Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/294

282. the Southern man who stood up and claimed that slavery should be protected, on Plymouth Rock, and told one Northern candidate for the Presidency that he also had once offered and volunteered to shoulder his musket, "the old Middlesex musket," and march South to put down an insurrection of slaves. I say, I honour a man’s fidelity to his own principle, even if it is a base one. Such are the two general reasons why the South wishes slavery in this new territory. But here is a third reason, quite special. 3. There must be communication with the West. Three railroads are possible; one lies through Mexican territory, but we have not got it, for the Gadsden treaty is not yet a fact accomplished:—two others lie through Nebraska territory. One or the other of them must be built. If Nebraska is free soil, the slave master cannot take his slave across, for the law of the free soil makes the black man free. But if Nebraska is a slave State, then the master can go there and carry his "chattels personal,"—Goffles of men, droves of women, herds of children, attended by the "missionary from Boston," and the bloodhounds of the kidnapper. She wants right of way for her institution; a slave railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Such are the reasons why she wants to establish slavery there.

See what encourages the South to make new encroachments. She has been eminently successful in her former demands, especially with the last. The authors of the Fugitive Slave Bill did not think that enormity could be got through Congress: it was too atrocious in itself, too insulting to the North. But Northern men sprang forward to defend it—powerful politicians supported it to the fullest extent. The worse it was, the better they liked it. Northern merchants were in favour of it—it "would conciliate the South." Northern ministers in all the churches of commerce baptized it, defended it out of the Old Testament, or the New Testament. The Senator of Boston gave it his mighty aid,—he went through the land a huckster of slavery, peddling Atheism: the Representative of Boston gave it his vote. Their constituents sustained both! All the great cities of the North executed the bill. The leading journals of Boston advised the merchants to withhold