Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/129

Rh my fathers, after solemn deliberation, did it, when we were poor, in spite of King and Church, and Lords and Commons. But, in 1850, Boston held a “Union Meeting” in Faneuil Hall, and resolved that the stealers of men should pursue their craft in the city of Hancock and Adams and Mayhew and Cooper.

In 1770, the British Commissioner of Revenue could not tarry in Boston, but must retreat to the castle on an island. But in 1854, the men-stealers in Boston are more safe than the most estimable citizens; they are welcome.

In 1766, Boston sought the “total abolishing of Slavery;” six years later even the burgesses of Virginia covenanted with each other to import no slaves, and buy none brought over; in 1773, the town of Medfield—only a hamlet then—wanted a “final period put to that most cruel, inhuman, and unchristian practice, the slave-trade;” and Massachusetts remonstrated against the sale of slaves and the condition of Slavery. But, in 1850, the meanness and the money of Boston assembled at a Union Meeting, in Faneuil Hall, to assure the slaveholders that a man might safely be kidnapped in Boston! Nay, a famous Doctor of Divinity publicly declared in a lecture, that, to “save the Union," he "would send into bondage the child of my affections, the wife of my bosom, nay, the mother that bore me!” The audience answered with applauses loud and long; only one great, honest soul, cried out “ Damnation!” In 1854, the South demands the restoration of the African slave-trade; and a Boston minister—too orthodox to reckon a man a Christian who denies that Mary's son is also God—hints his cowardly approval of the scheme.

In time of peril, Boston had for her agent in England America's foremost man, her own son, who began his career by filling the moulds in a tallow-chandler's shop, and ended by taking the thunder from the cloud, and the sceptre from tyrants; and Boston sustained him in his bravest word. But, in 1854, the leading political and commercial newspapers of the same Boston addressed the only anti-Slavery senator which Massachusetts has had in Congress since the days when Colonel Pickering held his seat, asking him to resign—for the friend of humanity “belonged to no healthy political organization.”