanness that ever dishonoured mankind.

The Boston Massacre,—you know what that was, and how the people felt when a hireling soldiery, sent here to oppress, shot down the citizens of Boston on the fifth of March, 1770. Then the blood of America flowed for the first time at the touch of British steel. But that deed was done by foreigners; thank God, they were not Americans born; done by hirelings, impressed into the army against their will, and sent here without their consent. It was done in hot blood; done partly in self-defence, after much insult and wrong. The men who fired the shot were brought to trial. The great soul of John Adams stood up to defend them, Josiah Quincy aiding the unpopular work. A Massachusetts jury set the soldiers free,—they only obeyed orders, the soldier is a tool of his commander. Such was the Boston Massacre. Yet hear how John Hancock spoke on the fourth anniversary thereof, when passion had had time to pass away:—

"Tell me, ye bloody butchers! ye villains high and low!