Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/176

Rh preliminary to legalizing it for a time limited only by the Eternal God. In the very capital of the Christian democracy there are four thousand purchased men. In the Senate-house, a few years ago, a Mississippi senator belched out his imprecations against that one New Hampshire senator who has never yet been found false to humanity. Mr. Foote was a freeman, a citizen, and a "Democrat;" and while, in the halls of Congress, he was threatening to hang John P. Hale on the tallest pine tree in Mississippi, there toiled in a stable, whose loft he slept in by night, one of that senator's own brothers. The son of Mr. Foote's father was a slave in the capital of the United States, while his half-brother—by the father's side-threatened to hang on the tallest pine in Mississippi the only senator that New Hampshire sent to Washington who dared be true to truth and free for freedom.

But a few years ago, Mr. Hope H. Slatter had his negro market in the capital of the United States; one of the greatest slave-dealers in America. He was a member also it is said, of a "Christian church." The slave-pen is a singular institution for a democratic metropolis, and the slave-trader a peculiar ornament for the Christian Church in the capital of a democracy. He grew rich, went to Baltimore, had a fine house, and once entertained a "President of the United States" in his mansion. The slave-trader and the democratic President met together— flatter and Polk! fit guest and fitting host! In all the three million square miles of American land there is no inch of free soil, from the St. John's to the Bio Gila, from Madawasca to San Diego. The star-spangled banner floats from Van Couver's island by Nootka Sound to Key West, on the south of Florida, and all the way the flag of our Union is the standard of Slavery. In all the soil that our fathers fought to make free from English tyranny, there is not an inch where the black man is free, save the five thousand miles that Daniel Webster surrendered to Lord Ashburton by the treaty of 1842. The symbol of the Union is a fetter. The President should lie sworn on the auction block of a slave-trader. The New Hampshire President, in his inaugural, declared, publicly, his allegiance to the slave power—not to the power of Northern mechanics, free farmers, free manu-