Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/286

274 was the first great step against freedom. It has cost us millions of people. We should have had a population counting millions more. It has cost us hundreds of millions of money. The Whig is poorer, the Democrat has a smaller majority. Ay, it has cost us what is worth more than both money and human life—it has cost manhood; it has caused us crime, falseness to our nature and our God. Just now the "Christian Republic" commits a greater offence against the fundamental principles of all morality, all religion, than the Russian or the Turk, or any Pagan despotism in the wide world!

How came it? The North wanted a special privilege of navigation; and it let slavery into the Constitution for that pitiful price. Mr Gorham, a representative from Massachusetts, a Boston man, in the Convention, declared that Massachusetts wanted Union, not to defend herself, she could do so, and had done so, and had defended others along with her; but she wanted a special privilege to trade. I am ashamed to confess it,—that was the Massachusetts which had just come out of the Revolutionary war. Here was a "compromise" between the covetousness of the North, wanting a special privilege of navigation, and the idleness of the South, wishing to eat but not to earn. Between these two mill-stones the African man was crushed into a slave—a mere chattel "to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever." That was the first step.

II. In 1792, America admitted Kentucky as a new State, made out of old soil, and established slavery therein. That was the first act of Congress establishing new slavery so far as she had power. Since then America has thrice repeated the experiment;—in 1796, establishing slavery in Tennessee; in 1817, in Mississippi; and in 1819, in Alabama—three new States made afresh out of old slave soil. That was the second step.

III. In 1793, America adopted slavery as a Federal institution; undertook herself, the Federal government, to seize and deliver up the fugitive slave. She took no such charge of other fugitive "property." She was not field-driver for horses and mules, only the hog-reeve for fugitive