Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/291

Rh In 1850, the Christian Democracy set worse bloodhounds afoot to pursue Ellen Craft; offered them five dollars for the run, if they did not take her; ten if they did! The price of blood was Northern money; the bloodhounds—they were kidnappers born at the North, bred there, kennelled in her church, fed on her sacraments, blessed by her priests! In 1778, Mr Pitt had a yet harsher name for the beasts wherewith despotic Spain hunted the red man in the woods—he called them "Hell Hounds." But they only hunted "savages, heathens, men born in barbarous lands." What would he say of the pack which in 1851 hunted American Christians, in the "Athens of America," and stole a man on the grave of Hancock and Adams—all Boston looking on, and its priests blessing the dead!

The slave power is now ready to take the tenth step. It wants these things; the acquisition of Cuba, the Mesilla Valley, the enslavement of Nebraska. Of the first and second I shall not now say anything. The third is a most important matter. It is an attempt to establish slavery in a new country. First, in a country where it never existed to any extent. There is only one American in the territory-known to have ever held a slave. That is a missionary who went thither from Boston, and, for a thousand dollars, bought a man in Missouri, to serve as help for his sick wife,—the only slave ever held by an American in Nebraska, so far as Senator Douglas is informed; and of all men the most, he ought to know.

Next, it is an attempt by the Federal government to establish it in a territory where it has been prohibited by the Federal government itself, by the solemn enactment of Congress, made thirty-three years ago, at a time when all the North swore solemnly that it would not suffer slavery to come north another inch. Do you know what is the population of Nebraska? There are not one thousand Americans in it. There is a delegate from Nebraska at Washington. He had seventy votes, out of this vast territory! There were two competitors, and I suppose there could not have been more than two hundred votes cast; I doubt if there were one hundred. It is an immense territory, 485,000 square miles; larger than sixty-two States of the size of Massachusetts. It