Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/208

196 That was the plain English meaning of the meeting, of the resolutions and the speeches. It was so understood North and South.

At the meeting itself it was declared that the Union was at the last gasp; but the next morning the political doctors, the "medicine-men" of our mythology, declared the old lady out of danger. She sat up that day, and received her friends. The meeting was "great medicine;" the crisis was passed. The Fugitive Slave Bill could be "executed in Boston," where the Writs of Assistance and the Stamp Act had been a dead letter: a man might be kidnapped in Boston any day.

But the meeting was far from unanimous at the end. At the beginning a manly speech would have turned the majority in favour of the right. In November, 1850, half a dozen rich men might have turned Boston against the wicked law. But their interest lay the other side; and "where the treasure is, there will the heart be also." Boston is bad enough, but bad only in spots; at that time the spots showed, and some men thought all Boston was covered with the small-pox of the Union meeting: the scars will mark the faces of only a few. I wish I could heal those faces, which will have an ugly look in the eyes of posterity.

The practical result of the meeting was what it was designed to be: soon we had other kidnappers in Boston. This time they found better friends: like consorteth with like. A certain lawyer's office in Boston became a huckstery of kidnappers' warrants. Soon the kidnappers had Shadrach in their fiery furnace, heated seven times hotter than before for William and Ellen Craft. But the Lord delivered him out of their clutch; and he now sings "God save the Queen," in token of his delivery out of the hands of the kidnappers of "Republican" Babylon. Nobody knows how he was delivered; the rescue was officially declared "levying war," the rescuers guilty of "treason." But, wonderful to say, after all the violations of law by the court, and all the browbeating by the attorneys, and all the perjury and other "amendments and enlargement of testimony" by witnesses, not a man was found guilty of any crime. Spite of "Union meetings," there is some respect for Massachusetts law; spite of judicial attempts to pack a